It didn’t take long for them to find her. Soon after Michele Dauber started teaching at Stanford Law School in the fall of 2001, a few female students came to her office and told her they had been sexually assaulted. After a time, she came to expect that if she kept her door open, especially in the first three months of the school year, a girl she had never met would come in, crying. “I know before she’s made it all the way through the door what she’s going to say,” Dauber said.

Dauber, now 53, is small and intense, with a wavy mop of graying hair. She seemed to understand the students’ distress in a way that other professors didn’t. She fought for the students in Stanford’s byzantine system; then, when recourse failed to come, she fought to change the system. The students in her class on college sexual assault, many of whom were themselves survivors, seemed “in awe” of her, a friend told me. Once, Dauber even let a student who no longer felt safe on campus live for a while in her Palo Alto home, along with her family, four chickens and a rescued cat. And then, on January 18, 2015, a friend of Dauber’s own daughter was assaulted—by a 19-year-old Stanford student named Brock Turner.

Before Donald Trump bragged on tape about grabbing women by the pussy, before the Harvey Weinstein stories unleashed a national reckoning over sexual assault, there was the Brock Turner case—a lurid, unforgettable embodiment of campus rape culture. The young woman passed out behind a dumpster near a Stanford fraternity. The young man, a potential Olympic swimmer, thrusting on top of her. The two Swedish students riding past who saw him and gave chase. The trial in which Turner’s father lamented that his son’s life was being destroyed over “20 minutes of action.”

But what seared the case into public memory was the victim’s statement to the court at Turner’s sentencing hearing. “You don’t know me, but you’ve been inside me, and that’s why we’re here today,” she began. The then-22-year-old, known as Emily Doe, recounted waking up in the hospital and learning that she had been found with her underwear off and her dress hiked up to her waist, dirt and pine needles in her vagina. She described, in excruciating detail, the effect of the assault and the trial. “You took away my worth, my privacy, my energy, my time, my safety, my intimacy, my confidence, my own voice, until today,” she wrote. Turner had informed the court he hoped to educate other young people that “one decision has the potential to change your entire life.” Emily’s response was devastating: “A life, one life, yours, you forgot about mine.”

After BuzzFeed published the entire 7,200-word statement, it was shared 11 million times in four days. CNN’s Ashleigh Banfield took the first half of her show to read it aloud, stopping to calm her quavering voice. Nineteen members of Congress, Republican and Democrat, read it on the floor of the House. Emily Doe was sitting in her pajamas eating cantaloupe when she learned that Vice President Joe Biden had written her a heartfelt open letter. She got messages of support from as far away as Botswana and India. The statement, Dauber said, “was the manifesto of the Me Too movement. This was a harbinger.”

Michele Dauber reminds her assistant of a military bulldozer called the D9. “It can go through a mountain or a house or through everything and it doesn’t stop even when missiles are shot at it,” the assistant explained. JEFF CHIU/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Emily and one of Dauber’s daughters had been “inseparable” friends in middle and high school, according to a letter Dauber wrote to the court. The two slept over at each other’s houses; Emily joined the family on vacation. Dauber described her as a “lovely, warm, talented, funny girl.”

At Turner’s June 2016 sentencing, Dauber sat with Emily. There was one case before Turner’s—that of a man named Ming Hsuan Chiang, who had been accused by his former fiancée of brutal domestic violence. “The photos of her that she showed in court looked like CSI: Miami,” Dauber recalled.

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In a plea deal that Chiang’s lawyer had negotiated with the district attorney’s office, Chiang pleaded no contest to a charge of battery causing serious bodily harm. The deal entailed a sentence of 72 days in county jail, which was accepted by the judge, Aaron Persky. But because California’s jails are overcrowded, a progressive measure gives convicts one day off per day served for good behavior, effectively halving sentences. That meant Chiang would spend only 36 days in jail. In addition, the deal allowed him to serve his time on weekends, so Chiang wouldn’t lose his job as a software engineer in Silicon Valley. Pending good behavior, Persky indicated he would also consider downgrading the felony to a misdemeanor, so that Chiang wouldn’t lose his work visa. Even though the woman had ultimately agreed to the deal, in court she had protested the very idea that her assailant was able to negotiate a more favorable sentence for himself. “When I get beaten, can I ask for a better offer?” she said, her voice breaking. “Can I ask for a ‘discount’ beating?”

Dauber and Emily watched this unfold in horror. “The whole courtroom grinds to a halt,” Dauber recalled. “Can the clerk stop what she’s doing and call down to the jail and find out what time Mr. Batterer is going to get to work on Monday? I mean, it was surreal.” By the time Turner’s case came up and Emily stood to read her soon-to-be-viral statement, Dauber felt in her gut that the same thing was about to happen to her.

“Emily Doe’s statement was the manifesto of the Me Too movement,” Dauber said. “This was a harbinger.”

The investigation and trial had shown that Turner and Emily met at a frat party, where they were both drinking. But while Emily’s memory goes black early in the evening, Turner claimed she had agreed to go back to his room. On the way there, he said, they slipped on the path behind the dumpster and started kissing. When the police found them, Emily was unconscious and partly naked. Turner’s pants were still on, but the rape kit showed that he had digitally penetrated her. Turner admitted this, but claimed that Emily Doe had consented before passing out, which Emily vehemently denied—she was so deeply unconscious that she did not revive for hours after she was taken to the hospital.

The jury sided with Emily. In March 2016, Turner was convicted on all three felony charges, including assault with intent to commit rape and penetration of an unconscious person. Under California law, he could have served a maximum of 14 years in state prison, but the district attorney had asked for six. Instead, Persky sentenced Turner to just six months in county jail—which would be only three months under the same measure that had applied in Chiang’s case. Persky also sentenced Turner to three years of probation and ordered him to register as a sex offender. Since Turner’s felony convictions made him ineligible for probation, Persky had to read into the record why he felt Turner deserved an exemption. When the judge cited the “severe impact” that a prison sentence would have on a young person without a criminal record, Dauber was dumbfounded. “There was no moment in the case in which he said to Turner, ‘Young man, you are being sentenced because you have done a bad thing,’” Dauber told me. “Instead there’s this incredible solicitude.”

After what she had witnessed, Dauber was convinced that Persky needed to go. As an elected judge, he could be voted out, but the next primary was five days after Turner was sentenced. Persky was running unopposed and the filing date to challenge him had passed. Dauber couldn’t bear the thought of all the other Emily Does that Persky might brush aside before the next election in six years. And since California is one of eight states that allows judges to be recalled by popular vote, she decided to launch a campaign to have him removed from the bench. There have been only two successful judicial recalls in California’s history, the last one in 1932.

“Since you are going to disrobe Persky, I am going to treat you like ‘Emily Doe,’” wrote the person who sent Dauber a letter containing white powder.

Over the next year and a half, Dauber raised more than $1 million from over 5,000 donors, most of whom contributed less than $100. She mobilized scores of volunteers and won endorsements from local politicians, unions and prominent feminists, including Kirsten Gillibrand, Lena Dunham and Anita Hill. This January, having accumulated nearly 95,000 signatures, Dauber got the recall on the ballot in Santa Clara County for the June 5 election.

The Me Too movement has supercharged Dauber’s campaign. But it has also fueled the opposition to her effort—joined by much of the state’s legal establishment—and created a deep hostility toward Dauber and her tactics. On February 14, a letter arrived at Dauber’s Stanford office. The message inside read, “Since you are going to disrobe Persky, I am going to treat you like ‘Emily Doe.’ Let’s see what kind of sentencing I get for being a rich white male.” A white powder fell from the envelope.

Dauber froze. “This can’t be happening,” she thought as Stanford evacuated part of the building. The powder turned out to be harmless, but the episode shook her deeply. These days, she mostly works from home. She has plastered her office door at Stanford with printouts of the rape and death threats that she regularly receives. On a recent spring afternoon, Dauber was wearing a gray T-shirt that said “UNFORTUNATELY FOR HIM, HE RAN INTO SOME VERY STRONG WOMEN,” but she wasn’t feeling as confident. “It was naïve of me to think that we could do something like this, that directly challenges so many powerful institutions, and not encounter an intense backlash,” she admitted. Her crusade against Persky had turned into something far uglier and far more personal than she had ever imagined.