And she says that moment, when at last she revealed her identity earlier this month, came as "an immense relief."
"It almost felt like a bittersweet birthday," Miller tells NPR's Morning Edition, "in that I was able to finally exist in the world without having to hide anything."
Since the incident that made her story — but not her name — famous, Miller had spent much time in silence. Only her 12-page victim's statement, which she read in court before Turner was sentenced, spoke to her experience on that January 2015 night when Turner was discovered on top of her unconscious body behind a dumpster at Stanford University.
"To sit under oath and inform all of us, that yes I wanted it, yes I permitted it and that you are the true victim attacked by guys for reasons unknown to you is sick, is demented, is selfish, is stupid," Miller told Turner in court in 2016. "It shows that you were willing to go to any length to discredit me, invalidate me, and explain why it was OK to hurt me. You tried unyieldingly to save yourself, your reputation, at my expense."
Shortly after she read that statement in court, describing in vivid, disturbing detail the violence and trauma she'd experienced, the judge overseeing the trial sentenced her attacker to six months in jail — much less than the six years in prison that prosecutors wanted for Turner, who had been convicted of three counts of felony sexual assault. Aaron Persky, then a California Superior Court judge, justified his light sentence at the time by saying "a prison sentence would have a severe impact on [Turner]."
Turner would ultimately serve just three months of that sentence.
"I spoke with conviction. I felt that it was working. I felt that it was everything I could have done. So I felt relief and pride and now thought the hardest parts were behind me, but they weren't," Miller recalls of that hearing. "When the sentence was announced, the immediate reaction I had was humiliation."
She says she had struggled to include her family and friends in the legal process up to that point. Since the moment she began learning what had happened to her that night — "every detail I found out on the news," she says — Miller remembers keeping many of her family and friends out of courtroom proceedings, hoping to "protect the people that I loved."
It had even taken her some time to tell her parents about what happened.
"It was almost like I cracked in half," she says of that conversation. "I just sort of bent over and was unable to speak. And at that point, my mom stood up and she just held me and we both cried. Because I don't think you can assign words to that initial experience. I think you need to feel it."
To most in her life, though, she didn't talk about what was going on in court, or even say where it was she was going when there was a hearing.
"It was extremely difficult to conceal that this was going on in my life," she explains. "At the same time, I felt like it was necessary to protect myself, and I was also terrified of the investigators. I felt like I couldn't disclose or be open about what happened."
By the time Turner's sentencing rolled around, Miller had relented and let some family and friends join her in the courtroom — but "as soon as the sentence was read," she says, "I remember thinking, 'Why did you allow them in?' Now people are just going to get hurt again. You humiliated yourself in front of everyone you love. And this is why you should do things alone."
She was not just humiliated; she was also confused how a conviction backed by witnesses and material evidence could have ended like this.
"Had I not released my statement, I would have gone home believing that my words were worth nothing. I would never have thought, 'Wow, that was such a courageous thing that I did,' or 'Wow, I'm an eloquent writer.' I truly believed that I had failed," she tells NPR.
Referring to Persky, she adds: "I don't understand how, if he is in such a high state of authority, he can overlook everything that I presented."