Rachel Rose Withers

In the early hours of June 13, Eurydice Dixon, a 22-year-old stand-up comedian from Melbourne, Australia, was raped and murdered while she was walking home from a gig. She’d spent the evening making people laugh in a city bar. “She was on top of the world because her gig went so well,” said the last friend to see her alive. The week before she was killed, she joked onstage about worry. “I have a tendency to worry a lot, about things that I shouldn’t worry about. Sometimes I worry we’re going to end up in a slave society—you know, just girly things.”

Her murder caused a wave of outcry in Australia, and a few ripples in the U.S. The following Monday, about 10,000 people attended a vigil in the Melbourne park where she was killed, with smaller vigils held in cities across the country. Everyone in Australia knows her name now, but because of her violent death, not her talent or her jokes. I can’t help but wonder: Had she survived her attack, had she escaped, had it only been rape, had it only been assault, could she have turned the incident into material? If she lived to tell the tale, would she be telling it?