Emily Doe is ready for you to know her name.
Before the world heard of the allegations against Harvey Weinstein, we learned of Doe, a victim of sexual assault at the hands of a Stanford University student whom a judge let off with a mere six-month sentence because “a prison sentence would have a severe impact on him.”
Brock Turner, whose swimming accomplishments came up frequently in the trial, and whose name has become synonymous with privileges enjoyed by the white and wealthy, served only three months.
“The fact that Brock was an athlete at a private university should not be seen as an entitlement to leniency, but as an opportunity to send a message that sexual assault is against the law regardless of social class,” Doe wrote in a viral, 7,000-word response to the sentence. “I fully respected his right to a trial, but even after twelve jurors unanimously convicted him guilty of three felonies, all he has admitted to doing is ingesting alcohol. Someone who cannot take full accountability for his actions does not deserve a mitigating sentence.”
The #MeToo movement had not yet begun in 2015, when the 22-year-old was sexually assaulted behind a dumpster in Palo Alto, California. Since that January night, Doe also feels the “severe impact” of the trial, and she’s ready to share her story and her name.
Doe’s real name is Chanel Miller, and her forthcoming memoir, Know My Name, will explain how she went from accompanying her sister to a fateful fraternity party to becoming an eloquent crusader against sexual assault. In her memoir, Miller will likely address how she was consistently bombarded during the trial in 2016, with Turner’s lawyer employing aggressive tactics to discredit her.
Miller wrote, “Instead of his attorney saying, ‘Did you notice any abrasions?’ he said, ‘You didn’t notice any abrasions, right?’ This was a game of strategy as if I could be tricked out of my own worth.” Although she was blacked out at the time of the assault, Turner claimed she “liked it.”
Miller’s book about the experience and her recovery is set to come out Sept. 24, and the cover art is particularly meaningful. The New York Times reports, “The cover art for ‘Know My Name’ is inspired by the Japanese art of kintsugi or ‘golden repair,’ in which broken pottery pieces are mended using lacquer and powdered gold. It’s a process that makes a new, beautiful object out of what’s been broken, emphasizing where it has cracked.”
A literature major from the University of California, Santa Barbara, Miller is now a writer and an artist. If her book is anything like her powerful, poetic viral statement, Know My Name will have an equally significant cultural imprint.
“In newspapers, my name was ‘unconscious intoxicated woman,’ ten syllables, and nothing more than that,” she wrote. “For a while, I believed that that was all I was. I had to force myself to relearn my real name, my identity. To relearn that this is not all that I am.”
