Know My Name

by Chanel Miller

  For the past seventeen months, every time I had a thought related to the case I would jot it in the Notes section of my phone and label it with Brock’s initials. Finally I sat down and searched “B.T.” Dozens of notes appeared that I had not read since writing them. I copied and pasted all of the text into a Word document. I had dozens of pages of haphazard notes. I sat and read everything in one sitting. Then I walked out of the room and did not return to my desk for three days.

  Through all my years of writing classes, teachers told us that if a topic felt too raw you put it aside for a later time. Create distance. But this deadline had been created for me. I had also never encountered an assignment like this, to write up a list of emotional damages. The prompt was depressing. Why should I document the ways I might be irreversibly ruined? I had a “Making a Victim Impact Statement” brochure that suggested questions: How do you feel when you wake up in the morning? How often do you cry? How much of each day do you feel sad? Have you thought about suicide?

  One afternoon I received a call from an unknown number. I let it go to voice mail. In the message, a woman identified herself as an officer from the Probation Department. I had learned to be wary. I called my DA, asking if I was allowed to talk to this woman. My DA said the officer wanted my input about the upcoming sentencing and I should call her and tell her I was writing a statement I could share.

  I was surprised the officer called me. I was used to being voiceless, my opinion rarely requested. I assumed there were minimum sentences for each felony. I imagined this would be her nice way of letting me contribute my two cents and I expected my words to literally be worth pennies, wishful coins thrown into a fountain.

  I told the probation officer I was writing a statement. But she began asking me questions. I responded by telling her I was hurt, and what hurt me most was watching my family suffer. I kept a palm to my forehead and closed my eyes, trying to focus, to stay with her questions, always more questions. I told her I had survived a school shooting carried out by a man who never got the help he needed. I didn’t want Brock to slip off the rails and punish more women, needed to be sure he was in therapy, taking classes in jail. So you want no more than a year, she said. I was confused, I had never said that. She explained that I had said “jail” and county jail has a one-year maximum. Prison has no maximum. Oh, I said. Well, do they offer classes in prison? I wondered why no one had explained this to me.

  Most importantly I wanted Brock to own up to what he had done. I asked if she had spoken to him and she said no, but she would be meeting with him the following week. I said it was hard for me to fully answer her without hearing what he had to say. You want him to get it, she said. She said she understood. The conversation had been brief. I told her I was working on a statement and I’d be more comfortable emailing it to her when I was done. But she said my oral statement had been fine, she’d jotted down a few notes, and that wouldn’t be necessary. You did great, she said. We both hung up.

  I felt a lingering discomfort. I wished somebody else had been there for the conversation. I told myself I was being paranoid, she would take care of things.

  Days later I received a call from my DA, her voice fraught. Can you tell me what you said to her? Throughout the year I had always been nervous about messing things up simply because I didn’t know enough; mixing time frames up on the stand, wearing the wrong thing to court, speaking with an improper tone. She explained the probation officer had offered a lenient sentence, had said I only cared about treatment, not incarceration, suggesting Brock didn’t belong in prison. I wondered how I had finally been given a voice, but it had not been the one I wanted. Laws exist, I thought. How is it possible for me to blow it at this point?

  I told her I’d call the probation officer back, but my DA said it was too late, the report had been filed. She would send me the probation officer’s recommendation along with Brock’s statement so I could respond to them in my own statement. Distraught, I opened the report.

  The probation officer had given my input a single paragraph. She had taken my words but constructed her own sentences, shaving all context away. I just want him to get better, it said. She gave me a voice of forgiveness and submission, the agony neatly paved over. She’d reduced my suffering to the line, I don’t experience joy from this. She’d drawn her own conclusion: He doesn’t need to be behind bars. This woman, who had been absent for the entire battle, had arrived to take the victory away. For months I had been climbing out of this hole, my hands finally gripping the edge. Now I watched the dirt turn to mud beneath my fingers as I slipped down again.

  The officer noted she had been struck by the victim’s ability to objectively digest the gravity and ramifications of the defendant’s behavior. That word, digest. She had mistaken my strength for digestion. Perhaps she’d expected a hysterical victim, the weeping and scathing kind. She could not hear how my muscles had tensed, did not know the way Lucas found me lying mute on the couch after the call, exhausted from the resurgence of memories.

  As a woman, I’d tried asserting my opinion without coming off as self-serving or overcontrolling. So I repressed pissed-off victim. Now I wondered if I had handled it too gracefully, my composure a signal that what he’d done was of little consequence. When I’d advocated for him to take classes and be in therapy, she mistook it as a nurturing passivity, gentle absolution. What I meant was take note of his mental health, because in my experience, when men were upset, lonely, or neglected, we were killed.

  A moderate county jail sentence, formal probation, and sexual offender treatment is respectfully recommended. It sunk me. Moderate suggested his crime was of low quality, low intensity, tolerable. It was diminishing: This case, when compared to other crimes of similar nature, may be considered less serious due to the defendant’s level of intoxication.

  She had interviewed Brock, reported, the defendant expressed sincere remorse and empathy for the victim. I wondered if her suggestion had been light because Brock had finally taken responsibility. I opened that PDF:

  I swear I never would have done any of this if [she] wasn’t willing . . . we were just in the heat of the moment. If at any time I thought she was not responding, I would have stopped immediately. . . . I never meant to treat her like anything else than an exceptional person. . . . During the trial I didn’t want to victimize her at all. That was just my attorney and his way of approaching the case. . . . I have to sacrifice everything . . . things can go from fun to ruined in just one evening. He explained he’d been working on a program where he speaks out against the college campus drinking culture and the sexual promiscuity that goes along with that.

  I didn’t read anymore, didn’t need to. As I scrolled, I realized at the bottom of the report were nearly forty letters written and signed by guidance counselors, teachers, coaches in Ohio. I skimmed, then paused at a letter submitted by his grandparents: Brock is the only person being held accountable for the actions of other irresponsible adults.

  There was another form filled out by the officer I had spoken to. Under victim’s race, she had checked White. Never in my life have I checked only White. You cannot note my whiteness without acknowledging I am equal parts Chinese. This single check mark was a testament to how little time she’d taken to know me, making the assumption I was white over the phone without bothering to ask.

  I discarded what my DA said and called the probation officer. Digest my ass, digest, I would pull the needle from the grenade, give her the victim she’d expected. I listened to the long brittle rings, arguments mounting in my head, but a recording politely asked me to leave a message, a beep, then silence. I hung up the phone, laid my palms flat on the desk. I stared at the cup of pencils, the photo of a beach on the wall. Everything was so calm. Nothing matched what I was feeling, my rage had nowhere to go. I smacked the cup of pencils, the thin stems spilling to the floor. I’M CHINESE. I screamed, slamming the table with my fists, throwing back my chair. I’M CHIN
ESE.

  I walked into the living room, Lucas rose out of his seat, resting his hands on my shoulders, talking me down. It’s okay, it’s okay, what’s going on. He was speaking in a level tone, trying to get me to match it. I pushed his hands off. I told him, You need to be angry. When you read this I want you to be angry. I wanted him to be so mad his body could not help but be anything else, to know what that felt like. I wanted him boiling, wanted him to break things.

  Sexual violence labeled moderate, why shouldn’t we be enraged. Maybe it is not calm they wanted all along, but suppressed, quiet, contained. My statement would no longer be a sad journal entry about my feelings. My DA had asked me to address the judge directly, but I would speak directly to Brock. I called my DA again, Is there a limit to how long my statement can be? Technically no, she said.

  I typed furiously until my fingers curled. I’d push away from the table, walking a few circles before I could sit back down. Rage activates, but too much of it cripples. Now. I have to do this now. But I kept stopping, wiping my cheeks with the backs of my hands. I physically could not handle it, could not funnel my anger into a petty tap-tap of keys, could not worry about syntax when my body was breaking down.

  I called my friend Mel, overcome. She said, Tell me what’s wrong. I explained the never-ending series of hurdles, the hollow apologies. When I finally stopped, she said, I just typed up everything you said. I will now email it back to you. Use it.

  That night, Margaret Cho was performing at the same Helium Comedy Club. In 2015, she released a music video called I Wanna Kill My Rapist. I looked up to her for being unapologetic, honest, and one of the few Asian American role models in mainstream culture when I was growing up. I sat on the perimeter of the audience, watching her step out of the same door I had used to arrive onstage. She wore red heels, yellow Kill Bill pants, and a black T-shirt that said OUI. After the show, as the audience trickled away, I walked straight to the greenroom door and knocked. Immediately two bodyguards stepped in, blocking me. But I performed here, I said. A woman who worked there told me to leave. I always do as I am told, but my feet remained planted. Two more employees swatted me away with a dish towel, telling me to go. Suddenly, I saw Margaret’s head emerge between the shoulders of the bodyguards. I called her name. I said, I’m a comedian too. We talked through the men’s shoulders, and she looked me right in the eye, smiling. I said, I just wanted to say I enjoyed your music video. She thanked me and asked me my name. Chanel, I said. She nodded, Nice to meet you, Chanel. We touched hands above the men’s shoulders, and then she was hustled away.

  As I turned, something gave. I sat down in a wooden chair with my head in my hands in the empty club and began sobbing. I could not stop. As we walked home I cried openly. I tried to smile while I cried to avoid alarming anyone on the street. My rage had been punctured, had released the despair. She understood how it felt when someone wanted you broken. Kicking and screaming is not a sign you have lost your mind. It’s a sign that you have stepped onto your own side. You are learning, finally, how to fight back. Rage had arrived to burn the timidness away.

  But how to make them listen? I did not want to be written off as a ranting victim. I remembered learning that anger was a secondary emotion, the primary emotion was closer to pain. I’d make them hear the hurt beneath the fury. To calm down, I taped up the blank poster boards Lucas had bought for me after our first date. I drew a huge road, one loop, creatures cycling around it in wagons and unicycles; a slug wearing a scarf blowing in the wind, flamingos with their necks twisted in knots, an antelope riding a scooter. Drawing until my mind was at peace again.

  The next day I called my friend Matt, who was still unaware that I was Emily. Everyone around me had been trained to expect little from Brock and this broken system. I wanted someone’s shock to be fresh, to hear the initial incomprehension, how could that possibly be. I felt crazy, I was crazy, I just needed someone to say this makes me crazy too. When I told him, his sorrow and frustration soothed me. He is Christian and asked if he could pray for me, and he did, right there on the phone. He did not ask God for strength, rather informed God that he knew I was strong enough to make it through this.

  I had told my story many times; but with loved ones I told censored versions. In court I could only speak through questions others asked me. I took out my worn copy of Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, which had guided me through college. She wrote, “Remember that you own what happened to you. . . . You cannot write out of someone else’s dark place; you can only write out of your own.” For the first time I would be telling my version of the story. A letter, from me, to Brock.

  That night, I told myself, you are going to sit down and you are going to feel all of it. Dark, nasty things are going to crawl out of you. Images will reappear. The feeling of uncertainty and isolation you had at each stage will be felt again. You will feel sick, you will feel sad. This will not be fun, this will feel impossible, but it will be done. It must be done. The present version of myself would walk through a long, dark tunnel to meet the girl who woke up on the gurney, join hands, and begin the walk back through the timeline of horrible memories, as she slowly learned the truth. As I typed, my face scrunched up, often I spoke out loud, sometimes the skin on my neck tightened, I whispered, I yelled, my eyes blurred with tears, I seethed, I stood up, I slumped in my seat, I walked in circles, but the two selves in my head continued to walk and walk, my present self constantly reminding my past self not to stop and curl up, just to walk through. I wrote all the way up to the present, and then I stopped. Past self and present self hugged, and past self disappeared. It was 7:00 A.M. and in nine hours I had written twenty-eight incoherent pages, my first draft. I looked out my window, the sun rising. I looked over at Lucas, sleeping peacefully. I ate some Lucky Charms cereal in my pajamas, listening to my spoon clinking against the bowl in the silence, the diluted yellow sun coating the buildings. I could see a bus down below, a small rectangle pulling up to its stop, people crossing the street. Another day was beginning. I was okay. The story had not swallowed me.

  For the next few days, I’d wake up and roll into my chair without brushing my teeth. I ate only when Lucas forced a plate in front of me. The long showers I usually relished became quick rinses. I didn’t have time to waste. I yelled the statement out loud from beginning to end to get the words right. I worried neighbors would call the police, as I screamed YOU HAVE BEEN CONVICTED OF VIOLATING ME, INTENTIONALLY, FORCIBLY, SEXUALLY WITH MALICIOUS INTENT. I wanted to tape a little paper to the front door: Just practicing.

  I kept pushing off my deadline, asking for a day or two more. When I had run out of time, I sent it off. The judge would have one week to read it before the sentencing.

  Almost immediately I became sick. I completely lost my voice. It was not husky, but gone, shavings of sound in between breath. I went to Rite Aid to buy a bag of lemon mint cough drops and my card was denied. I quickly slid them back over the counter, apologizing with a nod, and left. When I checked my bank account online, I had two dollars and eighty-three cents. This was the account I had proudly opened a year earlier when I’d landed my first job. I sifted through the room, looking for things I had bought that I could return. I spotted a book I had purchased, the receipt still tucked inside the pages. It was Charles Bukowski’s You Get So Alone at Times That It Just Makes Sense. I had been drawn to the title. I walked to the bookstore and got my sixteen dollars back.

  On the day of Lucas’s graduation, I walked to the ceremony alone, voiceless in his large black coat. His parents flew in to celebrate. They took us to Fogo de Chão, a Brazilian steakhouse, where we were each given a coaster; one side red, one side green. If you placed the green side face up on the table, waiters swarmed to you with racks of meat they’d slice straight onto your plate. Red side meant I am content for the moment, please leave me be. I loved the control, the way a flip of the coaster could send waiters into motion around me, the way the red made everything stop.


  Lucas’s parents still did not know about the case. They had planned a family trip to Lake Tahoe on June 2, the day of the sentencing, but Lucas told them he had to stay in Palo Alto to “help a friend” and would drive up the next day to meet up with them. I trusted them and always felt warmly welcomed, that was never the issue. Being sexually assaulted was not something I imagined I would share with most people. The public nature of the case had put me in a strange position. I felt awful they’d watched the story unfold in the news, unaware their son was involved, but I was torn; do I have a right to privacy or do they have a right to know? I also wanted the chance for them to get to know me better as Chanel before they knew me as Emily.

  We spent our final days in Philly packing my books on the windowsill into boxes, wrapping the pots and pans I had accumulated over the year. I left a card by the hot cocoa machine for Anthony, hoping he’d find it during his morning rounds. I hugged the women at the desk good-bye, gave them markers and books for their daughters, who I’d gotten to know through photos and stories. Lucas and I sat in the barren apartment, eating cold canned soup. I asked if I could read his statement, and he hesitated, worried it would hurt me. I assured him I’d be fine.

  Chanel has hated talking about the night that she was violated. . . . He’d written about the way I became verbally hostile, upset, abrasive, whenever the case was brought up. I remembered the shattered phone, the screaming matches. I remembered halfway through a movie, a rape unfolding on screen, yelling to turn it off, turn it off, where’s the damn remote, getting up to leave, slamming the door. He wrote about my inability to sleep by myself, the physical insecurity, keeping the lights on. He noticed times I left the apartment to wander aimlessly around the city, needing to be alone. How the process had been more invasive, public, and longer than we anticipated. Chanel has allowed me, in confidence and only due to our closeness, occasional glimpses of the pain that comes with this public violation of her body. . . . Please do not confuse that strength with the deep, negative, and permanent impact that comes with a man publicly sexually assaulting a woman while unconscious, and the year-long, media-ridden trial that has followed. I ached from the way this ugly event had reared its head in our relationship as we struggled to incorporate it into our lives.