Know My Name

In 2015 Miller was assaulted while unconscious outside a Stanford fraternity party. Her victim impact statement, published anonymously, was read millions of times. Her attacker received six months.

The book reclaims the name. It covers the night, the hospital, the two-year legal process, the cross-examination, the sentencing, and the long ordinary work of living afterwards.

The title is the argument: she had been a case, a statement and a controversy, and not a person with a name.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

Miller is a writer and an artist, and the prose is deliberate rather than raw. She is precise about the legal machinery — what a defence is permitted to ask, how a timeline gets constructed, what an impact statement is for — and equally precise about the small domestic wreckage nobody covers.

The famous statement is included, and in context it reads differently: not as a viral document but as something produced under conditions the book has already shown you.

She is exact about procedure, because procedure is where most of the damage was done.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

It is one of the clearest accounts available of what a trial does to a complainant, and of the specific asymmetry by which the defendant's promise is weighed against the victim's night.

The case changed California law on mandatory minimums and led to the recall of the sentencing judge. The book is the fullest first-hand record of it.

The most valuable material is procedural. Miller documents the forensic examination hours after the assault, the long wait for any information, the gaps of months in which nothing happens, the requirement to remember precisely while being told memory is unreliable, and the cross-examination designed to convert ordinary inconsistency into evidence of untruth. The cumulative account is of a system that is not cruel by intention and is devastating by design.

Her victim impact statement, published anonymously, was read by millions within days and entered into the congressional record. Its force came from addressing the perpetrator directly and from refusing the two available roles — the destroyed woman or the resilient survivor — and the book is in part an account of what it was like to be the person behind a document everyone had read.

Everyone had read it. Nobody knew whose it was, including people she saw every day.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

Coverage of the case led with the perpetrator's swimming times, his scholarship and his potential, while she appeared as an unconscious body without a name. Miller's analysis of this is precise rather than aggrieved: she shows how the framing established whose future was at stake before any argument was made about what happened.

Two graduate students cycling past intervened, gave chase, and held the perpetrator until police arrived. Miller writes about them with care, partly because their testimony was central to the case, and partly because they represent the one part of the night that was not systemic — two people who simply saw and acted.

The six-month sentence produced sustained public reaction, the judge was subsequently removed from office by recall, and the state changed its law to require minimum custodial sentences for sexual assault of an unconscious person. Miller is ambivalent rather than triumphant about this, noting what it took and how little of it was available to anyone else.

She is an artist and a writer, and the prose is deliberate: controlled, often funny, structurally careful, refusing both the clinical register and the confessional one. The book's literary quality is not incidental to its argument — the recovery of her name is enacted by the demonstration of a voice that the proceedings had reduced to a witness.

It is the clearest account in print of what a sexual assault trial does to the person reporting it, written by someone with the skill to render it precisely. It is one case in one jurisdiction and it is not a policy argument, but it is the document to read before forming any view about why so few assaults are reported.