Kate Gorney (L) and actor T.J. Miller attend the 2016 American Music Awards. Photo / Getty
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 according to DailyMail.
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 36-year-old 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.
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Miller said Sarah 'began again to circulate rumors online once [my and Kate's] relationship became public. Sadly she is now using the current climate to bandwagon and launch these false accusations again.
'It is unfortunate that she is choosing this route as it undermines the important movement to make women feel safe coming forward about legitimate claims against real known predators.'
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 participating 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 drinks 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 pulled her 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.'
After the second incident, Sarah says their relationship fell apart. They met once more, a few days later, to talk and Miller said 'it was a "trust thing"...and he thought I was into it'.
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. At that point, Miller was in his final year of college.
During the student hearing, both of Sarah's former roommates testified as to what they had heard and seen.
'I testified in student court about the noise I had heard and how upset she was after the incident,' Sarah's other former roommate, now a stay-at-home mom in Maryland, recalled. 'T.J. was there with a lawyer during the student court proceeding.'
Duffy said when she testified, she was uncomfortable with a lot of the questioning about her personal life - such as how much she had to drink the night of the incident she had heard and her knowledge of erotic asphyxiation.
'I was asked why I hadn't done anything [more] if I was so worried… and I said, well, the noises were loud enough that it did prompt us to ask what was wrong, so we did do something,' Duffy said. 'I felt very uncomfortable, the way they were challenging me on it.'
After a couple of weeks, Sarah says the school had told her that the issue had been resolved.
She still doesn't know whether he was punished by the school.
A GW spokesman told the Daily Beast that they couldn't release information on Miller's record because of privacy laws, but did say that he graduated in 2003.
Sources who spoke with the Daily Beast said that Miller was 'expelled after he graduated'.
When she told mutual friends about the incident, Sarah says she heard a lot of people saying 'Yeah, that's just T.J.'
But she also lost a lot of friends, who ended up taking Miller's side and ended up testifying to his good character at the student hearing.
Four of those former friends spoke to the Daily Beast, none on the record, and said they could never imagine Miller committing such violence.
'I have never heard of another woman [who dated him in college] make any kind of allegation or insinuation that he was anything but a good guy,' one friend who testified on his behalf said.
Nevertheless, the rumours followed Miller to LA, where four female comedians said they had heard of the allegations and purposely avoided working with Miller because of them.
Four other sources in LA and Chicago, said that they actually heard about the allegations because Miller would crack jokes about punching a girl in college.
When confronted by the Daily Beast, Miller and his wife, who he met at GW as well, said that Sarah made up the claims years ago in a jealous attempt to break them up.
'We met this woman over a decade ago while studying together in college, she attempted to break us up back then by plotting for over a year before making contradictory claims and accusations,' the Millers wrote.
'She was asked to leave our university comedy group because of worrisome and disturbing behaviour, which angered her immensely, she then became fixated on our relationship, and began telling people around campus "I'm going to destroy them" and "I'm going to ruin him,"' the statement continued.
Sarah denied the Millers' side of the story.
'He was a friend to me before [the incidents], and he had been there for me before that,' she said. 'I didn't want him in jail. I didn't hate him. He was someone I cared about… I don't want to mess up his life. But he behaved in a way towards me that I have to live with… [and] I don't think it's appropriate that I carry this by myself.'
The Daily Beast says that Sarah at first did not want to cooperate with the story when they first started investigating the allegation against Miller months ago.
But she changed her mind when the Harvey Weinstein allegations started inspiring more women in the industry to come forward with similar experiences - bringing the likes of Kevin Spacey, Louis CK and Matt Lauer down in the process.
Like Miller, Sarah moved to Los Angeles after graduation to get into comedy. But she no longer lives there.
While she says she had a 'wonderful experience doing improv and comedy' in LA, she says seeing Miller everywhere became a burden.
'I had to see him at my improv school [in L.A.], which I, shortly after, stopped going to, and see him at stand-up shows, and I stopped doing stand-up [eventually in L.A.],' Sarah said. 'It doesn't help that when I was living in L.A. I had to keep seeing his name on billboards, and on bus stops, and it just didn't… stop.'
She's baffled that he continues to deny the allegations.
'It is unfathomable to me that he doesn't understand that he actually put me through something I have to live with, that I never would've chosen, that completely, completely set the tone for my sexual adult life, that I actively had to spend years and years… un-programming,' Sarah said.
Miller made headlines earlier this year when he unexpectedly quit the hit HBO show Silicon Valley.
Miller has been in the headlines a lot this year, first for allegedly assaulting an Uber driver in December 2016 when the two got into an argument about Donald Trump.
Then in May, Miler unexpectedly quit his hit show Silicon Valley. He received a lot of flak when he announced the move in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, in which he came across as ungrateful.
Nevertheless, his career only appears to be on the upswing. He voiced the main character in July's The Emoji Movie, which has grossed $217million worldwide.
Elio is a hyper-imaginative orphan desperate for alien abduction.