Brock Turner.Santa Clara Sheriff's Office
Glamour magazine named "Emily Doe" one of their 2016 women of the year.
Doe, who has chosen to remain anonymous, was sexually assaulted while unconscious by former Stanford swimmer Brock Turner in 2015.
The court case garnered intense public scrutiny as Turner was found by two graduate students who saw the incident occurring behind a garbage bin outside of a fraternity house at Stanford University. When Turner tried to run, the students pinned him down until the police arrived.
After the assault, Doe wrote a powerful letter explaining the aftermath of the attack that went viral.
"You took away my worth, my privacy, my energy, my time, my safety, my intimacy, my confidence, my own voice, until today," Doe wrote in a letter to the court. She continued:
"You cannot give me back the life I had before that night either. While you worry about your shattered reputation, I refrigerated spoons every night so when I woke up, and my eyes were puffy from crying, I would hold the spoons to my eyes to lessen the swelling so that I could see."
It was this letter that Glamour cited in their decision to honor Doe. "It was Doe's take-no-prisoners telling of what happened afterward that changed the conversation about sexual assault forever," Glamour wrote.
Doe herself noted the outpouring of support she received after her letter went public. "I started getting e-mails forwarded to me from Botswana to Ireland to India. ... A woman who plucked a picture of her young daughter from the inside of her cubicle wrote, 'This is who you're saving,'" Doe wrote in Glamour on Tuesday.
Turner was found guilty on three felony counts of sexual assault and was sentenced to six months in a county jail and three years' probation in June, which many decried as a slap on the wrist. He was released from jail three months early in September 2016.
After Turner's sentencing, US Vice President Joe Biden wrote an open letter to Doe, admitting that he's "filled with furious rage" about the incident and applauding her courage.
