Brock Turner victim Chanel Miller reveals her identity in new interview, book
A woman known only as “Emily Doe,” who was sexually assaulted at Stanford University by ex-student Brock Turner, has revealed herself as Chanel Miller, author of the forthcoming memoir Know My Name.
In a Wednesday preview of her Sept. 22 CBS’ 60 Minutes interview, which will come two days before her book release and address the trauma that reportedly fed the #MeToo movement, Miller reads aloud parts of her victim impact statement, also shared in a 2016 Santa Clara County, Calif., courtroom.
“Your Honor, if it is all right, for the majority of this statement I would like to address the defendant directly,” Miller says in the CBS video clip. “You don’t know me, but you’ve been inside me, and that’s why we’re here today…”
“In newspapers my name was ‘unconscious intoxicated woman,’ 10 syllables, and nothing more than that… I had to force myself to relearn my real name, my identity. To relearn that this is not all that I am. That I am not just a drunk victim at a frat party found behind a dumpster, while you are the All American swimmer at a top university, innocent until proven guilty, with so much at stake…”
Miller concludes, “You cannot give me back the life I had.”
In January 2015, Swedish graduate students Carl-Fredrik Arndt and Peter Jonsson found Miller, then 22, half-naked and unconscious behind a campus dumpster. Turner, then 20, was on top "aggressively thrusting his hips into her,” Arndt told CBS News.
Although Turner tried to run away, the men restrained him until the police came. The student-athlete pleaded not guilty to five counts of felony rape in Santa Clara County Court, and during the court case, Miller, still anonymous, read a graphic account of the crime, which she published on BuzzFeed.
Turner’s own letter to the court argued that the sex was consensual. And after his three-felony conviction — which resulting in his registering as a sex offender, as well as being sentenced to six months in county jail, and three years of probation — his father alleged that “20 minutes of action” ruined his life. “He will never be his happy-go-lucky self with that easygoing personality and welcoming smile,” Mr. Turner wrote in a court letter.
Stanford University expelled Turner weeks after his arrest and banned him from campus, stating in on its website, “This is the harshest sanction that a university can impose on a student.”
Turner was released early from jail in September 2016, after serving half of his six-month sentence.
Aaron Persky, the Superior Court Judge who sentenced Turner, was recalled from the bench in 2018 by public vote, reported the New York Times. And in July 2018, Turner’s lawyer Eric Multhaup tried arguing — unsuccessfully — that his client committed “outercourse” because he used his fingers, and not his penis, to penetrate his victim.
According to the New York Times, the writing process helped Miller understand what happened to her. As Andrea Schulz, the editor-in-chief of Miller’s publisher, Viking Books, told the paper, “It is one of the most important books that I’ve ever published.”
Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle:
Judge Who Showed Leniency To Rape Suspect From ‘Good Family’ Resigns
Former Baylor Frat President Accused Of Rape Is Banned From Commencement In Texas
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