For four years, Chanel Miller was known as Emily Doe. She was the victim of a sexual assault that took place in January 2015 at a party in Stanford campus. The letter she read when Brock Turner, her perpetrator, was sentenced inspired other victims of sexual assaults to come forward, say their stories, and heal the trauma. Published by Buzzfeed, it was read by 11.000.000 people during the first four days.

                                        

With her memoir book, Chanel is letting us know her side of the story. Not only that it shows how the criminal justice system works for the survivors of the sexual assault and how difficult it is for the victims to relive time and again the assault in order to have their assailant punished, but also how difficult the healing process is.

"For the past year, I had been raking through comments looking for signs of support. I dug through opinion pieces in local newspapers searching for someone to stand up for me. I locked myself in my car in parking lots crying into hotlines, convinced I was losing my mind. All year the loneliness had followed me, in the stairwell at work, in Philly, in the wooden witness stand, where I looked out at a near-empty audience. Yet all along there had been eyes watching me, rooting for me, from their own bedrooms, cars, stairwells, and apartments, all of us shielded inside our pain, our fear, our anonymity. I was surrounded by survivors, I was part of a we. They had never been tricked into seeing me as a minor character, a mute body; I was the leader on the front line fighting, with an entire infantry behind me. They had been waiting for me to find justice. This victory would be celebrated quietly in rooms in towns in states I had never been to. For so long, I’d imagined myself wandering across a dry, empty plain. This card was the puddle. The realization that just below the surface, more water led to streams to rivers to oceans. That this was only the beginning. I was not alone. They had found me.”


Miller's assault story and her legal case opened a lot of debates about rape on college campuses, sexism, and the failure to protect the victims. More, it contributed to change California's law on sexual assault.


“I survived because I remained soft, because I listened, because I wrote. Because I huddled close to my truth, protected it like a tiny flame in a terrible storm. Hold up your head when the tears come, when you are mocked, insulted, questioned, threatened, when they tell you you are nothing, when your body is reduced to openings. The journey will be longer than you imagined, trauma will find you again and again. Do not become the ones who hurt you. Stay tender with your power. Never fight to injure, fight to uplift. Fight because you know that in this life, you deserve safety, joy, and freedom. Fight because it is your life. Not anyone else’s. I did it, I am here. Looking back, all the ones who doubted or hurt or nearly conquered me faded away, and I am the only one standing. So now, the time has come. I dust myself off, and go on."



Title: Know My Name: A Memoir
Details: Chanel Miller , Viking, 2019, $24.99 (368p)
ISBN: 978-0735223707

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