Chanel Miller

Chanel Miller is an American writer and artist whose memoir Know My Name recounts her assault and the landmark trial that followed, reclaiming her identity and voice.

Chanel Miller was known for years only as “Emily Doe,” the anonymous victim in a high-profile sexual assault case that drew international attention when her impact statement went viral in 2016. Know My Name, published in 2019, ended that anonymity on her own terms. The memoir is at once a personal reckoning, a critique of the criminal justice system, and an act of radical self-reclamation — a book that insists on the full humanity of a person the legal process had reduced to a case file.

The writing in Know My Name is remarkable. Miller is a gifted prose stylist who brings a visual artist’s attention to image and detail, and she captures the particular disorientation of trauma — the gaps in memory, the bureaucratic coldness of institutions, the strange ordinary moments that persist alongside devastation — with precision and care. The book is not an easy read, but it is never gratuitous; Miller is always in control of her material. She balances grief with humor, anger with generosity, and refuses to let her experience be flattened into a single narrative of victimhood or triumph.

Know My Name is essential reading not only as a survivor’s account but as a clear-eyed examination of how society and its institutions respond to sexual violence. Miller has said that writing the book was part of her recovery, and that sense of purposeful reclamation comes through on every page. It is a genuinely important piece of contemporary nonfiction.