Chanel Elisabeth Miller (born June 12, 1992) is an American writer and artist based in
San Francisco, California
San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th ...
and
New York City
New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the Un ...
victim impact statement
A victim impact statement is a written or oral statement made as part of the judicial legal process, which allows crime victims the opportunity to speak during the sentencing of the convicted person or at subsequent parole hearings.
Overview
One ...
at his sentencing hearing went viral after it was published online by '' BuzzFeed'', being read 11 million times within four days. Miller was referred to as " Emily Doe" in court documents and media reports until September 2019, when she relinquished her anonymity and released her memoir '' Know My Name: A Memoir''. The book won the 2019
National Book Critics Circle Award
The National Book Critics Circle Awards are a set of annual American literary awards by the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) to promote "the finest books and reviews published in English". in
Palo Alto, California
Palo Alto (; Spanish for "tall stick") is a charter city in the northwestern corner of Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto.
The city was es ...
, the elder of two daughters of a Chinese mother and an American father. Her mother emigrated from China to become a writer and her father is a retired therapist. Miller graduated from
Gunn High School
Henry M. Gunn Senior High School is one of two public high schools in Palo Alto, California, the other being Palo Alto High School.
Established in , Gunn High School was named after Henry Martin Gunn, who served as the Palo Alto superintendent fr ...
in 2010. She attended the
University of California, Santa Barbara
The University of California, Santa Barbara (UC Santa Barbara or UCSB) is a public land-grant research university in Santa Barbara, California with 23,196 undergraduates and 2,983 graduate students enrolled in 2021–2022. It is part of the U ...
's
College of Creative Studies
The College of Creative Studies is the smallest of the three undergraduate colleges at the University of California, Santa Barbara, unique within the University of California system in terms of structure and philosophy. Its small size, studen ...
from which she graduated with a degree in literature in 2014.
Assault and victim impact statement in 2015
On the evening of January 17, 2015, Miller accompanied her sister to a Kappa Alpha fraternity party at Stanford University; later that night, two Stanford graduate students found Miller lying on the ground behind a dumpster with another Stanford student, 19-year-old Brock Turner, on top of her. Miller was unconscious, her blood alcohol level was estimated to have been 0.22% at the time of the assault. When Turner tried to flee, he was caught and held down on the ground by the two graduate students as they waited for police to arrive. Turner was arrested and indicted on five felony sexual assault charges, to which he pleaded not guilty. In 2016, he was convicted of three of these charges and was sentenced to six months' imprisonment, sparking public outrage due to the sentence's leniency. Sentencing judge
Aaron Persky
Michael Aaron Persky (born 1962) is an American attorney and former judge of the Santa Clara County Superior Court from 2003 to 2018. He gained attention after his ruling in the case ''People v. Turner'', in which he in June 2016 sentenced Stan ...
was recalled two years later.
The 7,137-word-long victim impact statement by Miller—who was referred to in court documents and media reports as " Emily Doe"—was published by '' BuzzFeed'' on June 3, 2016, the day after Turner was sentenced, and was reprinted in other major news outlets such as ''
The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...
''. The victim impact statement was read 11 million times in four days after it was published, going viral.
''Know My Name: A Memoir''
On August 9, 2019, '' 60 Minutes'' released an interview with Miller—who decided to go public with her name. She described her story and the consequences of being anonymous, and met the two students who stopped Turner. Miller's memoir entitled ''Know My Name: A Memoir'' was published on September 4, 2019 by
Viking Books
Viking Press (formally Viking Penguin, also listed as Viking Books) is an American publishing company owned by Penguin Random House. It was founded in New York City on March 1, 1925, by Harold K. Guinzburg and George S. Oppenheim and then acquire ...
and became a best-seller. The book won the 2019
National Book Critics Circle Award
The National Book Critics Circle Awards are a set of annual American literary awards by the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) to promote "the finest books and reviews published in English".The Washington Post
''The Washington Post'' (also known as the ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'') is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C. It is the most widely circulated newspaper within the Washington metropolitan area and has a large nati ...
''. ''
The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...
'' also selected ''Know My Name'' for its "100 Notable Books of 2019." The Dayton Literary Peace Prize selected the book as its 2020 non-fiction winner.
Artwork
After her assault, Miller started taking art courses at the recommendation by her therapist. In the summer of 2015, Miller attended a printmaking class at
Rhode Island School of Design
The Rhode Island School of Design (RISD , pronounced "Riz-D") is a private art and design school in Providence, Rhode Island. The school was founded as a coeducational institution in 1877 by Helen Adelia Rowe Metcalf, who sought to increase the ...
in Providence, Rhode Island.
In 2020, a mural drawn by Miller appeared in the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. The -long and -tall mural shows three vignettes of a cartoon figure, and the phrases "I was", "I am", and "I will be". The museum was closed to the public due to
COVID-19
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a contagious disease caused by a virus, the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The first known case was identified in Wuhan, China, in December 2019. The disease quickly ...
, though the mural is visible through the windows facing Hyde Street.
Recognition
Miller's assault story and the legal case "sparked a nationwide discussion about
rape on college campuses
Rape is a type of sexual assault usually involving sexual intercourse or other forms of sexual penetration carried out against a person without their consent. The act may be carried out by physical force, coercion, Abusive power and control, ...
and how survivors were not being heard", and "became part of the intense debates around rape, sexism and sexual misconduct over the past years," including the
Me Too movement
#MeToo is a social movement against sexual abuse, sexual harassment, and rape culture, in which people publicize their experiences of sexual abuse or sexual harassment. The phrase "Me Too" was initially used in this context on social media in ...
.
On November 1, 2016, '' Glamour'' named Miller, then known only as Emily Doe, a Woman of the Year for "changing the conversation about sexual assault forever", citing that her impact statement had been read over 11 million times. Miller attended the award ceremony anonymously.
She accepted the award on stage in November 2019 after the publication of her book. She delivered a poem at the ceremony in which she advocated for the well-being of sexual assault survivors. She was listed as an influential person in ''
Time
Time is the continued sequence of existence and events that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, ...
'' 2019
100
100 or one hundred ( Roman numeral: C) is the natural number following 99 and preceding 101.
In medieval contexts, it may be described as the short hundred or five score in order to differentiate the English and Germanic use of "hundred" to de ...