Content warning: This story is about campus sexual violence and smear tactics against victims. Here are some relevant U.S. national hotlines for those who may be facing something similar.

Like many others, I spent last week consumed by the reaction to a civil lawsuit alleging gang rape by seven fraternity men at Cornell University. The allegations in the suit and the institutional failure to hold the accused men accountable from the beginning are devastating enough, but what has infuriated me the most are the efforts to undermine the credibility of the anonymous Jane Doe before the civil trial even begins.

The viscerally appalling nature of this suit and its supporting evidence—the image of a Snapchat message sent to the entire Chi Phi Fraternity chapter advertising “free pussy,” Cornell reportedly letting the accused men write essays to mitigate their conduct violations, the detail about the victim being commanded to snort ketamine off one man’s erect penis during an alleged assault that lasted for hours—have prompted two kinds of reactions. Initially, a tidal wave of support for Jane Doe, including the now-viral hashtag “I Am Jane Doe,” which has operated as a spiritual successor to #MeToo.

Then, like always, the blowback arrived. Cornell’s student paper and the lawsuit had identified the seven fraternity brothers, and their names and faces were soon blasted and shamed across social media. One of them, Diego Sarabia, reportedly lost his job at Wells Fargo following the publicity. And once men start to face consequences for sexual violence, no matter how small, that’s typically when the second kind of reaction kicks in: victim-blaming and rape denial.

We’ve seen it with every case I’ve covered at Spitfire News, from the ones involving A-list celebrities to the ones involving everyday survivors from all walks of life. When their stories gain traction, many of the same commenters rear their heads to repeat the tired propaganda of the patriarchy.

Disgraced broadcaster Megyn Kelly is a regular at this. On her SiriusXM show, Kelly suggested that Jane Doe enjoyed being raped by multiple men because she wasn’t attractive enough to solicit that kind of male attention otherwise. Journalist and “Epstein skeptic” Michael Tracey published what he claimed was Jane Doe’s real name, then took down his now-disputed post with unreliable sourcing. (Numerous women have been identified online as the real anonymous victim, meaning that most of them are not and are being harassed by attempted doxxers.) Noxious “Red Scare” podcasters Dasha Nekrasova and Anna Khachiyan also mocked Jane Doe’s appearance and claimed that women’s reports about being sexually harassed and assaulted are to cover up their own attraction to their perpetrators. The View host Sunny Hostin jumped in to clarify that the “boys” couldn’t be held accountable under New York law, only to later backtrack and say she was just trying to criticize the law itself (which I’ll get into more later).

This is the part of the cycle that always makes me the most upset. It is infuriating to watch new and often false narratives get constructed in real time to call a victim a liar, a pernicious form of DARVO where thoroughly discredited pundits and arguments are successfully leveraged against the integrity of someone who didn’t do anything wrong. The reputation that suffers is the one belonging to the person who was harmed, who couldn’t even initially remember what happened to her because she was so incapacitated, while the reputations of people who maliciously smear her or willfully believe those smears remain relatively intact.

And notice how many of the prominent detractors are women? They represent a tiny minority—most of Jane Doe’s vocal supporters are women, and women are disproportionately at risk of being victimized on college campuses—but they play an important role in the cycle. Just like with the #MeToo movement, women who falsely proclaim that feminist action against rape and abuse goes “too far” are given massive media platforms. Just like with Depp v. Heard, women are among the social media front lines of claiming men are the real victims of their violence against women. Enablers may feel that women have greater leeway to attack other women’s appearances, claim victims were attracted to their perpetrators, and insist that “imperfect” victims (read: all victims) are the reason more victims aren’t believed. Of course, that’s pure projection, but these women may receive some benefit from protecting the patriarchal status quo: a lucrative media career, validation from the worst people on the internet, and the illusion of being shielded from male violence. (Megyn Kelly of all people should know that isn’t true, but she’s also making the most money out of everyone mentioned here by far.)

But of course, the root cause of this internalized-turned-weaponized misogyny is male violence. An entire fraternity stood by in 2024 as Jane Doe was plied with alcohol and ketamine, objectified in a group chat, and raped for hours. Then, as she began to unravel what had happened to her over the following days and weeks, they concocted a lie. In a recorded phone call, Matthew Ingalls (who was expelled from Cornell and has since fled to Dubai) told Jane Doe that other men entered the room she was naked in because the frat party was too crowded; he neglected to mention that her incapacitated body had been advertised to dozens of men over Snapchat. Ingalls himself wrote “you can walk in and whip it out” in the messages obtained in the complaint. Ingalls later told campus police that he was the one too intoxicated to consent to sex that night. In another recorded phone call, Winston Lee explicitly denied the existence of messages inviting other men to the room. Yet Jane Doe’s honesty is being called into question, not theirs?

In fact, the seven accused men have each provided wildly different accounts of that night, but their credibility has not been undermined in the way Jane Doe’s has. The people smearing her are excellent at distorting the truth, but regardless of what happens in the court system or on social media, she deserves our solidarity and support. She deserves to be believed.

As I’ve already gone over, there are a few routine elements of the smear campaign playbook being leveraged against Jane Doe. First, the efforts to expose her identity, so that frivolous details like her appearance can be used against her. Second, the victim-blaming, which ranges from saying that she consented to what happened simply by showing up to a frat house to saying she reported the crime because she didn’t want to be accused of promiscuity. Third, DARVO (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender), with some of the men claiming she took advantage of them.

But what has happened in the case so far only supports what Jane Doe is alleging in her complaint. Cornell investigated the incident and found cause to expel two of the seven men, while leveling varying punishments (including suspension, a campus ban, and those aforementioned essays) against the other five. The fact that the university took punitive action against them at all, even going as far as expulsion, is extremely rare. Less than 1 percent of total Title IX reports and only 13% of Title IX investigations at Cornell result in an accused perpetrator getting expelled. This case involved at least 12 hearings that Jane Doe had to participate in over the course of less than a month in May 2025. The Chi Phi chapter was also closed in 2024 and remains barred from Cornell’s campus.

The fact that Cornell took any action against these fraternity brothers, even if it feels like the bare minimum or less, still shows there was greater than sufficient evidence to conclude that Jane Doe was assaulted by them. And it means that the campaign to name and shame them online isn’t a baseless “witch hunt” like many commenters have suggested. Cornell refuses to release more details about the Title IX investigation, citing federal privacy laws, but the outcome should undergird Jane Doe’s case—not undermine it.

However, when victims get any kind of win, their detractors simply shift the goalposts, which is what we’ve seen happen here. They’ve turned their attention to the criminal investigation, or lack thereof, that followed Jane Doe reporting her rape to the Cornell campus police. What may end up being the most consequential smear against Jane Doe originated from Matthew Van Houten, the very District Attorney tasked with prosecuting rapists in Cornell’s jurisdiction. So far, he has spent more time scrutinizing Jane Doe’s conduct instead of the students who violated her.

In an unusual 9-page statement about why his office didn’t originally pursue charges, Van Houten falsely claimed that Jane Doe originally described what happened that night as “voluntary, conscious, and consensual.” He even bolded those words for effect. But that’s not what Jane Doe said. While many of her critics point to a signed statement issued to the DA’s office that doesn’t include the word “rape,” Jane Doe didn’t write that statement—the campus police did. And they chose to omit the rape allegations she made from the very beginning.

When he faced rightful criticism, Van Houten chose to blame Jane Doe and concocted a false narrative that she changed her story. But she was always clear and consistent. Law enforcement officials were the ones who lied by omission about what happened that night, erasing critical details and ensuring that justice was not served. Now Van Houten’s words are being used against Jane Doe by mainstream media outlets and prominent pundits to smear her as a liar instead. I wish I could say this was surprising, but it’s par for the course. Police and attorneys regularly use their power to ignore, mistreat, smear, blame, charge, and abuse victims of gender-based violence—especially when they feel like victims are embarrassing them. This is why I call it the injustice system and it’s a big part of why it’s so rare to secure convictions against rapists and abusers. It’s not the fault of victims, but too often that becomes the lie at the heart of the story.

Sociologist Nicole Bedera is an expert in campus sexual violence and the Title IX system. I’ve written and spoken about her book “On The Wrong Side: How Universities Protect Perpetrators and Betray Survivors of Sexual Violence” many times. And when Bedera first heard the narrative that Jane Doe’s story had “inconsistencies,” she immediately suspected that those inconsistencies were the fault of authorities, not the survivor—a suspicion that was soon borne out in reporting from The New York Times. This is something Bedera has seen play out over and over again.

“I just saw so many examples in my time in the field where the story from the survivor did not change, and the thing that was changing, and then it became a game of telephone and the story got more and more distorted, was administrators sharing the information with each other,” Bedera told me. “For a student to report, they have to feel in their gut that something was reportable. Why would you go to Title IX and say ‘I don’t think anything happened to me?’ Why would you go to the police and say ‘I don’t think anything happened to me?’”

Another aspect in the case that has been distorted is that Jane Doe initially consented to sex with two of the men, but not the series of sexual encounters that unfolded as a result of the Snapchat being sent out—roughly “90 percent” of what happened, as she told campus police. This shouldn’t be hard to understand. Consent can be revoked at any time, and of course consenting to sex with two people doesn’t mean you consent to sex with an entire fraternity. Additionally, Jane Doe was becoming increasingly intoxicated by disorienting substances like ketamine over the course of the night. But authorities including Van Houten are pretending that giving consent at any point diminishes nonconsensual acts after the fact. It doesn’t bode well for the newly reopened case moving forward.

“We don’t hold perpetrators to the same standard. We make excuses for them when there are inconsistencies in their stories, as opposed to holding them up like a smoking gun,” Bedera says. “All the discrepancies in their stories should be damning. It should be something that helps us figure out what happened, helps us figure out who’s lying. It should hurt their credibility. And instead, it’s like they put seven shields in front of each other as a group […] which is why men participate in gang rapes. There is this sense of solidarity and that they will protect each other and this closing of ranks.”

Bedera has given dozens of interviews to journalists about Jane Doe’s case, but an experience she had last week with USA Today is an unsettling distillation of how media bias against survivors and advocates plays out. After doing two different interviews with two different USA Today journalists, Bedera told me that she went searching for the articles and discovered her own quotes popping up in USA Today stories written by journalists she had never spoken to. Some of those stories pushed the false narrative that Jane Doe was “inconsistent” in her reporting. When Bedera reached out to USA Today to request a retraction or at least a correction, an editor told her that her interviews were considered “proprietary” and could therefore be used in whatever way the publication saw fit.

Bedera was shocked and dismayed to see her quotes appearing out-of-context in stories that spread disinformation about a victim. She worried about how it could impact survivors’ perception of her. And it understandably made her never want to speak to USA Today again. The outlet and the editor who spoke to Bedera didn’t respond to my request for comment.

When I heard this had happened to Bedera, I too was dismayed and furious on her behalf. Bedera’s research is groundbreaking and her perspective is so necessary. To see it twisted in service of victim-blaming by such a prominent outlet is devastating. In my opinion, this is unethical for a few reasons—sensitive source interviews shouldn’t be shared around the newsroom and republished in varying pieces without consulting with the source first. And outlets in general should refrain from passing judgment on how a victim conducted herself before getting all the facts. USA Today wasn’t the only newsroom to get this wrong, and the consequences for Jane Doe and all survivors can be enormous.

“I think a lot of journalistic institutions and institutions more broadly believe that building credibility in the way they cover and talk about sexual violence is by believing anything a perpetrator says, believing anything an institution says, including platforming disinformation,” Bedera told me. “There’s this myth that everyone takes the survivor’s side, so to be balanced and be fair you have to overcompensate and give perpetrators and betraying institutions more credibility than they deserve.”

In a similar sense, many journalists and commenters have stressed in their reporting on this case that Jane Doe’s text messages in the days following the alleged assault included her concerns about the way gossip about it was being disseminated across campus. She also texted some of the alleged perpetrators in friendly and/or noncombative ways and was upset when she was disinvited from a party. But none of this is unusual in how survivors tend to process and come to terms with being assaulted. Most victims who are violated by friends and people they trusted don’t immediately rush to accuse them or recognize what happened as violence. Realizing that they are facing social consequences and scrutiny as a result of it is a natural and upsetting way to understand you were taken advantage of.

If media figures harbored less of a bias toward victims, then more of the reporting would contextualize how victims typically respond to sexual violence and work to destigmatize the process of coming to terms with being raped. It certainly would not traffic in victim-blaming rhetoric, disinformation about victims, and distortions of expert perspectives like Bedera’s.

It is extremely hard to secure a rape conviction, and that’s not the fault of victims. In New York, there’s a legal loophole in place that protects perpetrators if their victims had willingly become intoxicated before they were assaulted. Even if you were inebriated past the point of being able to consent, in New York, that isn’t necessarily a crime. This is something anti-rape activists have been fighting to change for years.

But put aside the idea that a victim needs to secure a conviction or a legal win at all to be supported and treated with compassion. Not only do we know that the majority of violent crime victims never report it, but we can also see the institutional barriers to justice demonstrated clearly in Jane Doe’s case. The campus police failed her. The district attorney’s office failed her. Cornell University failed her. Her sorority failed her. And now the mainstream media and social media are failing her, too.

Even if Jane Doe is to succeed in her case, and I hope that she does, the “justice” you get from the system in the best-case scenario is slim compared to the injustices suffered along the way. Just ask the author Chanel Miller. Her 2015 sexual assault case involving Stanford University fraternity member Brock Turner (who now, according to the social media grapevines, goes by his middle name Allen in the Dayton, Ohio area) ended with a felony conviction on three counts, including sexual penetration of an unconscious person and assault with intent to commit rape. Turner served just three months in jail.

Here is what Miller wrote in her 2019 memoir Know My Name about justice:

When we think about justice, we need to look past the court system and the punitive measures in place. Not only do they routinely fail victims, but as Bedera told me, rates of sexual violence on campus have only gotten worse in recent years, including in Cornell’s own data.

We need to think about prevention and where these violations typically occur. The movement to abolish male-only fraternities is one way forward, even if people don’t want to hear it. We know that these frats are hotbeds of sexual violence and that education alone isn’t enough.

We also need to think about how we support victims like Jane Doe. For me, that starts with unpacking and debunking the smear campaign against her, but it doesn’t end there. We need to fight for more protections for survivors, for compassion and empathy, and for better media standards around survivor storytelling. We need to fight for not just Jane Doe, but every person who relates to her story.