Know My Name

Overview

Know My Name is Chanel Miller's account of the years following her sexual assault by Brock Turner on the Stanford University campus in 2015, and of reclaiming her identity after being known publicly only by the pseudonym "Emily Doe." Miller traces the case from the night of the assault through the trial, Turner's widely criticized six-month sentence, and the viral spread of her victim impact statement, which reached millions of readers within days of its publication.

Rather than confining itself to the mechanics of the case, the memoir follows Miller through the slower, less visible work of rebuilding a life interrupted by trauma and litigation: her relationships with family and a partner, her attempts to keep working and creating art, and the strange experience of watching a version of herself become a symbol in a national conversation she had not chosen to enter.

Miller writes in close, often lyrical detail about the disorientation of the legal process itself, and about the effort of turning private pain into public testimony without losing hold of who she was before any of it happened.

A Reckoning With How Institutions Treat Victims

Published in 2019, Know My Name arrived amid a broader cultural reassessment of how sexual assault cases are prosecuted, reported, and remembered, and it quickly became one of the defining texts of that moment. Miller's decision to step forward as the author of the statement that had already circulated anonymously reframed the story: what had been treated as a case study in campus assault policy became, instead, a first-person reckoning with the specific ways courts, media, and universities can fail the people at the center of these cases.

The book pays close attention to language — how victims are described in headlines, how defendants are humanized in ways complainants rarely are, and how a courtroom's procedures can compound rather than ease a survivor's disorientation. That attentiveness to how a story gets told, and by whom, is central to the memoir's lasting influence and to its reception as a work of literary as well as testimonial value.

Why Know My Name Has Been Challenged

Objections to Know My Name in schools and libraries center on its direct, unflinching description of a sexual assault and its aftermath, including details of the attack, medical examinations, and courtroom testimony that some challengers consider too graphic or too mature for younger readers. Critics have also pointed to the book's frank treatment of trauma, its depiction of the criminal justice system's handling of the case, and passages addressing alcohol and campus sexual violence as reasons for restricting access. The catalog tracks one state and one district in which the book has been formally challenged. Supporters of the book counter that its explicitness is inseparable from its purpose: to document, without euphemism, what victims of sexual assault actually experience and endure.