When “Emily Doe” accepted a woman-of-the-year award from Glamour magazine, she didn’t say anything about being a victim. Instead Ms. Doe, 24, wrote in her acceptance letter about being a “survivor,” about being “indestructible,” about “fighting.” She encouraged other women who had been sexually assaulted to join her.
“Together we are countless and unstoppable,” she wrote in prepared remarks that a Stanford University law professor read on her behalf at the awards ceremony last month. “Now, we are indignantly rising. Be excited. Keep going. I’ll be fighting alongside you.”
She spoke up for those who have survived sexual assault.
Those uplifting words might have seemed impossible nearly two years ago, after Ms. Doe — who has never been publicly identified and declined to comment for this article — was assaulted by a Stanford swimmer named Brock Turner as she lay partially naked next to a trash bin outside a campus fraternity party. Both she and Mr. Turner were drunk, and she says she doesn’t remember any of what happened. He was lying on top of her when two graduate students bicycling by saw the couple, stopped the assault, and restrained him until the police arrived. After charges of rape were dropped, Mr. Turner was found guilty in a county court of three counts of felony sexual assault. The judge sentenced him to six months in jail with three years’ probation, a sentence that was criticized for being too lenient. Mr. Turner ended up serving three months in jail before being released in September.
The people who made a mark on higher education — for better or worse.
In a 12-page letter to the judge in the case last summer, Ms. Doe described being shattered and “irreversibly hurt,” and told of how her life had been “distorted beyond recognition.” The attack had left her “weak,” “guarded,” “feeble,” and “timid,” she wrote. Her statement drew national attention from the news media and praise from Vice President Joseph Biden, who said her words would “save lives.”
Since then, says Michele Dauber — a Stanford law professor whose daughter went to elementary and secondary school with Ms. Doe and who now acts as her advocate — the young woman has become a survivor. “I think what she’s saying is: ‘Let’s pivot to action. We deserve better. We’re not just victims, we’re survivors,’ " says Ms. Dauber, who is leading a campaign to recall the judge. “She doesn’t want ‘sexually assaulted by Brock Turner’ on her tombstone.”
In her newfound voice of strength and defiance, Ms. Doe seems to represent where the victim-advocate movement is going in regard to sexual assault. Graduates of Harvard University who were on the women’s soccer team took the same strong stance in October when they wrote a commentary for The Harvard Crimson condemning a “scouting report” in which members of the men’s team had rated the female players’ bodies and sex appeal.
“We do not pity ourselves,” wrote all six of the former players who made up the 2012 recruiting class. Instead, the women — who graduated last spring and were the initial subjects of the men’s team’s sexual descriptions — called themselves “successful, powerful, and undeniably brilliant female athletes.”
For her part, Ms. Doe wants to encourage more young women who have been harassed or assaulted to position themselves as something other than sad victims.
In an essay she wrote for Glamour before the awards ceremony, Ms. Doe wrote of her reaction to hearing a parent express the hope that their daughter didn’t “end up” like her. At first it made her feel damaged, wrote Ms. Doe, as if the assault defined her life story. But she had come to believe otherwise: “I hope you end up like me strong. I hope you end up like me proud of who I’m becoming. I hope you don’t ‘end up,’ I hope you keep going.”
She added: “Victims are not victims, not some fragile, sorrowful aftermath. Victims are survivors, and survivors are going to be doing a hell of a lot more than surviving.”
Robin Wilson writes about campus culture, including sexual assault and sexual harassment. Contact her at robin.wilson@chronicle.com.
