Earlier this week, Glamour magazine announced the women of the year. There was one woman in particular that caught my eye, and it lit a fire inside of my feminist self.
“Emily Doe” as she goes by, is the victim of the Brock Turner case. For those of you who are unaware of the horrendous things that happened to Emily, I believe you should read and catch up. In a short synopsis, Brock Turner had raped Emily while she was intoxicated and unconscious at a college party behind a dumpster. He stopped when two men on bikes had chased him down and caught him. After the case went to court, Brock was convicted of three felonies for a mere six-month sentence.
When Emily spoke at the stand, her testimony was spoken directly to Turner, and those words Emily spoke, at the trial, still replay in my mind to this day. This 12 page letter left an everlasting impression on not only myself, but also the entire nation:
“You do not know me, but you have been inside me, and that’s why we are here today”
“And then, at the bottom of the article, after I learned about the graphic details of my own sexual assault, the article listed his swimming times.”
“I was not only told that I was assaulted, I was told that because I couldn’t remember, I technically could not prove it was unwanted.”
These are just a few examples of the powerful words that Emily spoke to the court that day and that speech changed everything. The victim blaming that Emily dealt with her entire case, the favoritism towards Turner because he was a student athlete, and the joke of a sentence that Turner was given all struck conversation amongst the public.
Today, Emily Doe is now speaking out about how she’s been since the trial by writing an essay to Glamour magazine. This essay is also filled with raw emotion and powerful statements that make your skin crawl:
“The violation of my body and my being added up to a few months out of his summer.”
“If you think the answer is that women need to be more sober, more civil, more upright, that girls must be better at exercising fear, must wear more layers with eyes open wider, we will go nowhere. “
This case had shined the much needed light on rape culture in our society, how some athletes at big schools get a simple smack on the wrist for things they should be incarcerated for, and that victim blaming is still occurring no matter how badly we want to pretend it isn’t.
To Emily Doe, thank you for your strength, and your powerful words that the public needed to hear. Thank you for being the stepping-stone to help fix our society’s corrupted rape culture. Thank you.