WASHINGTON: 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 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.

Published in Dawn, October 4th, 2026