i am jane doe

Today I changed my Facebook profile picture.

It says:

I AM JANE DOE.

No, I am not the young woman at the centre of the Cornell 7 case.

That is precisely the point.

Jane Doe is the name used to protect the identity of a woman who has alleged that she was sexually assaulted by seven men associated with Cornell University's Chi Phi fraternity in 2024.

She has now filed a civil lawsuit. The case has received enormous public attention, and the criminal investigation has been reopened.

And now, apparently, some people are trying to expose who she is.

Why?

Why is there such an urge to find her photograph, her name, her social-media accounts, her history?

Why do we sometimes treat the identity of the person making an allegation as something the public is entitled to possess?

I don't need to know her name.

I don't need to see her face.

I don't need to know where she lives, who her family is, what she wore, what she drank, what she remembers perfectly or imperfectly, or what she did before or after that night.

Those details belong to her.

There are legitimate questions about the case that deserve investigation. There are competing accounts. There are legal proceedings. The prosecutor has explained why charges were not initially pursued, while saying the investigation is now being reopened in light of the newer information. The accused men have not been convicted of crimes. Those facts matter.

But protecting Jane Doe's identity does not require deciding the entire case.

It simply requires recognizing that a person's privacy should not become collateral damage in a public controversy.

And there is something else happening here that bothers me.

When people start hunting for a woman's identity after she has deliberately used a pseudonym, the conversation can shift away from what happened and toward who she is.

Then we start dissecting her.

Her photographs.

Her relationships.

Her sexuality.

Her choices.

Her past.

Her credibility.

And suddenly the woman herself becomes the spectacle.

No.

I don't want to participate in that.

So I put I AM JANE DOE on my profile.

Not because I am claiming to be her.

Because I am saying:

You don't get to expose her simply because you're curious.

You don't get to turn her identity into internet entertainment.

You don't get to make a woman prove her worthiness of privacy before granting it to her.

Let the investigators investigate.

Let the courts examine the evidence.

Let the accused have due process.

Let the facts emerge.

But leave Jane Doe's identity alone.

Maybe that's what I AM JANE DOE really means.

It means that somewhere in this enormous internet crowd, there are people willing to say:

You don't have to stand alone.

We don't need your name to understand that you deserve privacy.

We don't need your face to know that you are a human being.

And if protecting her anonymity means a few of us temporarily say,

I AM JANE DOE,

then perhaps that makes her a little harder to find.

And maybe that's the whole point.