Know My Name

This book needs to be a textbook.

It needs to be required reading for every law student, every journalist, every HUMAN BEING. This book is axis-shifting and transforming. The person who told me to stop whatever I was doing in that moment and read it was absolutely right.

Now, I'm telling that to all of you.

After reading this, I hate to use this as an identifier, but Chanel Miller is the woman who was sexually assaulted by Stanford swimmer Brock Turner. The fact that he gets that biographical intro and she has the victim moniker to introduce her is exactly the problem this book tries to address. Any illusion any of us have that victims are taken care of and protected is an absolute sham. Even if you knew that on some level, this book will find that point driven further into the deepest part of their soul.

The first most of us knew about Chanel Miller the human came when her victim impact statement was released. Millions of people read it online. Many, myself included, read it through blurry eyes with tears streaming down our faces. This book is the story behind that statement and everything that came after it.

Consider this: Chanel Miller only told two people outside of her family that she was the Stanford rape victim. So, the entire time leading up to the trial, people she knew and loved would talk about the case and she would suffer in silence. She read stories about the case online and the horrifically insensitive comments that people with zero knowledge of the case wrote about her. She ended up unemployed, broke, unsettled beyond belief - but still with faith that justice would come at the end of it. She describes in honest and excruciating detail the isolation and loneliness of that process, even though she was surrounded by family and her boyfriend.

Also consider that she doesn't remember at all what happened. She remembers before - and, then she woke up in the hospital with her hair littered with hundreds of pine needles, her underwear gone and nurses ready to conduct a rape examination. Imagine not being able to account for a huge chunk of your life and knowing that, in those moments, you were violated. She was saved because of two Swedes on bicycles who came upon the attack and saw a man victimizing an unconscious woman and chased him down.

The book leads through that unimaginable purgatory and into the trial where she had to face this asshole and have his attorney try to destroy her credibility because she was a woman at a frat party in a tight dress who had too much to drink. Even though I knew the jury would find Brock Turner guilty, I found myself in tears - released, somehow - by that tiny victory. But, as a reader, you know the great injustice that would follow. You brace yourself for Chanel all over again.

"It was time to see what justice looked like. We threw open the doors and there was nothing."

There is so much here that we don't hear of enough. We talk about rape victims by defining them as the act that was committed against them. We tell biographical details of perpetrators and leave the victims as objects of doubt. We look away because it's easier. But, this book forces us to stare directly at this. Stare at the double standards and the rape culture and the male toxicity. Stare at it and call bullshit on the whole damn thing.

Chanel's victim impact statement went viral and she became a hero in the MeToo movement. Hillary Clinton quoted her in her concession speech. We all believed time was most certainly up. But, honestly, what has really changed? There are so many Brock Turners out there, so many judges unwilling to sacrifice a (white) felon's potential for justice. So many universities who care more about covering their collective asses than actually stepping forward to do what's right.

This book isn't the final chapter, but it actually did leave me with hope.

I was in tears so many times in this book. The way Chanel talks about her sister, the way she worries about the impact on her parents, the frustration over the system as a whole. But, as it came to a close, I cried as much for her grace in telling this story unflinchingly. The lives she will save by showing victims they may feel isolated, but maybe they aren't alone.

Towards the end of the book, she describes the frustration of dealing with Stanford, which seemed more interested in preventing litigation that preventing actual rape. They promised to build her a garden with a quote from her victim impact statement, then rejected every quote she chose. She described wishing she could sit in that space behind that dumpster near a frat house, telling someone about the "real" hopeful garden - the spot where the bystanders brought her attacker to the ground: "Ninety feet away from where yous it, there is a spot where Brock's knees hit the dirt..."

I clenched a fist in victory for her, tears streaming down my cheeks.