My face would live side by side with my assailant’s face, my image inseparable from his actions. Every eruption that had occurred when my victim impact statement went viral would happen again, amplified. Any time a campus assault is reported, your name will reappear in the news. It’ll be difficult to get jobs in the future. I was warned that stepping into the public would have permanent repercussions. The decision sat heavy before me: keep hiding or disclose my name. But I still had one little dangling string. It was satisfying to have tied off loose ends. In March 2019, I finished the manuscript, papers churning out of my printer, a thick stack on my desk. She was the only person to have read a single word. The only time my phone would ring was on Friday mornings, my editor calling to make sure I was submerged, but not sinking. So from 2016 to 2019 I threaded sentences together while protected and insulated from the world, blissfully unknown. When I agreed to write a memoir, I could not guarantee that I’d reveal my identity. Every day I typed alone in the quiet, my sole job being to extricate the story. For three years before the book’s release, I wrote while remaining anonymous, known only to the public as “Emily Doe.” Writing my book was like sitting at a desk inside a vast, empty dome. Last year, I published Know My Name, a memoir about my experience being sexually assaulted on Stanford’s campus in 2015, the trial that followed and what I began to understand about healing and justice.
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