By Sonja Hansen on June 8, 2019

The survivor of convicted felon Brock Turner’s sexual assault, known publicly as Emily Doe, will release a memoir in September on her experience surrounding the attack that took place in January 2015.

Brian Tart, president and publisher of Viking Books where Doe will publish her book, told The Mercury News the memoir “will change the way we talk about sexual assault forever.” In a news release Tart wrote “Emily Doe will reclaim the story of her sexual assault, expose the arduous nature of the legal system and emerge as a bold, unifying voice.”

Turner, a former Stanford swimmer, was incarcerated for three of his six-month sentence and was released in September 2016 with three years probation and a requirement to register as a lifelong sex offender. The sentence was been deemed by some “a slap on the wrist,” and a movement that successfully recalled Judge Aaron Persky ’84 M.A. ’85 in June 2018 garnered over 100,000 signatures from local voters.

“Emily Doe’s experience illuminates a culture built to protect perpetrators and a criminal justice system designed to fail the most vulnerable,” said Viking editor-in-chief Andrea Schulz, who secured the North American rights. “The book will introduce readers to the writer whose words have already changed their world and move them with its accounting of her courage and resilience.”

Doe read aloud her 12-page victim’s impact statement to Turner during his sentencing on June 2, 2016. The document has been cited by congressional legislators, including former Vice President Joe Biden in an open letter, and used to strengthen sexual assault laws in California.

“You don’t know me, but you’ve been inside me, and that’s why we’re here today,” the statement begins. “You took away my worth, my privacy, my energy, my time, my safety, my intimacy, my confidence, my own voice, until today.”

Whether Emily Doe will write under her real name is yet to be revealed.

The scene of the crime, which was once a dumpster behind Kappa Alpha, has been re-landscaped into a garden. Stanford rejected the use of two of Emily Doe’s proposed quotes for a plaque in the garden, causing her to remove herself from the project. At present, a plaque has yet to be installed at the site.



Contact Sonja Hansen at smhansen ‘at’ stanford.edu.

