Stanford rejected quotes Chanel Miller proposed for plaque at site where Brock Turner raped her

Chanel Miller, who was raped by Stanford swimmer Brock Turner in January 2015, released her memoir Know My Name on Tuesday. In the book she describes how Stanford offered to put a plaque at the site of the assault but rejected the quotes she proposed from her victim impact statement

Stanford University offered to put a plaque at the spot where Chanel Turner was raped by Brock Turner, but the school rejected the quotes she proposed from her victim impact statement. 

Miller recounts her interactions with Stanford in the wake of the January 2015 rape in her new memoir, Know My Name. 

The 27-year-old's unyielding account paints the university's response as weak and detached and condemns administrators apparent efforts to manipulate the narrative, Miller's narrative, into something less damaging to Stanford's reputation.

A defining moment in Miller's dealings with the school came when officials offered to put up a plaque at the site where Turner violated her unconscious body behind a dumpster outside a Kappa Alpha fraternity party. 

Stanford removed the dumpster in 2017 and re-landscaped it into a small garden with a pair of benches and a fountain.  

When approached about a plaque, Miller suggested using quotes from the powerful 7,000-word victim impact statement she read at Turner's sentencing. The piece had gone viral online and became a herald of the #MeToo movement, inspiring a number of sexual assault survivors to share their own stories.  

The university rejected all of the quotes Miller proposed and pushed for a reassuring message that would imply forgiveness instead.   

Miller disassociated herself from the discussion in January 2018.   

In her memoir, Miller paints Stanford's response to the rape by student Brock Turner (pictured) as weak and detached and condemns administrators apparent efforts to manipulate the narrative into something less damaging to Stanford's reputation 

Stanford removed the dumpster where Turner raped Miller's unconscious body in 2017 and re-landscaped the area into a small garden with a pair of benches and a fountain (pictured)

The university's rejection of Miller's quotes prompted some 60 students with the Stanford Association of Students for Sexual Assault Prevention to protest in front of the Kappa Alpha fraternity, demanding that the school install the quotes she'd proposed.   

About a month later, Stanford Provost Persis Drell revealed what the proposed quotes were in a blog post.  

The first one Miller suggested was: 'You made me a victim. In newspapers my name was ‘unconscious intoxicated woman,’ ten syllables, and nothing more than that. For a while, I believed that that was all I was. I had to force myself to relearn my real name, my identity. To relearn that this is not all that I am. That I am not just a drunk victim at a frat party found behind a dumpster, while you are the All­-American swimmer at a top university, innocent until proven guilty, with so much at stake. I am a human being who has been irreversibly hurt, my life was put on hold for over a year, waiting to figure out if I was worth something.'

Drell said that the quote 'would not be supportive in a healing space for survivors'. 

The second proposed quote - 'You took away my worth, my privacy, my energy, my time, my safety, my intimacy, my confidence, my own voice, until today' - was rejected for the same reasons. 

Stanford said it would allow a milder portion of the statement and suggested the following: 'I'm right here, I'm okay, everything's okay, I'm right here'. 

It's unclear whether a plaque was agreed upon after Miller withdrew her input.  

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In her book Miller encourages readers to visit the memorial garden and try to see what it represents from her vantage.  

'I encourage you to sit in that garden, but when you do, close your eyes and I'll tell you about the real garden, the sacred place,' she writes in an excerpt obtained by NPR.

'Ninety feet away from where you sit is a spot, where Brock's knees hit the dirt, where the Swedes tackled him to the ground, yelling, "What the f**k are you doing? Do you think this is okay?" 

'Put their words on a plaque. Mark that spot, because in my mind I've erected a monument. The place to be remembered is not where I was assaulted, but where he fell, where I was saved, where two men declared stop, no more, not here, not now, not ever.'

The dumpster area where Miller was raped by Turner is seen above before it was removed by Stanford officials in 2017

For Miller, the plaque discussions were just one piece of what she views as Stanford's failure in facing the assault on its own campus. 

She attributes part of that failure to the fact that she wasn't actually a student there, asserting that Stanford stopped following up with her after confirming that she wasn't enrolled.  

The school did offer to give her money for therapy - on the condition that she would not sue, she claimed. 

'I finally understood I was visible not as a person, but a legal threat, a grave liability,' Miller writes.  

'Their apathy, their lack of apology I could live with, but what troubled me most was their failure to ask the single most important question: How do we ensure this does not happen again?' 

Up until a few weeks ago, Miller was known simply as 'Emily Doe' or 'Brock Turner's victim'. She publicly identified herself ahead of her memoir's release in a 60 Minutes interview Sunday

Up until a few weeks ago, Miller was known simply as 'Emily Doe' or 'Brock Turner's unidentified victim'.

She publicly identified herself ahead of her memoir's release in an interview with 60 Minutes that aired Sunday. 

During the interview Miller spoke about other institutions that [gravely] impacted her in the wake of the horrifying ordeal, including the California court system and the media.  

The rape case gained international attention in 2016 when Turner was given only a six month sentence after he was found guilty of three felonies for sexually assaulting Miller.  He only served three months in jail.    

Miller said she was outraged when she learned of Turner's lenient sentence.  

'I was in shock,' Miller said. 'So you're saying I just put aside a year and a half of my life so he could go to county jail for three months.'  

She continued: 'There are young men, particularly young men of color, serving longer sentences for non-violent crimes, for having a teeny bit of marijuana in their pocket. And he's just been convicted of three felonies … one month for each felony. How can you explain that to me?' 

The rape case gained international attention in 2016 when Turner (pictured in his mugshot) was given only a six month sentence after he was found guilty of three felonies for sexually assaulting Miller. He only served three months in jail

Media coverage of the case posed those same questions - but also focused heavily on the assault itself, stirring a public conversation about how much blame should lie with Miller given that she was drunk at the time.  

Miller, then 23 years old and a recent college graduate, accompanied her sister and a friend to the party at the Kappa Alpha fraternity house on Stanford's campus, which is just 10 minutes from her home. 

She remembered drinking some warm, cheap beer and vodka and going outside to pee, at which point her memory cut off. 

She woke up hours later in the hospital with her underwear missing, debris in her vagina and pine needles in her hair. A police officer and a Stanford dean were in her hospital room. 

In the memoir she recounts trying to piece together what happened her body was invaded by nurses collecting a rape kit.  

Miller told 60 Minutes that she didn't fully know what had happened to her until an article about the assault cropped up on her newsfeed.  

'I was alone, sitting at my desk, surrounded by co-workers, reading about how I was stripped and then penetrated and discarded in a bed of pine needles behind a dumpster,' she said. 

'And that's how I figured out all of those elements. And they all added up. And I finally understood.'  

Miller decried the public's fixation on the fact that she was drinking before the assault. '[Rape] is not a punishment for getting drunk,' she said. 'We have this really sick mindset in our culture, as if you deserve rape if you drink to excess. You deserve a hangover, a really bad hangover, but you don't deserve to have somebody insert their body parts inside of you'

The two men who stopped the assault, Swedish graduate students Carl-Fredrik Arndt and Peter Jonsson, were also interviewed for the 60 Minutes program

Having those intimate details - ones she herself didn't remember - laid bare for the public was deeply distressing. 

'I didn't understand why it was relevant when you're also reporting that my lower half was completely exposed. That my necklace was wrapped around my neck. That my hair was disheveled. That my bra was only covering one breast and the rest was pulled outta my dress,' Miller said of the graphic media coverage. 

'I don't understand why it is relevant how quickly he can move across a body of water in the context of that article,' she added, referencing how stories emphasized Turner's swimming talent.  

Perhaps the worst aspect, though, was the public fixation on the fact that she was drinking. 

'[Rape] is not a punishment for getting drunk,' Miller said. 

'We have this really sick mindset in our culture, as if you deserve rape if you drink to excess.

'You deserve a hangover, a really bad hangover, but you don't deserve to have somebody insert their body parts inside of you.' 

The impact lingered long after the news moved on as Miller feared how the publicity would affect her career.   

'I felt no parent is going to want me as a role model, if I'm just the discarded, drunk, half-naked body behind a dumpster,' Miller said. 'Nobody wants to be that.' 

Despite of all the darkness she endured at the hands of Brock Turner, Miller was able to find slivers of light in the ordeal and its aftermath.  

She thanked the two men who stopped the assault, Swedish graduate students Carl-Fredrik Arndt and Peter Jonsson.  

She also acknowledged the sexual assault survivors who reached out to her after her victim impact statement went viral. 

'It was really like medicine. Reading these was like feeling the shame dissolve, you know bringing all the light in,' she said. 

Four and a half years after the rape, Miller penned Know My Name to boldly reclaim her identity and put 'victim' and 'Emily Doe' to rest. 

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