Chanel Miller on Why She Refuses to Be Reduced to the 'Brock Turner Sexual Assault Victim'

By Emma Brockes, Guardian UK

25 September 19

After she was assaulted while unconscious, Miller’s life split in two. She became known as ‘Emily Doe’ – and her assailant served just three months in prison. Now she’s ready to tell the world who she really is

t has been just over three weeks since Chanel Miller allowed her name to become public and the 27-year-old is still trying to adjust. For a while, it seemed as if everyone she had ever known was going to email. “Hi! We were in bio-chem class together, how are you doing?!” she’d read. Or: “Hey, I always knew you’d write a book!” She smiles at the bleak comedy of a situation which no one, least of all Miller herself, knows quite how to handle. At some point in the emails, every sender would jettison the pleasantries and make the awkward turn towards saying: “I’m sorry.”

Around midnight on 17 January 2015, Miller was spotted by two students at Stanford University being sexually assaulted by a third student as she lay unconscious on the ground behind some bins. She was 22, a recent graduate of the University of California, Santa Barbara, working in her first job at a tech firm and living with her parents in Palo Alto. Earlier that evening she had, on a whim, agreed to accompany her younger sister to a fraternity party at Stanford University, a 10-minute drive from the house. By the early hours of the morning, Miller was in a hospital having her vagina and anus swabbed by police doctors – and 19-year-old Brock Turner was in custody.

What happened next has become a textbook example of the double standards applied to sexual assault victims and their assailants. While Turner was characterised as a champion swimmer, conscientious student and upstanding young man surely incapable of assault, Miller became the “drunk girl at the party”.

In that moment, her life split in two. To the majority of her friends and family, she was still Chanel – an anglicised version of her Chinese name, Zhang Xiao Xia – albeit a more muted version of the woman they knew. Within the legal system, and in a small, dark chamber of her own mind, she was “Emily Doe”, the pseudonym of the “Brock Turner sexual assault victim”, a woman reduced to the sum total of what someone else had done to her. After Turner was convicted of three counts of felony sexual assault and sentenced to just six months in prison – of which he ultimately served three – Miller read out a victim impact statement in court. “You don’t know me,” she said, addressing Turner directly, “but you’ve been inside me, and that’s why we’re here today.” Over 12 subsequent pages, Miller delineated, with devastating precision, the experience of being sexually assaulted by a man for whom the legal system had more sympathy than his victim. In June 2016, when the statement was published by BuzzFeed, more than 18 million people read it.

Three years later, Miller is sitting opposite me in a conference room at a publishing house in New York, her memoir, Know My Name, on the table before us. Miller is slight and softly spoken, with long hair and a mildly sardonic air, the kind of details that the victim in a sexual assault is used to having raised. Since the trial, every decision Miller makes – what to wear, how to comport herself, the extent to which she should smile or not smile, where she should go and what route she should take to get there – has, for a split-second, been refracted through what she calls “the lens of court”, a reflex audit of how her most trivial choices might be levelled against her by lawyers. “I know how to dismiss and turn down the volume on those voices, that question and reprimand,” she says, “but it’s all there and it is really inhibiting.”

Know My Name is written in vivid, punishing detail. The fraternity house has “a sour, yeasty atmosphere, where you could hear the soles of your shoes unpeeling from sticky floors”. After the assault, Miller’s body is “a nerveless mannequin”. She is bitterly funny about the dehumanising absurdity of the rape processing suite, where, after being swabbed and photographed (“I wondered if I was suppose to smile with teeth, where I should be looking”) she is given some sweatpants and a pamphlet, which together seem to say: “Welcome to the club, here’s your new uniform. In your folder you’ll find guidelines that will lay out the steps of trauma and recovery which may take your entire lifetime.”

The amazing thing, says Miller, is that at the time, the circumstances of her assault seemed so open and shut that in her innocence she imagined there was no case to be answered. “If someone is found humping an unmoving body, what is the case?” she says now. The case was one of consent; Turner pleaded innocent and claimed not only to have asked Miller “if she wanted me to finger her”, but to have asked if she liked it and heard her confirm: “Uh-huh.”

More broadly, however, the case turned less on the specifics of Miller’s conduct that night and more on her credibility as a victim. Miller’s sexual history, relationship status and the question of whether or not she “did a lot of partying in college” were all considered permissible points of access for Turner’s defence, as was the fact that, prior to blacking out and waking up in the hospital, she had peed outside. A man who drunkenly takes a leak under a tree is unremarkable; a woman who does so is lewd.

There were other biases at work, among them the broad assumption that alcohol excuses sexual assault, particularly on campus. Oddly, this presumption is nowhere more starkly on display than in journalist Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, Talking to Strangers – the publicity for which promises to examine a “series of encounters and misunderstandings” between people and in which he quotes extensively from Miller’s case.

Set aside, for a moment, the ethics of a man using the raw transcript of a woman’s sexual assault trial to prop up his theory about communication, and focus on Gladwell’s assertion that: “People v. Brock Turner is a case about alcohol.” The entire case, Gladwell writes, “turned on the degree of Emily Doe’s drunkenness”.

From a narrow legal point of view, Gladwell is correct. But in answer to the question: “How did an apparently harmless encounter on a dancefloor end in a crime?” Gladwell describes the assault as a “transparency failure on steroids”, and offers the apparently blithe summary: “A young woman and a young man meet at a party, then proceed to tragically misunderstand each other’s intentions – and they’re drunk.” Little credence is given to the possibility raised at the trial that Turner, far from “misunderstanding” the signals from Miller, could have understood them perfectly, nor that the pivotal disinhibiting agent in this case may not have been alcohol but misogyny. An unconscious woman cannot object when a man inserts his fingers and foreign objects into her vagina; what Emily Doe did or didn’t want was irrelevant.

At mention of Gladwell, Miller smiles and zips her mouth. Who needs it? But a moment later, she says: “We say alcohol is the cause, but to me it’s such a small way of thinking. Alcohol could never be the root of something that is part of such a greater pattern: when you look at the thousands of cases [of violence against women], the common thread is not that we are drinking too much. The fact that we continue to minimise and rationalise violence is so insanely damaging. This is not an intellectual conversation; it’s not a time for posturing. And it’s not OK that, in Gladwell’s book, I was treated and regarded as a case, as something locked in, and not as a person who is actively functioning and speaking and writing and prepared to provide my opinion.”

She says: “You have trolls, then you have this very sophisticated way [of writing]; it’s the same amount of damage, but disguised as this reasonable [critique]. It’s so easy for someone to copy and paste these sections from the transcript, to take my statement and analyse it however they may please, but it’s so difficult to live it. I’m not interested in making excuses any more. When a drunk man beats a woman, we don’t say: well the alcohol affected his decision-making. You’re accountable for that behaviour. It’s a crime.”

Over the past 18 months, Miller has been emboldened to speak out and ultimately shed her anonymity by the examples of the women testifying against Harvey Weinstein, and by Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony against Justice Brett Kavanaugh. “I watched them literally sacrifice themselves for the greater good, with the single hope that it’s going to help someone. It’s infuriating when we see how much victims have to sacrifice and give away from themselves, and how much we have to speak in gruesome detail about things that feel very private, in order to make this apparent to people. How many times we’re caught in that cycle of saying: ‘Doesn’t this mean something to you? Why can’t you see me? Why doesn’t this hurt you? Why aren’t you alarmed?’ Each one has propelled me forward, and has cleared out a little more space in order for me to step out today. I think it would have been a much slower process for me coming to terms with going public had they not laid that groundwork.”

Does she think Kavanaugh should be impeached? Miller smiles. “I think a lot about that. Hmmm. I think when Christine Blasey Ford or Debbie Ramirez comes forward with their story, it is our job to create a space for them to speak the truth without being automatically converted into political punching bags. And, yes, I do think that people in power need to be held to a higher standard of behaviour. So many of these conversations feel so absurd.”

The point about gruesome detail is particularly relevant in Miller’s case; she writes about how it felt to discover, after the fact, that a huge closeup of her exposed genitals had been flashed before the court as part of the presentation of evidence, moments before she walked in to testify. To attach her name to that image; to invite people to imagine her being assaulted was grotesque and terrifying and, in the first instance, she says: “Anonymity was essential to self-preservation and processing.” She was also fearful for her safety. At every stage of the trial and its aftermath, she has received death and rape threats from random men set on defending Turner online.

Over time, however, she began to think that the anonymity was cauterising her ability to heal. “When you keep something so contained, it restricts you from getting the help and support you need,” she says. “You’re keeping out the bad but the good comes in through that same door.” And what of shame? “Oh, of course. Shame loves growing in a contained environment, that’s the only way it can fester and thrive. You have to let your story breathe in order for some of that shame to be cleared out.”

The panic attacks have not gone away, and neither has the depression. She is still subject to bouts of anger and despair. At the end of the trial, Turner’s father read out a statement in which he said harsh punishment of his son would be “a steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action out of his 20-plus years of life”. Those 20 minutes have cost Miller most of her 20s.

She tries to be gentle with herself, and to “accept this is going to dominate major chunks of my life”. She has also come to understand that what happens now “is not eternally out of my control. I’ve realised that each time I revisit this story, I’m changing. And I’m growing stronger, and becoming more clear-headed and assertive and articulate. So I’m not wasting time by returning to the story; that is my way of moving forward. Once I realised that, I could breathe a little easier.”

Besides which, she says: “There are no deadlines for healing. Ultimately this experience will always be a part of you, but you get to choose how it serves you; what you draw from it. I get to use my anger as fuel, I get to use my grief as strength, and my ability to empathise with anyone who’s going through this; I’m thankful for the ability to do that.”

The awful truth is that by the standards of most women who are raped or sexually assaulted, Miller’s has been a “good” experience; according to some analyses of Justice Department data, fewer than 1% of rapes in the US result in felony convictions. Turner was found guilty of sexual assault with intent to rape and, after a campaign online, the judge responsible for his light sentence was removed. Miller had sympathetic cops and a great district attorney. She was one of the lucky ones. To which she can only laugh and say, as women have been saying repeatedly for years: “If this is what’s considered a smooth trajectory through the system, it is my duty to report that it’s not working.”