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chanel miller

Viking / Mariah Tiffany

The Brock Turner rape case was at the infection point of a series of social issues that now dominate today's headlines. It was the beginning of real discussions on white male privilege and sexual assault on college campuses, and helped inspire the #MeToo movement.

In 2016, Turner was found guilty of three counts of felony sexual assault for raping an unconscious woman behind a dumpster outside a fraternity house at Stanford University.

To protect her identity, she was referred to as "Emily Doe" in court proceedings, or "unconscious intoxicated woman" by the media.


Turner faced 14 years in prison, but the college swimmer only received six months from Judge Aaron Persky who said "a prison sentence would have a severe impact on him, I think he will not be a danger to others." As if prison time wouldn't have a "severe impact" on just about anyone.

It was widely presumed that Turner's lenient sentence was the result of white male privilege, resulting in voters recalling Persky from his position in 2018.

During the trial, "Emily Doe" wrote a powerful 12-page impact statement that revealed how the rape and its investigation upended her life.

"My life has been on hold for over a year, a year of anger, anguish and uncertainty, until a jury of my peers rendered a judgment that validated the injustices I had endured," she wrote.

RELATED: Brock Turner is now the textbook definition of the word 'rape'

She included painful details about how her body was handled by investigators.

"I had multiple swabs inserted into my vagina and anus, needles for shots, pills, had a Nikon pointed right into my spread legs. I had long, pointed beaks inside me and had my vagina smeared with cold, blue paint to check for abrasions," she wrote.

While taking a shower in the hospital, she felt terrified of her own body.

"I don't want my body anymore," she continued. "I was terrified of it. I didn't know what had been in it, if it had been contaminated, who had touched it. I wanted to take off my body like a jacket and leave it at the hospital with everything else."

It's been over four years since the brutal rape and "Emily Doe" is ready to show the world that the strong woman behind the impact statement is Chanel Miller.

But she has a lot more to say. Miller's story was purchased by Viking and will be told in her upcoming memoir, "Know My Name."

"Her story illuminates a culture biased to protect perpetrators, indicts a criminal justice system designed to fail the most vulnerable, and, ultimately, shines with the courage required to move through suffering and live a full and beautiful life," the publisher describes her book.

"It was just obvious to me from the beginning what she had to say and how different it was and how extraordinarily well she was going to say it," Miller's editor, Andrea Schulz, told The New York Times. "She had the brain and the voice of a writer from the very beginning, even in that situation."

RELATED: The judge who sentenced Brock Turner to 6 months in jail has been recalled

The cover of the book is inspired by the Japanese art of kintsugi or "golden repair" where broken pottery is mended together by gold lacquer into something beautiful and new. Kintsugi artists treat breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something they're trying to hide.

"It is one of the most important books that I've ever published," Schulz continued, because of its ability to "change the culture that we live in and the assumptions we make about what survivors should be expected to go through to get justice."

"Know My Name" will be released on September 24.