Embedded Files
Averie reviews Know My Name and covers the events of the Stanford sexual assault case.
Book Review: Know My Name
By Averie Black
Warning: This book review contains spoilers for Know My Name by Chanel Miller and talks of sexual assault.
Know My Name by Chanel Miller takes the artistic definition of literature and makes it proud. With a deserved 4.75 stars on Goodreads and over 145k ratings, this is one of the highest-rated books on the site. The book was a New York Times bestseller along with winning multiple awards such as the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Ridenhour Book Prize, and the California Book Award. Know My Name is a memoir written by the victim of the Stanford sexual assault case, also known as Emily Doe. Miller recounts the events from the moment she wakes up in the hospital to years down the line, both in her personal life and in her court case, People v. Turner. Though she was assaulted in 2015, Miller published her book in 2019. This was the first time she exposed herself not as Emily Doe, but as Chanel Miller.
“I survived because I remained soft, because I listened, because I wrote. Because I huddled close to my truth, protected it like a tiny flame in a terrible storm."
Miller’s writing style was extremely effective. She did not use big words or sweeping imagery very often because she did not have to. The topic’s heaviness already had so much emotion pushed into the words that there was no need to overcomplicate it. Miller recounts her story in a very purposeful way, taking paragraphs out of the narrative flow to make statements about assault and the way society and the court system treat its victims. She takes special care in timing, knowing when to let her anger, disappointment, and pain seep through the cracks of the story. Know My Name has no shame, it does not shy away from crude details or the ugly side of recovery, allowing the grotesque nature of the crime to take full effect. One could expect a story like this to take an extremely serious tone, which it does, but there are small scenes of humor peeking through in the form of one-liner thoughts of Miller or dramatic irony. Memoirs are often considered boring and slow, but there was never a dull moment in Know My Name. Just when the story started to slow down, there was another gut punch of reality or a tender moment, both being tear-worthy.
Image by Kim Fleming on Flickr
One day, Miller woke up in a hospital. The last thing she could remember was walking home after a party. She learned of her rape shortly afterward. Over the next several months, she is introduced to her court case, and also grapples with her familial and romantic relationships. At the time, Miller had a long-distance relationship with her boyfriend, Lucas, who played an important role in her recovery. Multiple times throughout the book, she is asked in court whether or not she had a boyfriend, which leads to her statement of ‘no’ not being valid until they found out she was the property of a man. Miller’s experience in court was less than desirable and continuously demonstrates the flaws within the system. She was given only a few minutes to read her victim impact statement of 28 pages, a statement that would later be republished to BuzzFeed, and act as the gateway to her story being widely shared. The victim impact statement can be read here, as well in the back of her book. Miller wrote, “I’d never questioned the short time limit I was given to read my statement, until Judge Aquilina made time for one hundred and sixty-nine statements. She made it clear each one was important. She invited restoration and compassion into a space I had associated only with torture.” Miller struggled with her treatment in the legal system, specifically how it paired with her passive personality. She talked about how she had always thought that was the way things were supposed to be and never contemplated her treatment until she realized she deserved better. Miller was constantly thrown around with demanding scheduling, which had no regard for her personal life and she was met with cold attitudes throughout.
“The judge had given Brock something that would never be extended to me: empathy. My pain was never more valuable than his potential.”
Image of Chanel Miller by Wikimedia Commons
Not only did the legal system berate Miller, but it catered heavily toward her assaulter, Brock Turner. Turner had been initially put in prison the night of the assault but was quickly bought out by his family for $150k. He had hired a pricey lawyer for his defense team, and many of his answers to questions regarding the assault changed quickly after the employment of said lawyer. Turner’s case stated that both himself and Miller had been intoxicated and while she was blacked out, she gave consent to Turner. Unfortunately, the fact Miller had blacked out, which eventually led to her unconsciousness, during the events of the assault made it much more difficult for her case. The judge continuously made statements that showed his partialness towards Turner, due to the fact that he had no prior convictions and was a “good kid.” After Turner was found unanimously guilty by the jury, he was given a six-month sentence, which was turned into three, due to good behavior. Victims have their entire lives torn apart. They face backlash and criticism and, due to one judge’s bias with a mountain of victim blame behind it, one more rapist was released years too soon. Luckily, the judge, Aaron Persky, was fired due to the injustice he brought to the case. According to Richard Gonzales and Camila Domonoske, a correspondent and reporter for NPR, "Women outraged by Turner's lenient sentence led the charge to recall Persky from his post, saying he is unfit to serve out the remaining four years of his term." This resulted in a 59% vote in favor of recalling Persky.
Miller was also under a lot of pressure from the public, receiving many negative comments under the articles reporting on the case. Even as recently as 2019, exactly three days before Miller published Know My Name, which was published on Sep. 24, an article on Save Our Sons was released. Save Our Sons is a website dedicated to helping accused rapists get out of their accusations. One of the tabs on their website is literally called “Accused? Start Here”, and they also promote Fox News on their homepage. The article is in defense of Turner and criticizes those in support of Miller. Save Our Sons published this article four years after the assault of Miller, and it is hard to imagine what kind of backlash she received while the case was still open. She describes that she had a phone call interview with a probation officer who had twisted her words and filed a report saying Turner should be given a smaller sentence. Miller wrote in response, “When I advocated for him to take classes and be in therapy, she mistook it as a nurturing passivity, gentle absolution. What I meant was take note of his mental health, because in my experience, when men were upset, lonely, or neglected, we were killed.” She had to live with everyone having an opinion on her rape and twisting her into someone she was not to fit their narrative.
“He had not been aware of my one rule: I decide what I am capable of. Whenever I am underestimated, I think, you mistake my quietness for weakness.”
After the court case was over, Miller and a professor at Stanford Law School, Michele Dauber, advocated for adding lights and surveillance cameras in all of the dark nooks on campus to prevent another situation like Miller’s. Stanford ended up building a garden in the place of her assault and requested a quote from Miller to put on a bench plaque. All of Miller’s proposed quotes were initially shut down because they villainized Turner or were too depressing. Stanford continued to counter her requests with more uplifting quotes until they finally gave in and used the last quote Miller had given them: “You took away my worth, my privacy, my energy, my time, my safety, my intimacy, my confidence, my own voice, until today.” The quote was credited to Emily Doe, that is, until November of 2019 when a second plaque appeared with the same quote– this time credited to Chanel Miller.
Video of Chanel Miller reading her victim impact statement posted by 60 Minutes
Know My Name is a story about worth and overcoming. Though Miller makes it clear that she will never be able to fully recover from her assault, she ends the book on a hopeful note. Miller is able to recognize the really good parts of humanity along with the really bad parts of it. This book should be required reading for all human beings, not just for women, men, or victims, but for everyone who needs to see what people are capable of.
“I encourage you to sit in that garden, but when you do, close your eyes and I'll tell you about the real garden, the sacred place. Ninety feet away from where you sit there is a spot, where Brock's knees hit the dirt, where the Swedes tackled him to the ground, yelling 'What the f**k are you doing? Do you think this is okay?'. Put their words on a plaque. Mark that spot, because in my mind I've erected a monument. The place to be remembered is not where I was assaulted, but where he fell, where I was saved, where two men declared stop, no more, not here, not now, not ever.”
Page updated
Report abuse