Businesswoman and campaigner Gina Miller is passionate about law. As she told the Creative Equals RISE conference this passion was instilled in her from a young age by her father who spoke of it as something to nourish; to keep alive.

And for someone who is not a trained lawyer, she’s linked to one of the biggest court cases of our time, having initiated the 2016 case against the British government over implementing Brexit without approval from Parliament.

This drive came from never being told she was different from her brothers. “My father was a feminist,” Miller explained. She said how her parents “spoke to me as if I was a grown-up even when I was a child” she said, noting they never gave her an ‘airbrushed version’ of life. 

And it’s an approach Miller is taking with her own children. “If I’m successful, I tell them why. If I’m failing, I say these are the lessons I’m learning.”  This attitude, as well as her father’s love of law, prompted Miller to move to the UK to study law. She explains: “I was going to be the best criminal barrister, I was going to be superhuman.”

Yet two months before her final exams, Miller was attacked by a group of men and sexually assaulted. The ordeal left her unable to walk for several months, yet when the university found out they tried to hush her up by offering her a First.

Miller describes how she felt this sense of injustice in taking something she didn’t earn. How she wanted to go back and earn it like she knew she could. But in the end, she decided not to. “I walked away,” she says. “I survived.”

The ordeal was a crippling experience for Miller who says she “felt shamed”; unable to tell her family and unable to complain to the authorities, asking herself who would believe “an ethnic girl from east-end London?”

It’s something Miller has only recently started talking about. Something inspired by her own determination to help others tell and confront their own truths. 

Instead of law, Miller moved into business and described that passage of her life with resolve. “I can survive and I’m not going to let anyone break me” she shared adding; “If I stay down, they win.”

It was a resolve once again put to the test when trapped in an abusive marriage. The same things that defined Miller’s strength and her extraordinariness were the same things she found herself being punished for. She explained: “All the things he saw and admired in me are things he systematically set about to break in me.”

Miller describes “drowning in her own life” as she was drugged, gaslit and beaten by her ex-husband. Yet she didn’t know how to escape.

Salvation came in the form of her daughter, then 16-years-old. Miller describes being told by her ex-husband that a gash on her back came from falling down the stairs drunk. Yet it was her daughter, watching from her bedroom, who asked her the next day why it was that daddy pushed her down the stairs.

Miller left the house with her daughter and spent three weeks sleeping in her car. She described how she would hold her daughter tight, every breath the girl took filling her too with breath and strength. She was determined not to let her ex-husband win and eventually resolved to “start talking” in an attempt “to break this taboo about domestic violence.” 

Miller says life is about choices. And that hers has always been “to be true to myself, not what I need to do to conform to society.” She encourages others to do the same, even in the face of hardship. She says: “When you’re honest with yourself; when you know your weaknesses and your strengths, nobody can bring you down.” 

The age of activism

What Miller learned about law might not have led her to become a lawyer, but it has all fed into her policy-making. She says how much things have changed over the course of her career; how “we’re in a different place now” with activist brands and businesses doing good.

But that, as she explains: “There’s a move to the right that could dial back all the decades of work” She urged the audience to “be awake to this.”

Miller said it was fitting that the day’s conference was called RISE. “We all have to rise up,” she urged. “Not just defend where we are now, but make sure the pace of change doesn’t slow.”

She pointed to the whitewash effect ‘building back better’ could have for women and diversity, and said how it was more important than ever to dial down the rhetoric and dial up the action.

“Massive fights are coming down the line,” she said. “We’ve got to make sure there are policies and changes and that the generations that come after us don’t have to fight as much as us because they’ll have their own issues.”

When her daughter, now 33, was born she was starved of oxygen and Miller was told she should be placed in an institution. Instead, Miller said: “I’m going to fight for her and that’s when the lioness in me really awoke.”

Since then, Miller has been fighting for others, elevating unheard voices to prominent platforms, and encouraging change despite the tide threatening to turn everything back. 

She points to diverse perspectives as being so important to the world. Something she tells her daughter and why she talks about people with different abilities, not disabilities. As she says:  “The world would be such a boring place if we were all the same."