One Friday evening in 2015, Chanel Miller was driving around Palo Alto, Calif., angry and frustrated over how the news media were portraying her sexual assault.
The man who had assaulted her, Brock Turner, was being talked about as a record-setting Stanford University swimmer with Olympic hopes. Miller — who was known as “Emily Doe” at the time — was described only as a drunken 23-year-old found half-naked next to a fraternity house’s Dumpster.
As Miller’s breath quickened and her panic rose, she pulled into an Ikea parking lot. She dug through her purse for a pamphlet of hotline numbers. She called the one that said “Stanford.” She told the woman who answered: “The swimmer, the swimmer, I’m the person.” Miller assumed that phone call had been confidential. But she learned later that Stanford administrators had logged that call as evidence that they had offered her resources. Her impression: They had considered that to be enough.
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One Friday evening in 2015, Chanel Miller was driving around Palo Alto, Calif., angry and frustrated over how the news media were portraying her sexual assault.
The man who had assaulted her, Brock Turner, was being talked about as a record-setting Stanford University swimmer with Olympic hopes. Miller — who was known as “Emily Doe” at the time — was described only as a drunken 23-year-old found half-naked next to a fraternity house’s Dumpster.
As Miller’s breath quickened and her panic rose, she pulled into an Ikea parking lot. She dug through her purse for a pamphlet of hotline numbers. She called the one that said “Stanford.” She told the woman who answered: “The swimmer, the swimmer, I’m the person.” Miller assumed that phone call had been confidential. But she learned later that Stanford administrators had logged that call as evidence that they had offered her resources. Her impression: They had considered that to be enough.
I was acknowledged by the vice president of the United States before my local campus could even acknowledge me.
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Miller recounts that scene in her new memoir, Know My Name (Viking), in which she reveals her identity for the first time. Miller didn’t attend Stanford — she graduated from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 2014 — but she grew up a seven-minute drive from the campus. On January 17, 2015, she went to a Stanford fraternity party with her sister, who was attending a different university but was in town for the weekend. Miller drank some shots, blacked out, and woke up in the hospital. While she was unconscious, Turner assaulted her.
The book chronicles her high-profile court battle against Turner, a case that was thrust into an international spotlight. In 2016, Turner was sentenced to six months in county jail after being convicted, which many people saw as a lenient punishment. (Voters later recalled the California judge who had handed down the sentence.) The victim-impact statement that Miller wrote went viral.
“Emily Doe” quickly became a symbol of the pain and trauma that sexual-assault victims experience, and the steep obstacles they often face when they try to pursue justice. Her anonymous statement gave many victims a voice. But now Miller wants to take ownership of her story, and she has some harsh words for Stanford.
A spokesman for Stanford wrote in an email: “We applaud Chanel Miller’s bravery in telling her story publicly, and we deeply regret that she was sexually assaulted on the Stanford campus. We’re continuing and strengthening our efforts to prevent and respond effectively to sexual violence, with the ultimate goal of eradicating it from our community.” In the book, Miller wrote that Stanford officials had told her they didn’t have a policy at the time for offering resources to nonstudents who were assaulted on the campus.
In an interview with The Chronicle, Miller discussed her tense interactions with Stanford officials over therapy money and a memorial garden, what more the university could have done after Turner assaulted her, and whether she’ll continue to fight for change in how colleges handle sexual-violence cases.
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While you didn’t go to college at Stanford, you say you “grew up on that campus.” What was Stanford to you?
I associate all memories there with warmth and community, having picnics under the palm trees, going to summer camp, having dinner with professors who were family friends. I never questioned that it was my home. I think that’s why being assaulted there hurt so badly. I didn’t realize it, but I had this expectation that if I was ever harmed, I would be taken care of — that they would want to know what happened to me. I realized how much I trusted them, until that trust was broken.
You write that, in the months after you were assaulted, “Stanford’s absence became a constant presence.” What did you need from Stanford that you didn’t get?
Doing nothing is doing something. Doing nothing is a choice. Harm comes in two parts — there’s the assault itself, and then there’s the aftermath. So much of your healing depends on the response. If there is no response, there’s so much damage that happens. I needed acknowledgement that I existed, that something happened at all. To go home and be left in silence for 10 days made me feel like it had all been in my head.
You say nearly two years passed before anyone from Stanford reached out to you.
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The Palo Alto courthouse is less than a mile from Stanford’s campus. I returned repeatedly to sit inside that windowless courtroom for hours and weeks at a time. To have never even offered to connect me to a support network, or to provide any access to counseling or resources on campus, to provide something as simple as a cushioned chair and a glass of water and a listening ear — that is so painful for me. I had to figure it out on my own.
After the assault, he was sent home. I disappeared. The yellow caution tape was taken down. And the next day, everything continued. Parties happened. The administration drank their coffee. And nothing was achieved. To send that message to students on campus — to say, “Even if you are taken away from a party on a gurney, we will not publicly address the fact that you are now missing or hurt or stuck in a grueling process with long-term effects.” That is incredibly disturbing to me.
So then, in the fall of 2016, you learned that Stanford wanted to pay for your therapy, as long as you agreed never to sue the university. You wanted university officials to meet with you and promise to improve their handling of sexual violence before you agreed to anything. What happened in that meeting?
What concerns me is that it took 18 million people reading the statement that I wrote in order to even be given the opportunity to meet with them. What happens to the cases where there are not headlines, where there’s not intense societal pressure? What happens to those victims? For me to have fought so hard just to be seen — I was acknowledged by the vice president of the United States before my local campus could even acknowledge me.
In that meeting, I thought they would hold themselves accountable for failing to be there during a vital period of time. I thought they’d say, “Yes, it was our job to bear witness. It was our job to not treat this as an isolated incident. Thank you for helping us expose this issue. We will conduct a self-study. We will establish policy based on data we find. We’ll be more transparent about campus-climate surveys.” None of this was stated. I was being offered money for therapy, but it never felt like it was to preserve my mental health. It was more a statement to say that they did something.
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You write that, in your view, Stanford saw you as only “a grave liability.”
I’m just not interested in the performance of helping. [Sighs.] I’m, like, overwhelmed with frustration. The Swedes [the two graduate students who intervened when they saw Miller behind the Dumpster and chased Turner] would bike from Stanford’s campus to the courthouse each time they were called in to testify. They would wait for hours. They showed up over the course of a year and a half to keep fighting so that I would not be left alone. They did more than Stanford has ever done.
Take me back to the moment when you returned to the place where you had been assaulted — behind the Kappa Alpha fraternity house — for the first time.
It was underwhelming. It almost felt, I don’t know. The word that comes to mind is “disappointing.” The condition of the ground, the crap that was sprinkled throughout, the leaves, the garbage. The fact that I was half-naked and sprawled out there, and that I had to argue and fight so hard for so long to prove that that’s not something anyone would want, is so upsetting. To sort of say, “You were discarded here, but perhaps you wanted it” — it never made sense to me.
Stanford eventually replaced the Dumpster with a garden that was supposed to be in your honor. A university official asked you to provide a quote from your victim-impact statement that could be placed on a plaque. As you tell it, you tried twice, and the university said the quotes weren’t “uplifting and affirming” enough. How did you feel in that moment?
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When they finally engaged with me, and asked me for my own words — for them to continue to say, “You are exceeding capacity for what is tolerable, for what we can stomach, for what we’re prepared to look at.” It sends a message that, “Hey, you need to keep the uncomfortable parts contained, because they will tarnish and upset the people around you. And nobody wants to see that. So you need to do the work of polishing it up yourself.”
At the end of the day, I was like, what am I doing? I’m in this email war for this teeny bronze plaque. But it was a symbol of a greater message, which is the silencing of what victims are actually experiencing.
[Persis Drell, Stanford’s provost, wrote in a letter to the campus last year that Miller’s suggested quotes for the plaque “expressed sentiments that would not be supportive in a healing space for survivors.” Drell continued: “We consulted with sexual-violence counselors and others who work with Stanford students who are survivors of sexual assault. They advised that rather than creating a healing environment for survivors, the quote could have a serious, negative impact for some survivors of sexual violence.”]
You withdrew cooperation at that point. How do you feel about the garden now? It’s still there.
I care so much about the students. And I have to be really careful. I was in this bitter exchange with the administration. At the same time I was trying to think about the well-being of students. Let me think about this. [Pauses.] The bigger picture was that we were all supposed to be helping students feel safe on campus and preventing this from happening again. And I felt like it disintegrated into ridiculous back-and-forths between administrators. I don’t know what it means. Now it’s just a garden, right? All gardens are nice.
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I asked because the garden was this thing that was supposed to be meaningful, and then everything devolved. I wondered if that felt kind of weird.
When I think of a garden, I imagine eruptions of flowers and grasses coming out of the earth. But it’s very neatly framed stone-wall rectangles. There’s like an X marks the spot. It’s a little odd to literally frame the spot.
It’s not what you expected it to be.
Right. But I was so moved by those students [who used augmented reality to create a virtual plaque] for continuing to say, “This isn’t how it has to be, and we can continue to shape history and the marks we leave.” Just to so intelligently rescue me from total erasure was so moving.
You write about how there was so much focus in the courtroom on your alcohol consumption, and how you were blamed for the assault because you’d been drinking at a frat party. What needs to change about the way we talk about campus sexual violence and alcohol?
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We dismiss the violence part of it, and we label it as sloppiness or failure of communication tinged with romance. We’re quick to humanize perpetrators and to say, “We all make mistakes. How could we have known?” The truth is, if you break the law while intoxicated, you’re still accountable for your behavior. I think we just have really low standards. If someone isn’t looking for signs of consent — if they say, “Oh, it was blurry, I don’t know” — we accept that. Instead of saying, “Well, it’s your job to know if you’re about to penetrate someone.”
If you don’t have consent, it’s not sex. It’s bodily invasion. It’s violence. And it’s a crime. It’s not a casual slip-up. As long as we continue to say, “Well, it’s too confusing” — it just scares me, because a perpetrator could walk out of a situation and say, “She was drunk, I was drunk,” and then still think that most of us would nod our heads and say, “Yeah, well, there’s really nothing to look into, because what can she say about it?”
You’ve already had a big impact on the conversation about campus sexual violence. Now that you have come out publicly, will you continue to stay involved in that fight?
I will always be involved in it, just because I will always be emotionally tied to it. I will be involved in it in my own way, if that makes sense. Even doing art that contributes to healing, or speaking on campuses, or continuing to be there to listen to students and what they are experiencing, to make sure they’re being heard, is really important to me.
That’s interesting that you mention art. I remember, when you were frustrated about the garden, you suggested some art displays that you felt might be a more fitting tribute. Like a haphazard pile of wood in the center of campus, where victims could come and hammer nails, one for every day they’ve “lived with what happened.”
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I love my liberal-arts education. [Laughs.] I’ve got some funny stuff in my brain. But I think you have to dream a little bit crazy and to think about these alternate futures and experiments to keep yourself sane. Because it’s so upsetting sometimes — just the seriousness around the ridiculousness. Like, in court, the seriousness around the meaninglessness of some of those questions. It’s hard to hold that heaviness, day after day. So I try to find more-imaginative ways of coping.
Do you have any final message that you want to convey to Stanford?
I would say to the students: If you are not feeling heard, it is not because you are not worth listening to. If you are not being supported, it is not because you don’t deserve help. If you are feeling alone and like everything is wrong with you, and that your being hurt is normal, then I’m here to say that it’s not. It’s because we are failing to provide you with support — to remind you that you deserve comfort and to be restored to a place where you feel at home and safe.
Sarah Brown writes about a range of higher-education topics, including sexual assault, race on campus, and Greek life. Follow her on Twitter @Brown_e_Points, or email her at sarah.brown@chronicle.com.