Berliner Tageblatt - #IAmJaneDoe: online support campaign in US university rape case

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 says on TikTok in a video viewed over 4 million times. "I am Jane Doe."

In her lawsuit, the woman says 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.

Authorities initially declined to press charges, but the investigation was reopened Monday, with New York Governor 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.

In a post earlier this week, which has been viewed almost seven million times, Tracey, who has nearly 350,000 followers on X, urged his followers to out the victim.

"Let's see if anyone has the "balls" to name this Jane Doe so we can all evaluate her veracity, and that of her lawyers, since her lawsuit didn't hesitate to name & shame 7 of her peers as gang-rapists," he wrote.

He later added: "If you happen to know who this Cornell "Jane Doe" is, get in touch and I would be happy to publish her name and identifying information."

Following the rape allegations, Cornell shut down the fraternity and temporarily suspended the students allegedly involved, several of whom were later expelled.

Local authorities said they declined to prosecute in 2024 because the complainant's testimony did not establish a lack of consent.

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.

J.Bergmann--BTB