I use my anger as fuel, my grief as strength 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.” You get to choose how the experience serves you what you draw from it. “If someone is found humping an unmoving body, what is the case?” she says now. 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. In your folder you’ll find guidelines that will lay out the steps of trauma and recovery which may take your entire lifetime.” 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. After the assault, Miller’s body is “a nerveless mannequin”. The fraternity house has “a sour, yeasty atmosphere, where you could hear the soles of your shoes unpeeling from sticky floors”. Know My Name is written in vivid, punishing detail.
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“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.” 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. 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. 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. In June 2016, when the statement was published by BuzzFeed, more than 18 million people read it.Ī woman carries a sign in solidarity for Miller during graduation at Stanford University. “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. 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. 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. 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. 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”. What happened next has become a textbook example of the double standards applied to sexual assault victims and their assailants. 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. 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. 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. At some point in the emails, every sender would jettison the pleasantries and make the awkward turn towards saying: “I’m sorry.”Īround 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.
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.
“Hi! We were in bio-chem class together, how are you doing?!” she’d read. For a while, it seemed as if everyone she had ever known was going to email. I 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.
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