Support snowballs in Cornell rape case
Thousands of American women have taken to social media to support the alleged victim of a gang rape at an elite US university, in a case that sparked a national outcry, after a political commentator threatened to reveal her identity.
Messages of support with the hashtag #IAmJaneDoe—a pseudonym commonly used in the US legal system to protect a person’s identity—have proliferated on TikTok, X and Instagram since a man named Michael Tracey asked people to help him find the former Cornell University student in order to “evaluate her veracity.”
In a symbolic gesture, women wrote posts and made videos claiming to be the alleged victim, in a bid to make it harder to identify her and defend the right of sexual assault victims to remain anonymous.
“He is trying to expose her identity, we won’t let him,” one young woman said on TikTok in a video viewed over 4 million times. “I am Jane Doe.”
In her lawsuit, the woman said that in 2024, when she was 20, she was drugged with ketamine, assaulted and raped by seven members of the Chi Phi fraternity, a social club for male students.
Broader debate
Authorities initially declined to press charges, but the investigation was reopened on Monday, with New York Gov. Kathy Hochul later appointing the state’s top prosecutor to see it through.
The outrage soon spread beyond the Cornell case, fueling a broader debate over sexual violence on US college campuses—from fraternity culture and the conditions that can enable abuse to institutional responses often criticized as inadequate.
Some US media outlets have compared the wave of online support to the #MeToo movement in 2017, when millions of women took to social media to share stories of sexual assault and harassment following revelations about Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein.
Following the rape allegations, Cornell shut down the fraternity and temporarily suspended the students allegedly involved, several of whom were later expelled.
In the United States, one in four female undergraduates reported forced sexual contact or sexual contact for which they could not consent, according to a 2020 study of 33 institutions by the Association of American Universities.
