Know My Name: A Memoir

by Chanel Miller

If I wanted to be a good victim, I’d have to clean up my language. So many new standards I’d need to uphold.

accumulate. I learned it was expensive to be assaulted.

My rape kit still hadn’t been tested in the crime lab. They told me it would be expedited due to media pressure, but months later I was still waiting. I figured it had something to do with results showing up slowly, some DNA sciencey who knows what. But I was told it was because of the backlog of kits. There were hundreds in line before me, some kits kept so long they grew mold, some thrown out, the lucky ones refrigerated. Immediately I felt ill. How could that be; this was not fruit rotting, it was little pieces of us in each one, an indispensable story. It also meant there was a population of victims in my vicinity, disguised in their everyday lives, going to work, refilling their coffee, eyes wide at night, waiting.

you carry it in, but I understand if you don’t want us in your home, because you know, Craigslist people. I just don’t want to— The man said, Well how else is she going to carry the desk? I understood what the woman meant, that a transaction as simple as receiving a piece of furniture from a stranger possessed an inherent threat, that any time we met someone online, we must scan for signs of assault, rape, death, etc. We knew this. But the guy did not speak this language; he just saw a desk.

Imagine you’re walking down the street eating a sandwich and someone says, Damn, that looks like a delicious sandwich, can I have a bite? You’d think, why would I ever let you eat this sandwich? This is my sandwich. So you’d walk on and continue eating, and they’d say, What? You’re not going to say anything? No need to get mad, I was just trying to compliment your sandwich. Let’s say this happened three times a day, strangers stopping you on the street, letting you know how good your food looks, asking if they can have some of it. What if people started yelling out of their cars about how much they wanted your sandwich. Let me have some! they’d exclaim, driving by with a honk. Were you supposed to say, I’m sorry, no thank you, every time? Would you feel obligated to explain over and over again that you don’t wish to share because it’s your lunch and you don’t know them? That you don’t owe them any of it? That it’s a little unreasonable that they’re asking in the first place? All you would want is to walk down the street eating your sandwich in peace. Maybe I am making this worse by comparing a woman’s body to a sandwich, but do you see what I mean?

ONLY FIVE MONTHS after I read my statement in court, Trump was elected. I was hit by the same feeling I’d had when the judge said six months. Blindsided. Disappointed. Wrecked. When Trump’s Access Hollywood tape surfaced, the average person acknowledged what he said was vulgar, lewd, foul. Anderson Cooper asked Trump point-blank if he understood he was talking about sexual assault and the nation watched him shrug and say, locker-room talk. In the public we grew tired. We heard the tape replayed one thousand times, debated two thousand times, pussy pussy pussy, in print, on air, Democrats and Republicans arguing, you’re inappropriate, no you’re inappropriate, until it dulled on the ears. We grew used to the same patterns of deflect, defend, dilute. The tape was from 2005, guys talking like guys, they wanted us to knit our shit and move on.

We live in a time where it has become difficult to distinguish between the President’s words and that of a nineteen-year-old assailant.

It is not reasonable to casually demand that victims put aside their lives to spend more time pursuing something they never asked for in the first place. This is not about the victims’ lack of effort. This is about society’s failure to have systems in place in which victims feel there’s a probable chance of achieving safety, justice, and restoration rather than being retraumatized, publicly shamed, psychologically tormented, and verbally mauled. The real question we need to be asking is not, Why didn’t she report, the question is, Why would you?