Lady Biz: Chanel Miller, immigrant entrepreneurs, and smearing real-life journalists
Hello and welcome to Lady Business, a newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the 87th issue, published December 15, 2019.
Reclaiming Her Name
“I couldn't write a sentence without hearing what a defense attorney would say, or how it would be twisted. It took me a very long time to get past that. ...[But I eventually] realized I'm not talking to the defense attorney. This is not for him.”
One of the highlights of my last week was watching this interview with Chanel Miller, the woman who first became anonymously famous as the survivor of Brock Turner’s assault and who went on to write the memoir Know My Name.
Miller is a thoughtful and powerful writer, as her viral “victim impact statement” at Turner’s sentencing first made clear. And her entire interview last week, conducted by my colleague Beth Kowitt at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Next Gen Summit, was absorbing -- not just for what Miller said, but for the obvious care she took in thinking through, and explaining, each of her answers.
Part of those answers had to do with her writing process, and how Miller decided what she would and wouldn’t be comfortable with when putting her name behind her story. When she started writing her memoir, Miller told us, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to publish it under her own name. At first she couldn’t write without picturing how Turner’s defenders would twist everything she wrote.
And even when Miller silenced those internal voices and was ready to put her name to the book, she set boundaries on what she was and wasn’t willing to do to promote it. She didn’t want to take on a full book tour, and the interview last week was her first at a conference. Which seems to have worked out just fine for Miller, professionally as well as personally; Know My Name is both a critical hit and a best-seller. So: “Go at your own pace,” she concluded, “because healing is really slow and it demands a lot of you.”
Lady Bits
--Another highlight of my time at the Summit last week was getting to moderate this discussion with the founders of medical-scrubs startup FIGS, shipping-logistics startup Shippo, and fashion-tech startup Lily AI. (Two of whom are Female Founders 100 companies!) The conversation ranged from turning down funding to why “be more like Steve Jobs,” a notorious bully, is not great leadership advice. (Just ask Away’s Steph Korey). But perhaps the most intense part of the discussion was around immigration, and what the immigrant founders of Shippo and Lily AI have overcome just to stay in this country. “It’s crazy what immigrants have to go through to live their American dream,” Lily AI’s Purva Gupta, who cycled through six different types of visas before getting her green card, told me. “But at the same time they’re tremendously contributing to the economy.”
--I am less-than-zero surprised that Clint Eastwood would be the latest filmmaker to perpetrate the tedious falsehood that we lady reporters get all our scoops by sleeping with our sources. But it’s really quite impressive for Eastwood to have done so while making an entire movie about false accusations -- and for him to have picked a dead woman, the late Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Kathy Scruggs, as his target. Sigh.
--Katie Hill’s resignation from the House of Representatives was messy: She admitted to having a relationship with a campaign staffer, which seems like a pretty justified cause of scandal. But her resignation appeared to result more from the publication, without her consent, of nude photos of Hill -- photos that were allegedly leaked by her estranged husband. All of which is very much not justified. Also not justified? Seeking to replace Hill with a man with a different history of offensively and non-consensually sexualizing women! Or, ahem Bernie Sanders, endorsing such a man.
--The Expanse is back, which means not only new episodes of the best space opera of the past decade, but also the return of Shohreh Aghdashloo’s fantastically-accessorized and profane world leader:
Thank you for reading, commenting, and subscribing to this newsletter! Please tell your friends to sign up here, let me know what you think about this week's issue, and what else you'd like to see me write about: maria.aspan@gmail.com