WASHINGTON, DC, United

States — 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 says on

TikTok in a video viewed over

four 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

last 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,

fuelling a broader debate over

sexual violence on US college

campuses — from fraternity

culture and the conditions

that can enable abuse to institutional responses often

criticised 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 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.