Doxxing Jane Doe

Who is Jane Doe? Online vigilantes have tried to expose the Cornell University student who filed a lawsuit accusing seven fraternity members of gang rape, and in so doing have invited a torrent of abuse on several other women. Her lawyers say three women have been falsely identified and harassed — and the real Jane Doe is being inundated with threats, too. “She’s not doing well,” her attorney Thomas Guiffra told CNN on Sunday. “She’s under siege on social media, where people are trying to identify her.”

The fact several women are now facing a torrent of online abuse in connection to Jane Doe’s lawsuit isn’t surprising. Targeted harassment and intimidation campaigns were a hallmark of the backlash to #MeToo. These targeted harassment campaigns were once organized on websites like Kiwi Farms and 4chan. But the effort to unmask Jane Doe — and to terrorize any woman they believe to be Jane Doe — is happening right in the open, on mainstream social media platforms that aren’t doing anything to stop it.

Jane Doe’s identity isn’t a total secret: It’s known to her attorneys, the judge presiding over the case, the seven men she’s accusing of rape, and their attorneys, too. In civil cases, a plaintiff’s anonymity is ultimately up to the judge, who weighs several factors, including whether identifying the plaintiff by name will put them at risk of physical or mental injury. “In New York, there’s no automatic right to proceed anonymously,” said Annie Seifullah, a founding partner at the victims’ rights firm Incendii Law. Still, “the law recognizes that survivors’ lives are routinely put on trial, and that forcing them to sue under their real names would keep many victims of sexual violence from coming forward at all.” Similarly, journalistic ethics guides typically suggest showing sensitivity to victims of alleged sex crimes, and reporters will often allow people alleging abuse to do so anonymously, so long as their identity can be independently corroborated.

The attempt to expose Jane Doe began on X, where Substack author and podcast host Michael Tracey — who is perhaps best known for his skepticism toward the allegations made about Jeffrey Epstein — solicited information about her. Tracey said he considered her identity fair game “since her lawsuit didn’t hesitate to name & shame 7 of her peers as gang-rapists.” Aidan Thompson, founder of the AF Post — a publication dedicated to articulating “the ideas, beliefs, and values of the America First Movement” — also asked for help identifying Jane Doe. “Beev, please help me discover the Cornell girl,” he posted on September 29th, referring to the “burnerverse,” a network of anonymous X accounts whose members discuss college sports and wage harassment campaigns against women with equal zeal.

“The fact that people are trying so hard to dox her and are harassing her and others — women they just think might be her — underscores how serious her privacy interest really is,” said Katie McKay, a senior associate at C.A. Goldberg, a victims’ rights firm that specializes in tech-facilitated abuse. “Obviously the anonymity is necessary. It’s protecting her, to some extent, from even more harassment, even more targeting and retaliation.”

X’s terms of service expressly prohibits users from sharing a person’s private information without their consent, and from threatening to do so; the site has also banned people who post the alleged names of pseudonymous users. But non-users’ names and photos aren’t considered “private information,” even if they can be used to dig up actual private details like their phone number or home address. X’s rules also say users “may not target others with abuse or harassment, or encourage other people to do so,” but the platform is flooded with posts disparaging women believed to be Jane Doe. X did not respond to a request for comment.

On X, Thompson posted photos and biographical details of a woman he claimed was Jane Doe. Tracey later identified the same woman as Jane Doe on his Substack, claiming to have seen her name on court records. In fact, Tracey got the name from a court records aggregator — a website that, according to disinformation researcher Jared Holt, was registered in mid-September and seems to selectively post information about polarizing cases, like Clavicular’s and Lindsay Clancy’s.

Despite Tracey’s repeated assertions that Jane Doe’s identity was a matter of public interest, many comments on his Substack post focused on the purported Jane Doe’s sex appeal and how this related to the veracity of her allegations. On X, dozens if not hundreds of people — ranging from anonymous accounts to prominent right-wing commentators — are now scrutinizing her appearance, making sexual comments about her, and disparaging her boyfriend. Anonymous accounts have circulated her Instagram and TikTok posts and made AI deepfakes of the woman Tracey and Thompson named.

Substack, too, is known for its lax content moderation policies. The platform has taken a laissez-faire approach to publishing, and in 2023 infamously refused to remove or demonetize several Nazi publications from its website. Tracey has seemingly benefited from his posts about Jane Doe: Substack lists his newsletter as 66th on its politics leaderboard. Substack did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Tracey, for his part, deleted the post in which he claimed to have identified Jane Doe — not because of his shoddy sourcing but because he claimed to have made his point: High-profile litigants shouldn’t be allowed to be anonymous, especially when accusing others of rape. “That’s all I ever sought to accomplish here,” he wrote. “Not to impugn this young woman on a personal level. I have no animus toward her, and never have. I sincerely wish her the best, and hope her life is not defined by this calamity.” Tracey did not respond to a request for comment.

Jane Doe isn’t anonymous to the court. “Underlying this is the belief that it’s somehow unfair to these defendants that she’s anonymous and they’re not. But they know who she is,” McKay said. “I don’t see a lack of accountability, even as a Jane Doe, in voluntarily subjecting your claims to the scrutiny of a court, with the subpoena power and the discovery power of the court.” Because the defendants know Jane Doe’s identity, their attorneys will be able to request access to her medical records, psychiatric records, and personal communications. “If the worry is that she wouldn’t be held accountable for any kind of false allegation, the whole process is designed to vet these allegations and only allow the claim to move forward — and her to potentially recover anything — if it’s deemed meritorious upon examination of all this evidence.”

And regardless of their stated motivations for doing so, anyone who has spent any time on X since 2022 (or the internet more broadly) would know that identifying a woman as Jane Doe would inevitably result in that woman getting a torrent of abuse. Either Thompson and Tracey identified and directed harassment toward an alleged rape victim, or they directed harassment toward an unrelated woman in their quest to expose the identity of an alleged rape victim. These harassment campaigns reverberate beyond their intended targets, creating a broader culture of intimidation. “I’ve already had many clients call me to ask if they should be worried about being doxxed over their Jane Doe status,” said Seifullah, the victims’ rights attorney. “Most survivors don’t report and this is why.”

Ironically, Tracey is now complaining that an online mob is not only going after his family but also targeting the new owners of his childhood home, to which he has no relation.

Harassment of people who come forward with sexual assault allegations isn’t a new phenomenon, andbut McKay noted that stringent efforts were taken to protect the identity of Emily Doe, woman who accused Stanford swimmer Brock Turner of rape in 2015, and “I don’t recall much of a doxxing campaign,” McKay said — even after Emily Doe’s victim impact statement went viral. When Chanel Miller came forward four years later, the news of her identity was truly revelatory even to those who had criticized her during Turner’s high-profile trial.

“I think the interest in ‘exposing’ victims is going to be magnified these days,” McKay said. Though it’s impossible to pinpoint what changed, McKay pointed to harassment campaigns directed at Amber Heard and E. Jean Carroll, two women who publicly accused famous men of rape. “Those women were publicly identified, and they were torn to shreds, viciously attacked by the public,” McKay said. “I don’t know if perhaps that’s created more of an interest or an expectation that every case is going to let observers who are non-litigants pick apart the victim, but it seems pretty clear to me that’s what they want to do here.”

Just like the #MeToo movement encouraged women to share their stories, the attempt to expose Jane Doe has generated a new wave of solidarity. On TikTok and Instagram, hundreds of women responded to Tracey’s request for information about the alleged Cornell victim with an “I am Spartacus”-esque campaign in which they proclaim to be Jane Doe. Some women are even coming forward with their own stories of sexual assault.

Sarah Lupica, a 24-year-old content creator with more than 1.5 million followers on TikTok, posted a video about being sexually assaulted when she was 16 years old. “For the longest time, I blamed myself for being in that situation,” Lupica told me. Until now, she said, she lacked the language to explain what happened to her. Lupica was 13 years old at the height of #MeToo and had no recollection of the movement. It didn’t reach her. The moment passed, the culture changed, and the abuse of women persisted in a culture that is even more hostile to survivors.

For Lupica, #IAmJaneDoe is a way of not only sharing her own story but showing other women that they aren’t alone. Lupica said she felt emboldened by the amount of other women who were coming forward. “I was really touched by it, and the whole movement of saying ‘I am Jane Doe,’” she told me. “It’s saying you stand with her and with everyone who’s been scared to speak — survivors who never got justice and girls who are really trying to understand what happened to them.”