There is a phrase spreading across the internet right now: I am Jane Doe. Women are saying it. Men are saying it. Survivors are saying it. People who have never experienced sexual violence themselves but understand exactly what is at stake are saying it too. They are not claiming to be the young woman at the center of the Cornell 7 case. They are trying to make her harder to find, and perhaps that tells us almost everything we need to know about the world survivors are still expected to navigate.

In September 2026, a former Cornell University student identified publicly only as Jane Doe filed a civil lawsuit alleging that seven members of the Chi Phi fraternity sexually assaulted her during the night of October 19 into October 20, 2024. She was 20 years old at the time. Her complaint alleges that she was intoxicated, pressured into using ketamine, supplied additional alcohol and marijuana, and sexually assaulted over the course of several hours. The lawsuit further alleges that during the night, a message was sent to a Snapchat group called “Chi Phi Actives” advertising sexual access to her, after which additional fraternity members entered the room.

Those allegations have not yet been decided by a criminal court, and that distinction matters. Several of the men named in the lawsuit have denied wrongdoing, and no criminal convictions have been entered. But something else matters too: Jane Doe did report what happened. She went to Cornell University Police in November 2024 and told investigators that she believed she had been raped. Records later reported by multiple news organizations showed that she described coercion, refusal, intoxication, and sexual acts she said she did not consent to.

Yet no criminal charges were filed in 2024. Now, two years later, the criminal investigation has been reopened, a senior prosecutor with sex-crimes experience has been assigned, and the case is being prepared for presentation to a grand jury.

Think about what that means. She reported. She spoke. She gave a statement. She told police she believed she had been raped. And two years later, we are still debating whether she said it correctly enough, remembered it clearly enough, resisted visibly enough, understood what happened quickly enough, or used precisely the right words at precisely the right moment.

That is one of the cruelest traps surrounding sexual violence. We tell survivors, “Why didn’t you report?” Then, when they report, we ask why they waited. If they remember everything, we scrutinize every detail. If trauma leaves gaps in their memory, we scrutinize the gaps. If they cry, they are emotional. If they don’t cry, they don’t seem traumatized enough. If they initially describe an encounter differently before they fully understand what happened to them, that evolution itself can be treated as evidence against them. And then society wonders why so many people never walk into a police station at all.

The statistics answer that question more clearly than any argument can. According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, only 24 percent of rape and sexual-assault victimizations were reported to police in 2024. In other words, roughly three out of every four were not reported to law enforcement. The CDC estimates that approximately one in five adult women in the United States has experienced completed or attempted rape during her lifetime.

Those aren’t tiny numbers hidden somewhere in the statistical margins. Those are classrooms, dormitories, friend groups, families, coworkers, neighbors, sisters, daughters, mothers, and friends. Those are women you know.

I know because I am one of them.

I was sexually assaulted in different ways by different men from the time I was eight years old until I was twenty-two, and I never reported any of them. Not one. That does not mean they did not happen. It means that, for all those years, reporting felt harder than carrying it quietly, and there are millions of survivors who understand exactly what that sentence means.

Sometimes you are afraid nobody will believe you. Sometimes you are afraid they will believe you and then everyone will know. Sometimes you blame yourself. Sometimes you don’t yet have language for what happened. Sometimes the person who hurt you is someone you trusted. Sometimes you fear retaliation. Sometimes you don’t want your entire identity reduced to the worst thing somebody else did to you. Sometimes survival looks nothing like the tidy version people expect.

That is why the public treatment of Jane Doe matters almost as much as the case itself. The fraternity connected to the allegations had 57 active members during the fall 2024 semester. The Snapchat group referenced in the lawsuit was called “Chi Phi Actives,” and screenshots included in the complaint show responses to the message allegedly advertising sexual access to Jane Doe. But an important distinction has gotten lost online: there is currently no public evidence proving that all 57 active members belonged to that Snapchat group, that all 57 saw those messages, or that all 57 knew what was happening upstairs.

We do not need to exaggerate what we know because what has been documented is disturbing enough. People didrespond. Messages reported from that chat treated access to a young woman’s body like entertainment, like something to be joked about, traded, discussed, and passed around.

There is an important lesson there that extends far beyond Cornell. Sexual violence does not survive only because of perpetrators. It survives in environments where humiliation becomes entertainment, where people laugh instead of intervene, where someone sees something frightening and decides it is none of their business, and where belonging to the group becomes more important than protecting another human being.

And now, after Jane Doe has finally brought her case into public view, another threat has emerged. Journalist Michael Tracey publicly solicited information that could reveal Jane Doe’s identity and said he would publish her name and identifying information if someone provided it to him. Those posts triggered widespread backlash and helped ignite the online effort now using phrases including #IAmJaneDoe and #WeAreAllJaneDoe.

There is something deeply revealing about that sequence. A woman says she was sexually assaulted, her name is protected, and someone decides that the information the public is missing is not another piece of evidence, another institutional record, another explanation for why the original investigation failed to produce charges, or another examination of campus sexual violence. It is her name.

Why?

What would knowing her name contribute to understanding whether these allegations are true? What would publishing her photograph accomplish? What public interest requires strangers to know where she lives, where she works, what her social-media accounts are, who her family members are, or what she looks like?

Her name does not make the evidence stronger. Her face does not make the investigation more complete. Her identity does not answer the questions raised by the lawsuit. It simply makes her accessible: accessible to harassment, accessible to strangers, accessible to people who have already decided she is lying, and accessible to people determined to punish a woman for speaking publicly about sexual violence.

That is precisely why protecting the identity of sexual-assault survivors matters. She should not have to surrender the rest of her privacy simply because she sought accountability.

And that brings us back to those four words spreading across social media: I am Jane Doe.

The idea is simple. If someone is hunting for Jane Doe, give them thousands of Jane Does. Fill the search results with women saying it, men saying it, survivors saying it, and allies saying it. Fill them until a search for one frightened young woman’s identity leads instead to an enormous wall of people standing shoulder to shoulder saying:

You do not get her.

For some of us, that solidarity carries another layer too. Those of us who practice beneath the shadow of dark goddesses such as Hecate, Lilith, and the Morrigan know the language of the dark feminine intimately. We know the stories of women who stand at thresholds, women who refuse subjugation, women associated with sovereignty, rage, transformation, crossroads, battle, and the kind of power that grows teeth when something sacred has been violated.

There is a place for that rage. There is a place for anger that does not apologize for existing, but rage does not have to become destruction. It can become protection. It can become advocacy. It can become the friend who sits beside another survivor while she tells her story. It can become the person who says, I believe you. It can become someone correcting misinformation instead of spreading it. It can become donations to rape-crisis organizations, volunteering, calling out rape culture when it appears in our communities, demanding better institutional responses, educating our sons and daughters about consent, and refusing to treat another person’s trauma as gossip.

And, if you are able, it can become your own voice. Tell your story if telling it helps you. Speak if speaking makes you feel powerful. Stand beside someone else if you are not ready to speak for yourself. Share another survivor’s words. Share resources. Share the hashtag. Use the anger. Use the grief. Use the part of you that knows something is profoundly wrong with a culture that asks survivors to bleed publicly before it agrees they might have been hurt. Channel it into helping.

Because the dark feminine is not simply rage for rage’s sake. It is the refusal to remain powerless.

But no survivor owes the world their story in order to participate. Silence can be sacred too. Privacy can be sacred. Choosing not to tell anyone can be an act of self-preservation, and nobody should turn “speak out” into another demand placed upon survivors. Those who can speak can create cover for those who cannot. Those who can stand publicly can stand in front of those who need to remain hidden.

That is what I am Jane Doe can mean.

There is something especially powerful about survivors joining that wall because many of us know exactly why someone might want to disappear after telling the truth about what happened to them. I never reported what happened to me between the ages of eight and twenty-two. Jane Doe did. Neither choice determines whether what happened to a survivor was real.

Reporting is not the price someone pays to qualify as a victim. Immediate reporting is not the price. Perfect memory is not the price. Perfect behavior before an assault is not the price. Sobriety is not the price. Being able to explain trauma while you are still standing inside of it is not the price, and anonymity should never be treated as evidence of dishonesty.

Sometimes anonymity is simply survival.

The Cornell case remains unresolved in court. Jane Doe’s allegations deserve to be investigated thoroughly. The accused are entitled to the legal process afforded to them. Evidence should be examined, disputed claims should be tested, and a grand jury should be allowed to hear the case. But none of that requires sacrificing Jane Doe’s identity to the internet.

We can demand due process without demanding her name. We can examine evidence without hunting for her face. We can discuss inconsistencies without pretending trauma follows a screenplay. We can acknowledge what has not yet been legally established while still understanding why sexual-assault survivors so often hesitate to come forward. And perhaps most importantly, when someone tells us something terrible happened to them, our first instinct does not have to be figuring out how to tear them apart.

Sometimes we can simply listen, stand beside them, and turn fury into protection. Sometimes we can make enough noise that the person trying to expose one woman discovers thousands standing in the way.

So today, for every survivor who reported and wasn’t believed, for every survivor who never reported, for every child who didn’t have the words, for every adult who spent years calling an assault a “bad experience” because admitting what really happened was too painful, and for the young woman at Cornell who deserves the right to decide when, whether, and how the world learns her name:

I am Jane Doe. And if protecting her requires thousands of us to become Jane Doe too, then we are all Jane Doe.

Much love and many blessings,
Mrs. B