A former girlfriend of comedian T.J. Miller is speaking out to accuse the rising Hollywood star of sexual assault.
The alleged victim, who asked not to be named, told the Daily Beast in a report published on Tuesday that she and Miller met at George Washington University in 2001, where the two were both involved in one of the school’s comedy groups.
On two terrifying occasions, she says Miller beat her and sexually assaulted her – including punching her in the face during sex and raping her with a beer bottle.
The allegations has been whispered about in the comedy world since Miller rose to fame as a stand-up comic after graduating in 2003, but Tuesday marks the first time the victim – referred to as ‘Sarah’ – told her side of the story.
Miller and his wife Kate, who he met attending the Washington, DC school, have denied the claim in a joint statement to the Daily Beast – saying the accuser devised the story as a way to break them up when they got together.
T.J. Miller (pictured in July) has been accused of sexually assaulting a girl he dated in college
Sarah says she and Miller started dating in 2001, when they were performing together in the school’s improv troupe receSs.
A few months into the relationship, in the fall of that year, she says Miller assaulted her for the first time.
Sarah admits that she had a lot to drink the night of the first assault, and that her memory is hazy.
But she remembers Miller ‘shaking me violently’ and punching her in the mouth as they were having sex at her apartment.
When she woke up the next morning, she had a fractured tooth and a bloody lip and Miller said she had fallen down.
While Sarah was unsettled by her injuries, she trusted Miller because nothing like that had happened before. She was also especially invested in their relationship because she had lost her virginity to him.
‘I couldn’t bring myself [at the time] to believe this had happened,’ she said. ‘It was me not wanting it to be true.’
The second assault happened a few days later, when she learned that she would not longer be particiapting in their improv group.
She called Miller upset about what had happened and the two met at a college party later.
Sarah says she only had two drunks that night so her memory of what happened when they went back to her apartment is ‘crystal clear’.
She says they started having sex again when Miller got violent.
‘We started to fool around, and very early in that, he put his hands around my throat and closed them, and I couldn’t breathe,’ she recalled.
‘I was genuinely terrified and completely surprised. I understand now that this is for some people a kink, and I continue to believe it is [something] that should be entered into by consenting parties. But, as someone who had only begun having sexual encounters, like, about three months earlier, I had no awareness this was a kink, and I had certainly not entered into any agreement that I would be choked.
‘I was fully paralyzed,’ Sarah added.
Sarah says she began gasping for air so loudly that her two roommates ran to her room and asked if everything was ok.
She answered the door in her robe and said ‘I don’t know. I’ll talk to you in the morning.
But she was not ok. Sarah says the violence only continued when Miller pulledvher back into bed and started anally penetrating her without her consent.
‘I actually believe at that point I cried out, like, ‘No,’ and he didn’t continue to do that—but he also had a [beer] bottle with him the entire time. He used the bottle at one point to penetrate me without my consent.’
Like many victims of sexual assault, Sarah didn’t scream for help. Instead, she says she ‘froze’ because she ‘wasn’t prepared’ for what was happening.
She says Miller left her apartment around 5am. The next morning, she came down to find her roommate having breakfast and both said they noticed bruises on her body.
They corroborated Sarah’s story with the Daily Beast, in addition to three other former GW students who Sarah confided in after the incident.
‘She looked like she had been through a rough night—I recall seeing bruises [on Sarah],’ one of the roommates, Katie Duffy said.
One of Sarah’s roommates asked if she wanted to go to the police while the other asked if she wanted to go to the hospital. Sarah said no to each of the options.
‘I was not ready to process what was happening [the prior year], and I have spent a lot of time in my life apologizing for not having shouted “no,” and for not having told my roommates to get him out of here,’ Sarah said. ‘I was not ready to reconcile the events taking place with the person I had known. It was so disorienting and so physically traumatic.’
Sarah did finally get the courage to report Miller to the school though about a year later, and he was tried by a student jury.