Warning: This post is about sexual assault and may cause distress for some readers.
In 2015, Chanel Miller made a spur-of-the-moment decision to join her sister at a Stanford University fraternity party.
When she next woke up, on a gurney in a hospital hallway, she had assumed other identities: ‘Emily Doe’, ‘unidentified victim’ and ‘unconscious, intoxicated woman’.
She did not initially realise what had happened to her. But as pine needles fell out of her hair, as nurses poked and prodded her body, as she sat at work in the days afterwards reading articles about that night, she pieced it together.
Chanel Miller, known as ‘Emily Doe’ for four years, reads her victim impact statement on 60 Minutes. Post continues below video.
She had been assaulted by former Stanford student Brock Turner behind a dumpster outside the party. He was stopped when two Swedish international students saw him, tackling him as he tried to run away and holding him down until police arrived.
Turner’s achievements as a champion swimmer were thread into articles about the case, read by his victim who was not afforded the same treatment.
Top Comments
If you ever need an example of white/class/wealth privilege. Read her statement and then go and read about the Exonerated 5. The fact that this douche got the most pathetic sentence with witnesses/evidence and 16 year old Korey Wise got 13 years in an adult prison with no evidence is all you need. I read this (her statement) when it first was available and I was numb, shocked, angry and every other emotion.
That was incredibly difficult to read, very well written though. The sentence was a joke and the Judge should never have been a judge. If anything, I'm glad that the laws have been changed so that sexual abusers have to serve a minimum sentence. But three years is still too little. In this day and age there is no excuse, you don't assualt an unconscious person, how bleeding obvious is that?