Chanel Miller, the woman who was known as Emily Doe during the Stanford University rape case, came forward with her identity earlier this month to speak about Brock Turner’s lenient sentence – he was sentenced to six months in jail and ended up serving half of that for raping Miller while she was unconscious – ahead of the release of a memoir titled Know My Name.
Now, Miller has spoken to 60 Minutes, revealing the reason she wanted to reveal her name to the public was because she didn’t want to be forever labelled as the “unconscious, intoxicated woman” while Turner was painted as an Ivy League star athlete.
Chanel said she was interrogated so much during the trial that she welcomed the brief moments she would be excused from the stand when she was sobbing too much for questioning to continue.
Choking up as she spoke, she said, “Instead of investigating the crime that’s at hand, we interrogate the victim and go after her character and pick her apart and openly defile and debase her. And you just have to sit on the stand while this is happening…Nobody is handing you a tissue. Nobody is standing up for you. You’re just getting ripped apart.”
She continued, “And if I cried hard enough, then I got to be excused to the bathroom, which was my favourite because then I finally get a break and I can breathe for one second. But then you go back in and it just continues.”
In a separate interview with People, Chanel said that she has been waiting for an apology from both Turner and the judge who gave him such a lenient sentence.
“I was very ready to receive an apology from the very beginning,” she said. “I’m always going to advocate for acknowledging behaviour and figuring out how to change and grow from that, but you can’t do that without acknowledging what happened.”
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Speaking of her book, Chanel said, “We should all be creating space for survivors to speak their truths and express themselves freely. When society nourishes instead of blames, books are written, art is made, and the world is a little better for it.”
Know My Name was released today.
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