The fight for the recall was growing increasingly heated. Signs were stolen off lawns, arguments veered into dark and personal tangents. On June 1, a Huffington Post piece by Julia Ioffe stated: Emily Doe’s statement, too, was the subject of fevered speculation among the anti-recall crowd. “I can’t prove it, but I think [Michele] Dauber wrote the victim letter,” Cordell told me. Babcock echoed her suspicion. “It’s so sophisticated for someone who was so young,” she said. Persky’s lawyer, a fellow Stanford alum named Jim McManis, was also sure that Emily hadn’t written the statement. “A person whose identity I am not at liberty to disclose says that it was written by a professional battered women’s advocate,” McManis explained. “I can’t verify it, but the person who told me this, I value her judgment.”
In some ways it was a compliment. I was too “sophisticated” to be believed. I also didn’t mind the suggestion of it being an advocate; the advocates I had were thoughtful, assertive, intelligent beings. But I took issue because of the implication that victims are frauds, liars, not to be trusted. Who would I commission to write a twelve-page first-person narrative? How would that conversation even go? Hey, would you mind writing seven thousand words about the innermost private pains of my life?
What they were really saying is, victims can’t write. Victims aren’t smart, capable, or independent. They need external help to articulate their thoughts, needs, and demands. They are too emotional to compose anything coherent. It cannot be the same drunk girl who was found unconscious, the one who the media said uncontrollably sobbed throughout testimony. On a deep level, they wanted to take away my writing, which I would not give up so easily. Some history:
When my mom was twenty-six, she appeared in the documentary film Bumming in Beijing. It followed a group of counterculture artists, living in poverty, defying conformity inside China’s Communist regime. In this group, she was the writer. She said, When I think about going to America, it’s like going back to the womb. It’s very dark and you don’t know how bright your future will be. When I arrive in America, I think I should get a job first.
Throughout my childhood, my mom worked at the dry cleaners, as an aerobics instructor, crossing guard, at the flower shop, Frame-O-Rama, local newspaper, as a real estate agent, but every night, I saw her sitting in the dark living room, blanket around her shoulders, in front of the glow of the computer screen, writing. When my dad took us to school every morning, I’d pass her door, see her asleep. Once I found her crying; her Chinese website with her writing had been banned and shut down. I was unaware speech could not be free.
After my twenty-fourth birthday, I took the train to New York to sign a contract for my first book, celebrating with a dessert of grilled peaches. I sent my mom a photo of the sun setting over the tall silver buildings. She responded, You are mommy’s dream.
My writing is sophisticated because I had a head start, because I am years in the making, because I am my mother and her mother before. When I write, I have the privilege of using a language that she fought her whole life to understand. When I speak in opposition, I am grateful my voice is uncensored. I do not take my freedom of speech, my abundance of books, my access to education, my ease of first language for granted. My mom is a writer. The difference is, she spent the first twenty years of her life surviving. I am a writer, who spent twenty years of my life fed and loved in a home and classroom.
In a sense they were right. I don’t deserve credit. It belongs to my mom, who held my hand in line at book signings, to Grandma Ann, who read to me on the corduroy couch, to Mrs. Thomas in second grade, who laminated our covers and bound our books, turning our classroom into a publishing house. I owe it to public school English teachers, Mr. Dunlap, Wilson, Owen, Caroline, Ellen, Teddy, Kip. To my grandmother, Bam. To my grandfather, Lovick, a six-foot-two World War II veteran who read books thick as bricks, but sat in his office with a little handwritten pile of my poems beside him, typing them up one by one, so they would never be lost. There are many people responsible for this statement, everyone who taught me how to see the world, to pay attention, to speak up, because my opinion was worth something, the ones who told me I deserved to be heard and seen.
On June 5, 2018, the judge was recalled. I remembered a quote from him in the San Francisco Chronicle: Women are frustrated by how they are treated by society, how they are treated by the criminal justice system. That passion is genuine. It needs to be expressed. Expressed was the wrong word. We the victims are tired of expression, I expressed a lot in his courtroom. The word we need is: acknowledged, taken into account, taken seriously.
The day I’d read my statement, I’d gone home believing I had failed. How many victims have been insulted, made small, because there were no other voices to counter that belief. How many of us have been made to feel humiliated, melodramatic, instead of brilliant, brave. One man could have kept me from awakening millions. Question who your realities are being written by. Reexamine who dictates it. Who decides you are important. The judge was not God. He was one man, wearing a black smock, head of a small domain, ruler of a one-room kingdom on Grant Avenue. He was not the sole truth speaker, the rule maker, the final word. He was an elected official, voted out by 62 percent.
When he was recalled, there was no formal ceremony. I imagine there was simply a day he woke up knowing he would not zipper up the black smock, left it hanging lifeless in his closet. The Los Angeles Times reported that after the sentencing, the judge said, I expected some negative reaction. But not this. The judge knew I’d be unhappy with the sentencing, he just didn’t know eighteen million people would be indignant, and that two hundred thousand people in the local county would vote for his outing. Whether one agrees with the recall or not, the volunteers taught me something I will know for the rest of my life: the world is not fixed.
On July 25, 2018, Brock’s appellate attorney appeared in court before a panel of three judges to present his case that Brock had only intended to have outercourse. The Mercury News reported Justice Franklin Elia responding, I absolutely don’t understand what you are talking about, which summed up everything I could say.
On August 8, 2018, my DA texted me, Judgment affirmed! The appeal was denied. It was like the sound of a last breath, a beat, the lightness of a bird lifting off a wire. Three years and eight months after that night in January, the case was closed. It brought to mind a Hafiz poem:
And then, all the and thens ceased.
Nothing remains to be done in the
Order of time, when all is still.
No more calls, no more updates, no more what’s next, no more no way of knowing. I had forgotten it was possible to exist without him, to have a life not tied to his. That night I celebrated alone by buying Oreos, pouring them in a bowl of milk, letting them sit, scooping out the remains. I did not respond to my DA’s text that day, or the next, skeptical it could really be over. I let weeks pass, wary of the good news, wondering if it was true I was finally free.
I am not sure exactly what healing is or looks like, what form it comes in, what it should feel like. I do know that when I was four I could not lift a gallon of milk, could not believe how heavy it was, that white sloshing boulder. I’d pull up a wooden chair to stand over the counter, pouring the milk with two shaking arms, wetting the cereal, spilling. Looking back I don’t remember the day I lifted it with ease. All I know is that now I do it without thinking, can do it one-handed, on the phone, in a rush. I believe the same rules apply, that one day I’ll be able to tell this story without it shaking my foundation. Each time will not require an entire production, a spilling, a sweating forehead, a mess to clean up, sopping paper towels. It will just be a part of my life, every day lighter to lift.
Ram Dass said, Allow that you are at this moment not in the wrong place in your life. Consider the possibility that there have been no errors in the game. Just consider it. Consider that there is not an error, and everything that’s come down on your plate
is the way it is and here we are. I don’t believe it was my fate to be raped. But I do believe that here we are is all we have. For a long time, it was too painful to be here. My mind preferred to be dissociated. I used to believe the goal was forgetting.
It took me a long time to learn healing is not about advancing, it is about returning repeatedly to forage something. Writing this book allowed me to go back to that place. I learned to stay in the hurt, to resist leaving. If I got stuck inside scenes in the courtroom, I would glance down at Mogu and wonder, if I am really in the past, how did this blinking thing get in my house? I assembled and reassembled letters in ways that would describe what I’d seen and felt. As I revisited that landscape, I grew more in control, could come and go when I needed to. Until one day I found there was nothing left to gather.
The transcripts that once overwhelmed me were now only pieces of paper. I began to belong more to my present than my past. I was no longer trying to get somewhere, only asking myself, Are you improving? Sometimes the answer was not today. Sometimes I was regressing. But the voice in my head was now gentler. Whatever the answer, I was patient and understanding.
From grief, confidence has grown, remembering what I’ve endured. From anger, stemmed purpose. To tuck them away would mean to neglect the most valuable tools this experience has given me. If you’re wondering if I’ve forgiven him, I can only say hate is a heavy thing to carry, takes up too much space inside the self. It’s true that I’ll never stop hoping that he learns. If we don’t learn, what is life for? If I have forgiven him, it’s not because I’m holy. It’s because I need to clear a space inside myself where hard feelings can be put to rest.
Many of us struggle to crawl out from under what we’ve been given, to build ourselves beyond the small definitions we’ve been assigned. I feared, at times, that I’d lost my imagination, because I felt boxed in my role as victim. But when I was trapped, I learned I could still move internally. When I felt depressed, I wrote and imagined my future down to the coffee bean, the children’s books I will illustrate, the chickens I will have in my yard, the soft cotton linens, the sauce-dipped wooden spoons on the counter. The need for it to come true according to plan was not important. The act of imagining was.
I wrote this book because the world can be harsh and terrible and often unforgiving. I wrote because there were times I did not feel like living. I wrote because the court system is slow as a snail, and victims are forced to spend so much time fighting, rather than spending their days creating, drawing, cooking. I wrote to expose the brutality of entitlement, gender violence, and class privilege in our society. But I would be failing you if you walked away from this book untouched by humanity, without seeing what I saw: those thousands of handwritten letters, the green-lipped fish at the bottom of the ocean, the winking court reporter. All the small miracles that sustained me. We may spend half our time wandering around, wondering what we’re even doing here, why it’s worth the effort. But living is an incredible thing, just to have been here, to have felt, if only briefly, the volume and depth of others’ empathy. I wrote, most of all, to tell you I have seen how good the world could be.
I never could have known that, after college, I’d be assaulted within seven months, live in Providence then Philadelphia, do comedy and weep during testimony, write twelve pages that would resonate globally, move in with a tall boy and a tiny dog, and spend two and a half years writing. I have created a self inside the suffering. Looking back, the assault is now inextricable from the greater story. It is a fact of my life, the same way I was born in June, and I was raped in January. Awful feelings may remain the same, but my capacity to handle them has grown. I can’t tell you what happens next because I have not yet lived it. This book does not have a happy ending. The happy part is there is no ending, because I’ll always find a way to keep going.
On September 23, 2018, a candlelight vigil was held for Christine Ford in Palo Alto when it was confirmed she would testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee. It felt strange calling it a vigil. Perhaps it was a collective strengthening before sending her into battle, knowing what she would face. A huge, white moon sat in the sky. I drove out of San Francisco, taking familiar roads. As I drew closer, I saw glowing clusters of people trailing through the streets, lanterns swinging, toward the center, to gather at the intersection of El Camino and Galvez, close to my parents’ home. I heard cars honking their support. I pulled over to the side of the road, the lights framed in my rearview mirror, a long rectangle full of glowing dots. I meant to get out, but sat there, door open, feet on the curb, weeping. I listened to the night air full of honking, incessant, blaring horns, the beautiful rage, the support of my hometown, people packing the sidewalks I grew up on, these streets where I’d scootered with Tiffany, eating lemon drops. I heard them chanting, We are her, she is us. A younger version of myself had been hungry to see this for a long time.
My mom arrived, slipped me a red bean mooncake she’d been carrying in her pocket, and we walked into the crowd where Grandma Ann was waiting, chanting, We believe you. The next day, Mid-Autumn Festival, my mom’s mom passed away in China. I thought of the two things she would say every time I visited, You have pretty dimples! And huge feet! Her grandma’s feet had been bound. Four-inch feet, and now mine, size 9½. Every generation, we get a little more free.
A few days later, Ford testified. I woke up to see Ford’s photo, eyes closed, hand raised and flat. I held my breath when I saw it, knew how it felt, that symbol of surrender, about to step into your own wound. All morning I could not focus, went walking through a eucalyptus grove in the city. It had rained that morning and for hours I surrounded myself in the mint and wet mulch and breathed.
I returned to the news to see Kavanaugh testifying. Exasperated, sniffling, snarky, sarcastic, inflamed with glistening eyes. When Senator Amy Klobuchar asked if he’d ever drunk enough not to remember, he said, You’re asking about blackout, I don’t know, have you? I’m curious if you have. I had been asked the exact same question. I had sat with restraint, never raised my voice, never retaliated. I wondered why a man, who was about to sit on the highest court of the land, could not maintain his demeanor, could only spit back, embittered by the unfairness of it all.
I watched Lindsey Graham, beet red, teeth flared, finger-pointing. I used to shrink at harsh tones, used to be afraid. Until I learned it takes nothing to be hostile. Nothing. It is easy to be the one yelling, chucking words that burn like coals, neon red, meant to harm. I have learned I am water. The coals sizzle, extinguishing when they reach me. I see now, those fiery coals are just black stones, sinking to the bottom.
For years, the crime of sexual assault depended on our silence. The fear of knowing what happened if we spoke. Society gave us one thousand reasons; don’t speak if you lack evidence, if it happened too long ago, if you were drunk, if the man is powerful, if you’ll face blowback, if it threatens your safety. Ford broke all the rules. She had none of the requirements society tells us we need before we dare open our mouths. She had every reason to stay hidden, but stepped straight into the most public, volatile, combative environment imaginable, because she possessed the single thing she needed, the truth.
The barricades that held us down will not work anymore. And when silence and shame are gone, there will be nothing to stop us. We will not stand by as our mouths are covered, bodies entered. We will speak, we will speak, we will speak. There was a line survivors had been taught never to cross. She crossed it, the moment she lifted her hand.
So much of that day was beyond language, was not heard, but felt. Kavanaugh and Graham’s words ricocheted around the room, mean and flighty, nervous, erratic. There was spittle and eruptions, faces wrinkled and cracked, diatribes like swarms of flies, of insults and unclarity. Who held the gravity in that room? It was her. Her words rose from the center of her being, resonated throughout the nation. She was the mountain, their words like fleeting winds and harsh rain, while she did
not move. When she spoke it was sobering, the sadness filling our insides with sand until everyone had sunk in their seats. The truth holds weight.
Trump mocked her at a rally days later in Mississippi: How did you get home? I don’t remember. How’d you get there? I don’t remember. Where is the place? I don’t remember. How many years ago was it? I don’t know. What neighborhood was it in? I don’t know. Where’s the house? I don’t know. Upstairs, downstairs—where was it? I don’t know—but I had one beer. That’s the only thing I remember. The crowd laughed openly, clapping. But all I saw was Trump chucking coals, while we remain water.
I began this story alone as a half-naked body. I remembered nothing. There was so much I did not know. I was forced to fight, in a legal system I did not understand, the bald judge in the black robe, the defense attorney with narrow glasses. Brock with his lowered chin, his unsmiling father, the appellate attorney. The obstacles became harder, I was up against men more educated, more powerful than me, the game rougher, more graphic, serious. I read comments that laughed at my pain. I remember feeling helpless, terrified, humiliated, I cried like I’ve never cried before. But I remember the attorney’s still shoulders as guilty was read. I know Brock slept ninety days in a stiff cot in a jail cell. The judge will never step foot in a courtroom again. The appellate attorney’s claims were shut down. One by one, they became powerless, fell away, and when the dust settled, I looked around to see who was left.
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