It was twilight on Tuesday, October 6th, in a town far from Cornell University, when a police officer was dispatched to a house to respond to the scene of a reported assault. A man had called the police to say that he was inside the house, and that he had shot his mother in the head, turned the gun on his sister, and was “going to kill her also.” The officer arrived in his patrol car just after 7:05 P.M. As he pulled up to the house, another vehicle was reversing out of the driveway, with two young men inside. Given the nature of the call, the officer drew his weapon and shouted at the men to get out of the car and lay on the ground. The men did as they were told. The officer patted them down for weapons, finding none. Moments later, the officer heard the voice of an older man, who, according to a police report, yelled, “I’m the DAD. WHAT’S GOING ON?” Then, by way of explanation, he added, “My daughter is Jane Doe, the victim of the Cornell 7 rape case. We are being threatened by numerous unknown people.”
When officers entered the house, they saw that there was no ongoing assault. Jane Doe—as she is referred to in court documents—was inside, uninjured. The two young men were identified as her brother and boyfriend. The call was a hoax. The family had been “swatted”—a form of harassment that involves calling 911 with false reports of ongoing violent crime, bomb threats, or other dangerous situations. Jane Doe explained to the police that her phone number and address had been leaked on the internet, and that she’d been receiving harassing phone calls, including that evening. She had recorded one such call. In the recording, the man says, “I’m probably just gonna, like, pull up to your house and shoot. . . .” The caller speaks in a deep, throaty voice that at times sounds almost garbled. In response, Jane Doe says nothing. The man says, “I can hear you breathing.”
While officers were still at the family’s house, dispatch reported that the initial caller was back on the line, saying that he had an AR-15 assault rifle and was going to kill everyone at the house, then himself. About an hour later, police reported another call, this one saying that the house was on fire. In yet another phone call, a man stated that he had explosives and that the family would die—“either now, midnight, or tomorrow.” Jane Doe was receiving additional threats via text message and D.M. Her phone had hundreds of unread messages on it, but some of them she opened. “Typical white btich whore crying ‘rape,’ ” one of the messages read. “Hopefully someone does the world a favor and 🔫🔫🔫 you, nothing of value would be lost.” Officers advised her to keep her phone turned off. The next day, according to her attorney, she started taping pieces of paper over the windows at the house.
It has been twenty-eight days since Jane Doe filed a hundred-and-one-page civil lawsuit alleging that she was sexually assaulted by seven students at the Chi Phi fraternity house on October 19, 2024, while she was a sophomore at Cornell University. The claims in the complaint have been met with expressions of outrage and solidarity on her behalf. The case was filed anonymously, to protect her identity, as is often done in civil litigation involving claims of rape or sexual assault. But, within days of the case being filed, details about her identity began to emerge online. Jane Doe now finds herself at the center of another calamity—an ever-expanding blast radius of online abuse, threats, and vigilantism which has touched virtually every person connected to the case, along with people who have no immediate connection to it at all.
Amid the frenzy, Jane Doe has been silent. Her lawyer, a fifty-nine-year-old attorney named Thomas Giuffra, has instead been giving frequent interviews on his client’s behalf. When I visited him at his office in midtown Manhattan, three days after the swatting incident, he frequently invoked the language of war to discuss the case—he and his client were “in the bunker,” “in the trenches,” and “on the beach of Normandy and everyone’s shooting at us. That’s what it feels like.” He told me that a private investigator who works for his firm had been standing guard outside his house with a gun the previous two nights. “I’m a quiet lawyer who lives in the suburbs,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting this.” The swatting had only confirmed what was already apparent to people following the case on social media: Jane Doe’s identity had been compromised. A week earlier, an independent journalist, Michael Tracey, published her name on social media, before deleting the post. Days later, a partially unredacted document seeming to reveal her initials began to circulate online. On X, the A.I. chatbot Grok was freely speculating about her identity when prompted by random users. A United States marine with the same name as one of the defendants, whose address was mistakenly listed in the case files, reported “ongoing and continued threatening calls.” Eventually, Phaedra Perry-Bond, a state-court judge overseeing the lawsuit, decided to seal certain documents related to the case, citing “dangerous internet vigilantism” and a proliferation of “doxing” attempts, which she took the step of defining, in a footnote, as publishing a person’s identifying information on the internet, with malicious intent. She said that everyone involved, including the public, must “do their part in bringing the temperature down before someone gets hurt.”
Giuffra said he started working with Jane Doe last spring. It had been less than six months since the night at Chi Phi, and, when he travelled to visit her for the first time, he found her to be “emotionally shut down,” he said. Giuffra is a plaintiff’s attorney, meaning he represents people seeking damages through civil litigation. Sometimes such cases reach a trial, but more often they are resolved out of court, through financial settlements. Giuffra estimated that most of his work revolves around clients who are abuse survivors, including at least one prominent case related to the disgraced film producer Harvey Weinstein. In sensitive lawsuits like these, a plaintiff is able to ask a judge to allow them to file their complaint using a pseudonym. Giuffra said he almost always advises his clients to proceed anonymously, so that they can “have a normal life and get beyond this.”
For a time, Jane Doe resisted that advice. In advance of filing her lawsuit, she and her attorneys debated the decision to remain anonymous. “She didn’t want to be another one of these women who were hiding behind anonymity,” Giuffra said. “She wanted to make a stand.” He told me that he and his co-counsel, an attorney named Whitney Seals, cautioned her that using her name might create a “firestorm” that would forever be linked not just to her but to her family. “You want to fight this battle against these guys, but sometimes cooler heads have to prevail,” Giuffra said. Eventually, she agreed to take their advice. But, of course, a firestorm came anyway.
In a written affirmation attached to a court filing, Jane Doe asks, in her own words, to be referred to as “JANE DOE” in court records. “What happened to me was devastating and humiliating,” she writes. In the affirmation, she speaks of shame, fear, extreme anxiety, and depression. The thought of her identity being revealed, she says, has caused “many sleepless nights.” Of the seven men whom she names in her complaint, she adds, “Defendants have no regard for my health or safety.”
The events of October 19, 2024, were first documented in detail about four weeks after they took place, in November, when Jane Doe gave a lengthy interview to the Cornell University Police Department. She reportedly told police during that meeting, “I can say with 100 percent confidence I was raped.” Her account was then summarized into a six-page “voluntary statement.”
In that document, she describes what begins as a typical Saturday evening on a college campus. An element of uncertainty, familiar to any twenty-year-old, is present from the beginning of the night: while at a Crunch Fitness in Ithaca—Jane Doe is a weight lifter—a thief takes the keys to her car and steals her wallet, later charging hundreds of dollars at a nearby Walmart. She cancels her credit and debit cards, leaving her to rely on Apple Pay for the remainder of the evening, and posts the news that she’s been robbed to her Snapchat story, but Jane Doe’s planned night out goes on regardless. Because of the robbery, however, she is late to festivities at her sorority house. She begins drinking Tito’s vodka, from the bottle, “to catch up to my Sorority Sisters.” Soon, she is at a local bar, for a “date night event,” drinking more, and vaping. Around 10:30 P.M., she walks to the Chi Phi fraternity house, feeling “numb from being cold and intoxicated.”
She goes on to recount wanting to see her friend, a student named Matthew Ingalls, whom she knew since freshman year, and whom she describes as someone she was interested in romantically. He asks her to have a threesome with one of his other fraternity brothers, and Jane Doe remembers feeling “excited,” reasoning that perhaps the men were gay, “which would have meant that they were part of my community as I am bisexual.” Jane Doe then describes a sexual encounter between herself, Ingalls, and another man, Jonathan Newell. At first, she says, she feels “pretty ok.” When one of the men begins to feel sick, she pats his back and tells him it’s fine if he needs to vomit. As the night goes on, however, the situation begins to turn. A third man enters the room. One of the men then begins groping her. A second threesome soon begins, and Jane Doe hears the men say something about “having a turn.” She begins to feel used. More men enter the room. The night becomes a blur. “I didn’t matter as a person to these men,” she tells police. She remembers feeling like her phone was out of reach, and knowing that she did not have her wallet. Certain memories return to her mid-evening. When someone asks her if she wants more ketamine, she realizes that she already took the drug earlier, on a couch. Later, she is told that she also smoked marijuana and consumed a high-proof rum that she describes as “Jamaican liquor.” Multiple times, she says, she swats away the hand of a man reaching for her vagina and tries to hide her naked body beneath the covers. At some point, she looks around and says, “I don’t know who any of these people are.” She describes feeling exhausted and “totally totally disgusted at the situation.” After she is led into a second, smaller room to engage in another threesome, one of the men enters and asks, “You all are still at it?” Jane Doe tells police that she replied, “ ‘Yeah,’ in a sad and unenthusiastic tone.”
Only later did she learn that Newell had advertised her presence to his fraternity brothers, in a Snapchat group called “Chi Phi Actives,” at around 1:42 A.M., alerting members that there was “free pussy” in the room upstairs. Forty-nine minutes later, Ingalls, Jane Doe’s friend, wrote, “You can walk in and whip it out.”
This September, the details of that evening became public in Jane Doe’s lawsuit. It names seven men involved in the encounter, accusing them of sexual assault, and some of them of rape. The men have denied allegations of wrongdoing. Within days of Jane Doe’s filing, people outraged by the case rushed to find the seven men online. One of them, Diego Sarabia, was reportedly fired from his job at Wells Fargo. Another, Gillio Lopes, surfaced in a viral video, in which a woman confronts him on campus: “Everyone at Cornell is ashamed of you,” the woman tells him. “That group chat is fucking disgusting.”
There was an equally fervent effort to identify the members of the wider Chi Phi Snapchat. This group would be the so-called eighth man—the fraternity brothers who might have seen the messages and done nothing to intervene. Soon, a list of fifty-seven names began to go viral on X, Instagram, TikTok, and Threads. Popular accounts, such as that of the activist and writer Amy Siskind, re-shared the list. “Here are the 57 men in the group chat,” she wrote. At the same time, a separate effort was underway to identify the woman behind the lawsuit, primarily by Michael Tracey, a thirty-eight-year-old independent journalist who mostly publishes on Substack.
Tracey first heard about the Cornell case from a friend in September. He soon noticed the “first wave” of social media posts castigating the defendants who’d been named in the complaint. In one TikTok, an influencer who typically records videos about the film industry urged his 3.7 million followers: “Ruin their futures. Make sure their futures are so dim and so dark that they could not find a job shovelling shit at the bottom of a goddam bridge.” When Tracey read the complaint, though, he was unconvinced that the filing showed that the events of that evening constituted what it described as a “gang rape.”
Tracey is a rumpled, sometimes radioactive figure in the media world who once identified the anonymous plaintiff in a civil case accusing the billionaire Leon Black of rape and has skeptically covered certain claims made against Jeffrey Epstein, characterizing them as part of a “mass-hysteria racket.” He told me that the Cornell case fits what he has long seen as a “craven” pattern in civil litigation: lawyers introduce “reputation-destroying” claims against defendants, while “strategically anonymizing the client,” then publicize the complaint, generating media attention that helps pressure defendants to settle. The system, he said, is ripe for cynical exploitation. Public officials were already referring to the defendants as if they were guilty. On September 28th, Robert G. Cantelmo, the mayor of Ithaca, characterized the seven men in an official statement as “perpetrators.” The day before, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democratic congresswoman from New York, described the case as proof that a “culture of rape, sexual assault, and pedophilia is protected in élite institutions across the United States.” She continued, “It has got to stop.”
Tracey began to relentlessly seek out Jane Doe’s identity, asking his followers on X if any of them knew who she was. “And yes,” he wrote in one post, “this is 100% permitted under the First Amendment.” The project made Tracey a central character in the fallout from the scandal and inspired thousands of posts from women stating, “I am Jane Doe.” (News outlets referred to Tracey alternately as a “content creator,” “political commentator,” “right-wing online personality,” and “podcaster,” though he does not have a podcast.) After cross-checking various sources, he believed he had found her name, and reached out in a text: “Dear [Jane],” his message began, “I have no personal animus toward you whatsoever. I’m sure it’s extremely troubling how this situation has spiraled out of control. However, given that settlement funds are being sought, and especially considering a criminal investigation has been triggered, I consider it in the public interest to report on your identity.” On Thursday, October 1st, he published the woman’s name online. He stressed to me that he never shared her address or private contact information, but Tracey’s post surely contributed to bad actors being able to find her. After a few hours, he took down the post. “The principle has been served,” he wrote on X.
When I asked Giuffra about the attempts to identify Jane Doe, he began to attack Tracey. “I don’t want to mention that little weasel with the . . .” he began, then trailed off. He called Tracey a “nasty little troll of a man” and said, “He should go back to his mother’s basement and wait for his meat loaf.” Giuffra understood the critique of anonymous litigation, but argued that, if abuse victims couldn’t proceed under a pseudonym, they might never come forward with litigation at all. Any argument to the contrary, he said, was “an attempt to continue to silence women.”
Tracey quickly became a target of threats himself. “Please I hope you get raped,” one woman wrote to him. “For literal hours. It’s the only rape I’d ever watch.” Tracey responded by publishing the woman’s messages and a picture of her face, after which she apologized. “Genuinely I am so sorry for those messages I sent,” she wrote in a D.M. “That Cornell case is the first thing to really get me pissed off in a long time and seeing peoples takes on it got the best of me and overtook my emotions . . obviously.” Tracey then took down his original tweet. “Don’t harass or ‘doxx’ her please,” he wrote to his followers.
As the days went on, Tracey received a steady stream of phone calls, several of which he took, engaging with the callers for minutes at a time. He soon visited Cornell at the invitation of a local, to attend an Ithaca Common Council meeting. During a second trip, he arrived at a “Justice for Jane Doe” event that had been advertised on the city’s calendar as a “Gathering of people to show support for a crime victim.” The event was held on the Ithaca Commons, a few minutes from campus, where people were gathering wearing “I am Jane Doe” and “Jane Doe sent me” T-shirts. About ten minutes after he arrived, an Ithaca police officer said his presence seemed to be making people uncomfortable. Tracey asked how. “I don’t know,” the officer said. “Clearly people don’t want you here.” Three men started walking toward Tracey, putting their bodies close to his. “Go away, bro,” one of them said. More people started approaching him, according to a video I reviewed, some repeatedly shouting, “And the rapist is you.” At one point, Tracey said, a woman “whacked me with some kind of stick, or rod, or something.” “Piece of shit,” another woman yelled as more people stood nearby, yelling and filming on their phones. “Are you gonna dox more people?” a man in a reflective vest asked. The shouting continued until chants broke out. “It’s a public event,” Tracey said when another police officer approached. “I’m a journalist. I’m covering this issue.”
As Tracey has noted on social media, the anger directed toward him has also reached his siblings and his mother. Tracey said on X that his father, with whom he shares a first name, has received “literally thousands of nonstop crazed texts/calls/voicemails.”
On Thursday, October 8, Tracey began receiving D.M.s on X from a woman he didn’t know. She said her name was Lauren, and that she and her husband had purchased Tracey’s childhood home in New Jersey four years earlier, and that, as a result, they were now receiving threats. “Can you please post on here that you do not live at this address?” she wrote to Tracey. “Please, we are trying to protect our family and this is so out of hand we are horrified at the comments we are seeing.” She told him that they had started receiving packages delivered in his name.
“Please,” the woman wrote. “Help us.”
Among the many names circulating online, one belonged to a man in his early twenties, whom I’ll refer to as B.
B. is a recent graduate of Cornell University. While he was a student, he decided to ask several trusted female friends for a list of fraternities they thought well of at the school. B. described himself to me as “progressive to a fault,” an “ally,” and someone who is capable of developing a “meaningful relationship with anybody, no matter your background.” Several fraternities at Cornell were known for their ultra-wealthy membership—kids who wore designer clothes and came from prominent, well-known families. It was not uncommon to see Ferraris parked in the driveway of those fraternity houses. B. was not a wealthy student. It was important to him to join a fraternity with socioeconomic and ethnic diversity—as well as one that his female friends considered to be safe and well respected. Based on those criteria, he told me, Chi Phi was “the No. 1 frat on the list.”
Depending on the semester, Chi Phi had anywhere from fifty to eighty members. B. quickly learned that the reputation of the frat was only as strong as its brothers, and that insuring good behavior from a group of eighteen to twenty-two-year-olds was not so easy. “A frat is no better than the people it attracts,” B. said. He told me he was known in the frat “for being someone who intervened and got upset over things that other people thought weren’t a big deal.” He recalled, for instance, getting into arguments with his fraternity brothers specifically about the frequent use of a gay slur. (The frat had several gay members, B. said, but this didn’t stop some people from using the word.) But, when it came to sexual harassment, B. believed that Chi Phi had done a “remarkably good job” at creating a safe, respectful environment for women. A second recent graduate of Cornell, whom I’ll call T., said that, when he was a student, his cohort was “overly cautious about anything involving sexual assault and harassment,” likely as a result of the #MeToo movement. If students rushing the frat had a reputation for being “degrading” to women, he said, they were not offered bids. T. thought that perhaps the cultural pendulum of #MeToo had begun to swing back by the time that Jane Doe’s peers, who had been cooped up during the pandemic for much of high school, arrived on campus, ready to experience the world of partying, sex, drugs, and alcohol. Both T. and B. said they never saw ketamine during their time at the school.
B. graduated before the alleged assault took place, but, in the fall of 2024, he still got word of a Cornell public-safety alert that had been sent to the campus about the incident. He quickly texted a friend who’d been a member of Chi Phi leadership. “Please tell me you’re not involved,” he remembers saying. “Please tell me we’ve already de-brothered the people who were involved.” He thought of all the times he had presented Chi Phi as a safe place to the women in his life. If a woman ever appeared to be intoxicated at a party, he told them, “we’re gonna call you an Uber home. If nothing else, I’ll make sure you get home safe.” The news of the incident, he said, was “heartbreaking.” B. was “absolutely furious.”
It wasn’t until Jane Doe’s court filing became public, two years later, that he first learned of the Snapchat messages from the night of October 19, 2024. B. said it was common for “active” members to maintain a Snapchat group during each academic year—he had been in one during his own time at Cornell. But he was never in this one, having already graduated. B. explained that the Snapchat groups were mostly used by younger fraternity brothers to send stupid, drunken pictures, while others treated it “like a spam folder” that they kept on mute. B. recalled plenty of instances of “locker-room talk,” he said, but he had never seen anything like the messages that the men sent about Jane Doe, offering her up like a sex doll. Once again, he was flooded with feelings of shame and disgust.
Soon after reading the complaint, B. received a TikTok from his sister. The video referenced an outdated Chi Phi roster—a list of its members’ names and pictures—and presented the names as the men in the Snapchat group. B. saw his own name on the list, alongside the names of other men who had graduated before the time of the alleged rape. The TikTok said: “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the ‘brothers of Chi Phi.’ ” When B. opened the video, it had half a million views. He remembers the number eventually climbing to almost two million.
At that point, he said, it was as if “a bomb went off.” Within a day, his employer started receiving anonymous messages attempting to connect him to the case. B., who told me he works in a field where he relies on building a trusted reputation with his clients, was placed on paid leave by his employer. Although the company knew that B. had graduated before the alleged rape, they still wanted him to prove that he had never been in the group chat. But, short of subpoena power to get records from Snapchat, a power he didn’t have, B. couldn’t figure out a way to do so.
By then, he had learned that his name wasn’t just in the TikTok his sister had sent—it was being shared all over X, Threads, and Instagram. At the same time, a website called CornellSeven.com appeared with a similar list that was soon placed under the heading “Chi Phi Actives Snapchat Group.” The website, built by a man named Aaron Faulk, listed B.’s name, home town, major, employer, and current place of residence. At one point, the top of the page described the list as being “verified.” (That word has since been removed.) When I reached him this week, over e-mail, Faulk said he was a thirty-six-year-old man who started the website because he has a daughter and “was shocked and disgusted by what Jane Doe alleged happened to her.” Faulk said that, by the time he published his website, the list of fifty-seven names was already being shared “extremely widely” on social media by accounts with larger followings than his own. He repeatedly stressed to me that he was not responsible for the list because he did not “originate” it. In a post on Threads, he said that, if handed a cease-and-desist, he’d “print it & burn it on livestream.” (He later told me this was a joke.) B. soon hired a lawyer, a defamation attorney named Adam Ford, who did send Faulk a cease-and-desist letter. Faulk responded by removing B.’s name from the “Actives” roster. In the days since, Ford has contacted Faulk about ten other Cornell graduates on the website who were never in the Snapchat group. In response, their names have been removed. Ford has thought about the idea of issuing a public statement of some kind, but his clients didn’t want their names in the press—“then you’re forever connected to the story, because you’re not connected,” he said.
Early on, B. deactivated his social media accounts, to stop strangers from reaching him. But he quickly realized that if they “couldn’t get to me, they just tried to get to anyone adjacent to me. It spread all the way out.” He remembers people leaving comments on his mom’s Facebook account, saying, “You know you raised a rapist, right?” Then they went to his mom’s friends’ pages and left comments there: “You know she raised a rapist, right?” B. started having panic attacks and stopped sleeping. He lost his appetite, something he’d never experienced, even in past episodes of depression. He has now been on leave for eleven days. B. had plans to apply to graduate school—either to study public policy or to get his J.D. He has now placed those plans on hold indefinitely. “Who’s to say how many people scrolled through that list quickly, saw my name, and even if this gets a public correction in the media—which I’m not sure it ever will—how many people will even see it?” B said. “How many people have seen my name and think of me as someone who I’m not?”
T., the other Cornell graduate, is also struggling. He described himself as a private person, with hardly any digital footprint, who works for his family’s business and feels a responsibility to maintain its good name. He, too, was falsely identified as a member of the Snapchat “Chi Phi Actives” group chat at the time of the alleged assault, even though he had graduated in 2022. T. described feelings of helplessness and shame through the ordeal. He said he had a therapist who had been helping him, but he had initially been nervous to tell her. He feared she might be “disgusted” with even the fact of his distant non-involvement. “I’m generally prone to having a very guilty conscience,” he explained. “The only reason why I haven’t completely shut down is that I know that I had absolutely nothing to do with this.” Still, at the height of the messages he was receiving, he said, “I was being so inundated—I didn’t trust myself—I had to go look at my Snapchat again. And, of course, I was not part of that group.” When we met at his attorney’s office in Manhattan, earlier this week, his hands shook as he spoke.
A few months after she made her statement to Cornell Police, Jane Doe left campus. For a time earlier this year, according to Giuffra, she tried to make “a go of it” in New York City—“to get a new phase going,” he said—but that didn’t work out. She soon returned home to be with her family.
When I asked Giuffra about what his client is like, outside of this lawsuit, he described a funny, smart young woman who is trying her best to imagine what her future will be now. She has surrounded herself with “tough” people who “aren’t afraid to protect her.” She has a supportive family and a therapist. And she has dealt with the intense scrutiny of the case, Giuffra said, largely through humor. This was something that Giuffra, who described himself as more “stern” in nature, took some time to understand. Finally, Jane Doe explained it this way: “If I dealt with it the way you would expect me to deal with it, I wouldn’t get out of bed in the morning.”
As we sat in his office, Giuffra pulled out his phone and started playing a recording of a threatening phone call he’d received from the man with the deep, throaty voice who’d called Jane Doe three days before.“Why don’t you come see me, big boy?” Giuffra can be heard saying in the recording. “I’m 6'3".” A few minutes later, his paralegal knocked on the door and reminded him that he had agreed to another interview—this one, with Univision. Giuffra picked up his phone and checked his messages. In the time that we’d been talking, he’d received another thirty-one texts.
“This is my life lately,” Giuffra said as he adjusted his Zoom background.
“How is Jane?” the TV news anchor asked when she came on the screen.
“She’s not doing great,” Giuffra replied.
As he spoke, more posts were accumulating online, guided by an ever-churning machine of algorithms, chatbots, and people chasing clicks. The list of fifty-seven names was still out there, gaining views. Jane Doe was still at home, in her “bunker,” fielding more threatening messages and seeing her name posted online. ♦