Know My Name

In 2015, a young woman was sexually assaulted while unconscious behind a fraternity house at Stanford University. In the trial that followed, she was known to the world only as Emily Doe, and her victim impact statement — read aloud in court and shared millions of times online — became a landmark of the movement against sexual violence. Know My Name is the author reclaiming her identity: she is Chanel Miller.

With clarity, fury, and unexpected humor, Miller recounts the assault and its aftermath — the invasive medical exams, the years-long legal ordeal, the public dissection of her life, and the lenient sentence that provoked national outrage. But this is more than a chronicle of a case; it is the story of a person insisting on her own wholeness, and of the slow, deliberate work of reassembling a self that a court tried to reduce to a statement.

A memoir of trauma and survival that is also a work of real literary artistry, Know My Name is a searing indictment of how the justice system treats survivors — and a testament to the power of naming one's own story.