Justice

Brock Turner's Victim Reveals What Happened After Her Letter Went Viral

November 1st 2016

In June, Emily Doe’s victim statement captivated the internet. 

Doe, whose real name has been kept private, wrote about the trauma she’d been caused by her fellow Stanford student Brock Turner, who was found guilty of sexually assaulting her behind a dumpster after a frat party. 

Now, in an essay published in Glamour, Doe has explained how her life has changed since the events that followed the reading of her letter, which included Turner being sentenced to just 6 months in county jail. Turner would eventually serve just half of that sentence

"Immediately I felt embarrassed for trying, for being led to believe I had any influence. The violation of my body and my being added up to a few months out of his summer. The judge would release him back to his life, back to the 40 people who had written him letters from Ohio. I began to panic; I thought, this can’t be the best case ­scenario. If this case was meant to set the bar, the bar had been set on the floor."

While the Glamour essay details Doe's lowest points, it also reveals the strength she received from people who supported her, from Vice President Joe Biden to women from all over the world.

"I started getting e-mails forwarded to me from Botswana to Ireland to India. I received watercolor paintings of lighthouses and bicycle earrings. A woman who plucked a picture of her young daughter from the inside of her cubicle wrote, This is who you’re saving."

The essay, which offers Doe's lengthiest public comments to date, also highlights how the discussion surrounding sexual assault and consent needs to shift away from focusing on the victim’s behavior to that of the perpetrator.

"If you think the answer is that women need to be more sober, more civil, more upright, that girls must be better at exercising fear, must wear more layers with eyes open wider, we will go nowhere...

"I hope you grow up knowing that the world will no longer stand for this. Victims are not victims, not some fragile, sorrowful aftermath. Victims are survivors, and survivors are going to be doing a hell of a lot more than surviving."

Go to Glamour to read Emily Doe's full letter. 

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