On a quiet Saturday at the Miller home in Palo Alto on January 17, 2015, around the table, 22-year-old Chanel Miller, her younger sister, Tiffany, and Tiffany’s friend, Julia, sat down to a light meal of broccoli and quinoa.
That day, Tiffany, who was also a junior at Cal Poly, had just driven three hours up the coast to spend the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend with her family. Her objectives were twofold, though, as she also had an invite to a fraternity party down the road and wanted to go with her sister.
Chanel had planned to stay home, watch TV, and read, but her sister insisted. As a recent graduate working at an educational app, she felt a bit too old for a chaotic college party, but her desire to bond with her sister won out, and she agreed to tag along.
As they got ready, the atmosphere was lighthearted, and the girls began ‘pre-gaming drinks’ to kickstart the night. When it was time to leave, Chanel’s mother drove them to the venue, dropping the three young women off near the edge of the Stanford campus.
The trio then walked the rest of the way to the Kappa Alpha fraternity house.
Chanel later admitted to having drunk approximately four shots of vodka and champagne before leaving the house. She drank too quickly, failing to factor in that her tolerance had significantly dipped since her college days.
As soon as they got through the front doors, the girls found themselves in a claustrophobic, crowded scene. Chanel noted the classic hallmarks of a frat party: loud music, a sea of students, and red cups in the room.
Because she was a graduate and felt a bit out of place, Chanel jokingly teased her sister, saying she felt like ‘big mama’. Determined to shake off her self-consciousness, she intentionally let her guard down and climbed onto a chair to start dancing.
Tiffany stood below, laughing, and coaxed her older sister to climb back down. At the party, Chanel kept drinking, mixing whiskey and lukewarm beer.
Inside the frat house, Chanel danced with her sister, unaware that freshman varsity swimmer Brock Turner was actively circling the same room. Heavily intoxicated and increasingly aggressive, Turner spent the night approaching multiple women.
Turner approached Tiffany twice during the party and tried to kiss her, but she rejected his advances each time. At the same time, the mixture of alcohol was catching up to Chanel, fracturing her coordination.
Seeking fresh air, Chanel stepped outside the fraternity house accompanied by her sister. While she was outside, a friend of Tiffany’s who was also highly intoxicated needed help getting back to the dorm room.
Tifanny then left to walk her friend back, explicitly telling Chanel to wait on the pavement until she got back. While she was waiting outside, Chanel’s boyfriend, Lucas, called, and they spoke for several minutes.
Later records show her speech at this time was heavily slurred and largely unintelligible due to alcohol intake. Chanel then tried to call Tiffany to see where she was, but her sister didn’t answer. Seconds later, she lost all motor control and collapsed onto the ground, unconscious.
While Tiffany was away, Turner exited the fraternity house and found an unresponsive Chanel lying on the pavement. Instead of seeking medical help, he isolated her, dragging Chanel’s limp body into a dark alcove behind a dumpster.
Found Behind a Dumpster
There, he stripped Chanel’s clothing and began sexually assaulting her. Two Swedish graduate students, Peter Lars Jonsson and Carl Fredrik Arndt, were cycling on the campus when they spotted Turner on top of Chanel.
In later testimony, they said the scene didn’t look right. According to the Chanel Miller, Know My Name memoir, Jonsson said he confronted Turner, asking him, “What the f–k are you doing? She’s unconscious.”
CBS News reported Arndt’s comments, saying, “Turner was moving a lot. But we just saw her lying there completely still.” Turner then quickly rose and attempted to flee the scene.
As Arndt went to see if Chanel was still breathing, Jonsson chased Turner, tripped him, and held him down, asking him what he was smiling for. Turner tried to run again, but the students tackled and pinned him down until police got to the scene.
They handcuffed a disheveled Turner and officially arrested him. When questioned at the station, Turner immediately began trying to construct a narrative, saying he had drunk heavily but insisted that Chanel had been awake and welcomed his advances while inside the party.
He also said she willingly walked behind the dumpster with him.
Later that morning, Turner’s family posted a $150,000 bail. Less than 12 hours after being tackled and arrested, he was allowed to return home to Ohio to await trial.
Waking Up in the Trauma Bay
While Turner was being booked into jail, an ambulance rushed Chanel to the Stanford Hospital, where she remained unconscious for hours.
At 4 a.m., Chanel finally opened her eyes in the emergency room, with no idea how she got there. She found dried blood and bandages on the backs of her hands and elbow. Her first thought was that she had perhaps fallen and was in an admin office on campus.
Her demeanor was calm, and she asked where Tiffany was. A deputy then explained that she had been assaulted, and she retained composure, assuming that they had a case of mistaken identity, considering she knew no one from the party.
When Chanel was finally allowed to use the restroom, she discovered that she was completely naked under the hospital pants. A fit of panic began to rise within her, and to keep breathing, she tried to convince herself that the police had used scissors to cut her undergarments off for evidence.
Then she began feeling pine needles scratching the back of her neck. They were tangled in her hair, and she frantically began pulling them out. Chanel shuffled from room to room with a blanket wrapped around her, pine needles trailing behind her as the nurses tried to keep her calm.
She was also being asked at the time to sign papers with the phrase, ‘Rape Victim,’ and that is when it dawned on her that something horrible had happened to her. Chanel had to go through an evaluation naked where the nurses held a ruler to various abrasions on her body and photographed them.
They swabbed her private areas and gave her shots for post assault care before she was transferred by ambulance to a hospital in San Jose. Her sister, who had left the party by then, had been frantically calling. Tiffany then got a call from Chanel while she was in San Jose and came to pick her up.
Chanel told officers then that she had no memory of being alone with a man that night and had not consented to any sexual activity. She unfortunately learned the details of what happened from an online news story days later.
On the drive back, still reeling from shock and confusion, the sisters made a pact of silence and decided not to tell their parents what happened. Chanel returned to her parents’ home and attempted to resume a normal routine despite the severe physical discomfort and a lack of memory of how she ended up in the hospital.
A few days later, while browsing the internet, she came across a breaking news story about a sexual assault that took place on the Stanford campus on January 18. As she read the details and description of the victim’s clothing, Chanel came to the horrific realization that she was the unnamed victim in the piece.
It was also the first time she learned the name of her assailant, Brock Turner. Now aware of the criminal nature of what happened, Chanel cooperated extensively with the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Department to get him in custody.
The Charges and the Defense
On January 28, 2015, Turner was formally indicted on five charges, two of which were rape. He pleaded not guilty to all.
At the preliminary hearing, the judge dismissed the two rape charges after forensic tests showed he had not used his penis in the attack. Rather, he had penetrated Chanel with his fingers.
Three felony counts, including assault with intent to commit rape, penetration of an intoxicated person, and penetration of an unconscious person, remained.
The defense built their argument around the idea that the encounter had been consensual.
The prosecution used witnesses like Tiffany, who stated that Turner was previously unknown to both of them and had approached her twice during the party, trying to kiss her, but she pulled away. She also identified Turner out of a lineup as the aggressive man at the party.
According to Kron4 News, Turner’s defense attorney told the judge Turner “is a fundamentally good young man from a good family with a record of real accomplishments who made bad choices during his time at Stanford of about four months, especially related to alcohol and the 20 minutes or so during the night of January 17-18, 2015 when he committed these serious crimes.”
In March 2016, a jury found Turner guilty of three felony counts, and he was facing a maximum of 14 years in state prison. On June 2, 2016, before the sentencing, Chanel read a 7,000-word impact statement before the court and her abuser.
An excerpt from the statement, as reported by The Guardian, read, “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 isn’t all 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, who waited a year to figure out if I was worth something.“
Six Months and Probation
On June 2, 2016, Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Aaron Persky stunned the world, sentencing Turner to six months in county jail followed by three years of probation.
Having spent 40 minutes pouring her heart out to the court, Chanel expected the sentence would reflect the gravity of the injury. In her memoir, Chanel recalled reacting to the sentence given with physical shock and visceral anger. Her family left the courtroom devastated and hollow.
For Turner’s father, it was a victory.
Speaking later during a 60 Minutes interview, Chanel described her reaction to CBS News, saying, “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. How can you explain that to me?”
Her victim statement was then shared anonymously to BuzzFeed in 2016 and quickly went viral. People read it 11 million times in the first four days before it was translated into multiple languages and read aloud on the floor of Congress.
A second letter then set off a series of events against Judge Persky. CBS News reported a letter to the judge in which Brock Turner’s father, Dan, penned, “His life will never be the one that he dreamed about and worked so hard to achieve. That is a steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action out of his 20-plus years of life.”
It landed like gasoline on the already smoldering embers of discontent surrounding the verdict. District Attorney Jeff Rosen declared Turner should have gotten more prison time.
Dan Turner tried to salvage the situation, stating the word ‘action’ was actually meant to refer to a period of time rather than sexual activity and said it was an unfortunate choice of words.
Turner was ultimately released in August 2016 after just serving three of the six-month sentence. He arrived in Xenia, Ohio, in September and registered as a sex offender.
The Recall
Because there was little anyone could do about Turner, the public remained outraged by the sentence. To critics, Judge Persky embodied an outdated judicial system which treated sexual assault too frivolously.
Stanford Law professor Michele Dauber launched a formal recall campaign on the judge, telling USA Today, “Judge Persky has failed women in a very significant way, and the voters are going to hold him accountable. Many eyes are going to be on Santa Clara County as a model for how to respond to bias against women in the legal system.”
In the June 2018 recall election, voters removed Persky from office, making him the first judge in California to be recalled by voters in 86 years. There were also legislative consequences as the state expanded its definition of rape and added mandatory minimum sentencing for sexual assault.
Assembly Bill 2888 created a three-year minimum prison sentence for rape convictions. AB 701 also expands the legal definition of rape to include unconscious victims.
Know My Name
For four years, Chanel Miller remained anonymous. From the time of her sexual assault, she was known by the legal pseudonym, ‘Emily Doe’. In September 2019, Chanel finally came out with a memoir titled ‘Know My Name.’
A college friend, Alison Green, said learning that Chanel was ‘Emily Doe’ took her breath away. Chanel’s therapist, who had been treating her for trauma related to a sexual assault, had no idea that she was the focus of the Stanford case.
At one point, before she knew, the therapist even urged Chanel to read the viral impact statement so many people were sharing online.
Today, a memorial garden and fountain mark the spot where Turner assaulted Miller. Two plaques quoting Miller’s victim impact statement are at the location. According to Time Magazine, they read, “You took away my worth, my privacy, my energy, my time, my safety, my intimacy, my confidence, my own voice — until today.”
Years later, Brock Turner spent his years trying to evade public recognition. He remains under lifetime sex offender registration and is permanently banned from USA Swimming. He currently resides in the Dayton, Ohio area.
Chanel Miller has reclaimed her narrative and built a career focused on literature and art. Following her 2019 memoir, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, she expanded her reach into children’s literature.
Today, Chanel stays close to her family and often speaks about how their collective support restored her faith in humanity.
For other true crime stories with tragic endings, check out our articles on Tori Stafford and Amber Hagerman.
