Photo credit: Wired

One of the former stars of HBO's “Silicon Valley” series has now been accused of sexually assaulting a woman when he and the victim were in a home off the campus of George Washington University after she says violently punched and choked her.

I suppose some are asking, is this just another day in Hollywood?

The woman, who's thus far chosen to remain anonymous in order to protect her identity, suggests that the incident was traumatizing and has a dramatic effect in her life ever since, where she's continuously reminded of that violent beating and rape each and every time she turns on the television and sees the face of T.J. Miller, who has become a well-known actor due to his rising fame from his role on the “Silicon Valley” series.

According to former students at George Washington University, as well as many others inside the stand-up comedy circles and Hollywood, these allegations against T.J. Miller have been widely known for years amongst the rumor mill.

Miller's victim said that she's willing to come forward now as there's a growing sense of bravery and unity from victims of sexual assault largely in part due to the “Me Too” campaign which has not only loomed like a dark cloud over the entertainment industry, in both television, media, Hollywood film, and even the music industry; but also “because of the societal awakening to issues of sexual assault and harassment that has come in the aftermath of the misconduct allegations”, as she told the<a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/silicon-valley-star-tj-miller-accused-of-sexually-assaulting-and-punching-a-woman"> Daily Beast</a>.

The victim says that Miller both hit and sexually assaulted her, and that the matter was even once addressed at the “student court” at George Washington University.

“He just tried a lot of things without asking me, and at no point asked me if I was all right,” the victim said. “He choked me, and I kept staring at his face hoping he would see that I was afraid and that he would stop. I couldn’t say anything.”

T.J. Miller, however, alongside his wife Kate, denies any wrongdoing in the matter and unsurprisingly enough she's sticking beside him as he attempts to play the victim, a common theme amongst this tribe of up-and-coming Hollywood stars.

“Sarah began again to circulate rumors online once my [Miller his wife Kate's] relationship became public. Sadly she is now using the current climate to bandwagon and launch these false accusations one again,” T.J. Miller and his wife wrote. “It is unfortunate that she is choosing this route as it undermines the important movement to make women feel safe coming forward about legitimate claims against real known predators.”

Despite the single anonymous accuser, known only as “Sarah” coming forward, there are several others who have corroborated many of the details of the two alleged sexual assaults which occurred at the hands of T.J.Miller.

At least two other students who attended George Washington University at the time of the violent beating and rape, testified to the Student Court at the time of the incident; both of whom stated that they saw bruises covering Sarah after the assault and that they heard violent thuds in the off-campus house where the rape was said to have occurred.

At least three others have suggested that they also consoled Sarah after the rape and beating and that they helped her for years to overcome the haunting memories of the incident.

One of those involved in the trio who was close to Sarah, Matt Lord, says that he was also her ex-boyfriend over a decade ago.

“I attended George Washington University for undergraduate studies from 2000 until December of 2003. I had a romantic relationship with the woman, who spoke with me about T.J. Miller sexually assaulting her,” Lord, who currently works as an attorney in Montague, Massachusetts, said in regards to the claims.

Lord went on, “At the time I believed the statements she made regarding the assault by Mr. Miller, and I continue to believe the statements she made are true. She was engaged in student conduct proceedings regarding the sexual assault, and I remember the emotional toll that the assault and the subsequent conduct hearings placed on her.”

Each of the two assault and rape incidents between Miller and Sarah occurred at George Washington University, where Miller was a student and Sarah was taking classes but not matriculating. There was a comedy troupe in which both Miller and Sarah had a relationship, called “receSs,” where Sarah said, “I felt relatively safe with Miller at the time.”

This was in 2001 when the two dated, and she reflected upon a night where she claimed “she had too much to drink,” and went on to suggest “there are parts of the incident I don't remember.”

Sarah continued, “It is important to me to cop to that, and I’m not interested in forcing a pretend memory on anyone. 15 years later, I remain terrified of accusing someone of something they didn’t do, but I have a visual and physical memory of that.”

Sarah says that what she does recall is that they were “fooling around” at her place and that during that incident “Miller began shaking me violently, and punched me in the mouth during sex,” according to the victim.

The next morning Sarah said she woke up with a bloody lip and a fractured tooth as a result of the incident, and that she asked Miller about it who claimed she had simply fallen down while she was drunk.

She claims she continued to see Miller, despite her reservations about that night, in part because she was naive and had lost her virginity to him and had a sense of trust that accompanied those types of relationships.

“I couldn’t bring myself [at the time] to believe this had happened,” Sarah said. “It was me not wanting it to be true.”

After that incident occurred, however, she was told that she could no longer participate in the comedy troupe “receSs”, and that she called Miller upset hoping to confide in him, where no direct answers were given as to why she was kicked out of the group.

Days later the pair would meet again at another college party, where they later left in a cab to head back to her roommate's apartment and began to engage in consensual sex.

That night, however, Miller would once again become extremely violent, and she was relatively sober and could not forget what had occurred.

She said the violent incident lasted around five hours, and it was “crystal-clear” even today what he did to her.

“We started to fool around, and very early in that, he put his hands around my throat and closed them, and I couldn’t breathe,” she stated as she reflected upon the incident. “I was genuinely terrified and completely surprised. I understand now that this is for some people a kink, and I continue to believe it is [something] that should be entered into by consenting parties. But, as someone who had only begun having sexual encounters, like, about three months earlier, I had no awareness this was a kink, and I had certainly not entered into any agreement that I would be choked.”

“I was fully paralyzed,” Sarah continued.

Sarah also said that she was “choking audibly”, and that her friends and roommates who were in the apartment came rushing to the door because they overheard the commotion.

She said that she got dressed in a bathrobe and came to the door, where they asked if everything was okay.

“I don’t know,” she responded, before shutting the door, “I’ll talk to you in the morning.”

“He pulled me back to bed and more things happened,” Sarah said. “He anally penetrated me without my consent, which I actually believe at that point I cried out, like, ‘No,’ and he didn’t continue to do that, but he also had a beer bottle with him the entire time. He used the bottle at one point to penetrate me without my consent.”

Sarah claims that during the incident she “froze”, and that she “wasn't prepared” for the violence nor did she want to believe it was even happening, claiming she was in shock.

At around 5 AM the next morning Miller left her apartment, and that she told several of her roommates about the incident while in tears.

One of those roommates, who's now a stay-at-home mother in Maryland, corroborated the statements but has asked to remain anonymous.

“I knew T.J. was in her bedroom and I was in my bedroom, which was a wall away,” the woman said. “My other roommate was in my bedroom with me and we heard a loud smacking noise, and we were concerned. The very next day when we talked to Sarah she was very upset, and, had said he had hit her in a very violent way.”

Another roommate of Sarah's, Katie Duffy, also backed up the story.

“One night, she had him back, and late at night, and we heard quite a lot of fighting sounds and banging, and loud, violent sounds in their room,” Duffy said. “So we knocked on the door of our housemate Sarah and asked if she was OK. She did indicate she was OK. Whatever response she gave, we felt we didn’t have to intervene further, at least at the time.”

Duffy went on, “Looking back, I wish we had done more to intervene, but we didn’t know what was going on. This is a girl I didn’t know very well, but it didn’t mean I didn’t have the power to go into that room, and remove her from that situation, and protect her. We did what we thought was the right thing at the time. It wasn’t enough.”

The next morning, Duffy said that Sarah showed up for breakfast covered in bruises.

“She looked like she had been through a rough night. I recall seeing bruises,” Duffy said. “One roommate asked if she wanted to go to the police. Others offered to take her to the hospital, given how she looked.”

She also says that Sarah refused to seek medical treatment or contact the police.

Duffy said that's as far as her remembrance of Sarah goes because shortly after she moved out and not knowing each other well they didn't keep in contact.

According to Sarah that in the days that followed that incident her and T.J. soon ended their relationship after she talked with him about what had happened, where Miller attempted to control the narrative.

“T.J. said it was a ‘trust thing’, and that he thought I was into it,” Sarah recalled.

I'll be honest with the readers at this point, and I'm sure some of you are thinking it, this sounds as if the woman was either extremely naive or suffering from some sort of Stockholm syndrome, but the basis of this story is that Miller is into incredibly freaky, violent sex.

What appears to be occurring is that now, even when sex is consensual, that a man is being directed to ask a woman before he performs the next step of intercourse.

While some of the allegations are indeed quite violent, a beer bottle in her vagina, and the punching and choking, it's undoubtedly too late for ant criminal proceedings and she also didn't report it to law enforcement and should have.

I think that this is setting a new precedent for kinky sex, where a man must now step-by-step ask the woman before he maneuvers into the next phase, which sort of kills the natural aspect of the sex, but also protects both him and the person he's engaged with.

Certainly, there are really disturbing parts of this as I mentioned before, but this brings about uncharted waters now, that legally I can't remember ever being ventured into.

So if a woman engages in consensual sex in with a man in one position, and he then shifts to another position, must he ask before doing so otherwise, it becomes rape? Definitely murky waters for future legal cases.

As the pair become further apart in months afterward, Sarah says that she did speak to mutual friends about the incidents with Miller, who would give her replies such as, “Yeah, that's just T.J.”

She said she would see him again the next year at a female comedy show she attended. “T.J. showed up to heckle, and I remember being so angry,” she said, “and had to leave.”

About a year after the incident, Sarah would later consider going to the Campus Police about what happened to her. Instead, however, the incident would be handled at Student Court.

“I was not ready to process what was happening, and I have spent a lot of time in my life apologizing for not having shouted ‘no,’ and for not having told my roommates to get him out of here,” Sarah said, explaining her logic for why she didn’t go to campus police a year earlier. “I was not ready to reconcile the events taking place with the person I had known. It was so disorienting and so physically traumatic.”

Sarah asked her then-roommate, the later time become a Maryland housewife, to testify at the hearing about the “loud smacking noise” she heard that night.

“I testified in student court about the noise I had heard and how upset she was after the incident,” Sarah’s roommate recalled. “T.J. was there with a lawyer during the student court proceeding.”

Her other roommate, Duffy would also testify on her behalf.

“I was asked why I hadn’t done anything more if I was so worried, and I said, well, the noises were loud enough that it did prompt us to ask what was wrong, so we did do something,” Duffy said. “I felt very uncomfortable, the way they were challenging me on it.”

Sarah also said that the student court grilled her about “all my habits,” including what she had to drink and exactly how much she drank on both nights.

She was also asked if she had ever heard of erotic asphyxiation, and was asked if they had ever discussed the sexual practice, which she had not.

George Washington University wouldn't give much information about the case other than saying it was “because of federal privacy law, we are not able to provide information about current or former students’ education records,” in response to inquiries regarding a campus PD report or the student court proceedings.

George Washington University did confirm that Miller graduated in 2003, although many students say that he was expelled after he graduated which cannot be confirmed.

Despite the claims from Sarah and her friends, she says she also lost friends over the incident with many suggesting he “couldn't have done this.”

“I’ve known T.J. since college, always known him to be a very caring person, and respectful, particularly toward women,” one friend said. And he loves his wife very, very much.”

Another source, who testified in student court via phone, post-graduation, on Miller’s behalf, said it was unimaginable that T.J. could do “anything like that.”

“I have never heard of another woman make any kind of allegation or insinuation that he was anything but a good guy,” the friend continued. Another friend insisted that Miller “was the type of person if you took him to a strip club, he would want to talk to the strippers, not hit on them.”

Another one of Miller’s friends said that he “believed she knew she was making this up” to “intentionally and maliciously fabricate” a sexual-assault allegation against T.J. Miller.

I'll leave it at this. There are two sides to this argument which is now getting attention, and I'm not sure which one is legitimate, or not, although I do find some of the perversions alleged to be disturbing, to say the least.

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