The woman known as Jane Doe in the Cornell gang-rape case is receiving threats from people who have discovered her identity and is terrified for her safety, according to her attorney, Thomas Giuffra. Doe was also the victim of a swatting episode this week, a form of harassment where someone places a false call to emergency services with the goal of sending armed officers to the victim’s location.
Swatting incident and threats
Giuffra told CNN that officers pointed weapons at Doe’s family after a fake tip about someone “killing people in the house” on Tuesday evening. “If you had a trigger-happy cop, or somebody had done the wrong thing, somebody could have ended up dead,” Giuffra said.
Nobody ended up dead on that particular occasion, but Doe’s character is systematically being assassinated. “What attracts women to those parties – late at night, like Jane Doe – to walk alone to a fraternity house and take her chances?” Caitlin Flanagan tut-tutted in the Free Press. “What she’s really looking for is a man. And she has no idea how to find a good one.” The underlying message here? She should have known better than to go to a frat party. Silly little girl: she was asking for it.
Commentary and backlash
Rightwing commentator Megyn Kelly, who has been vocal about her experience of sexual harassment at Fox News and should really know better, went even further and attacked Doe’s looks. “No one will even consider the possibility that this woman made a decision to get it on with four men total, not seven, and enjoyed it because, I’m just going to be honest, she’s not the most attractive gal,” Kelly said on a recent episode of her podcast. “She’s extremely beefy in like her arms and her legs. She has a whole video online talking about her cankles. And she possibly enjoyed being admired. This is how women make these mistakes.”
It should go without saying that being raped is not a “mistake”. It should go without saying that a woman should be able to go to a party and have a drink and walk home at night and wear whatever she likes without it being an invitation for men to rape her. And yet it seems that women have to keep saying all this over and over again.
Pattern of victim blaming
Every time a story about a woman being raped becomes headline news, the same pattern repeats without fail. People accuse the woman of asking for it. They question her motives; they scrutinize her looks; they attack her character. And without fail, she is punished for speaking up.
It happened to Christine Blasey Ford when she accused Brett Kavanaugh, then a supreme court nominee, of assaulting her when they were both teenagers in the 1980s. Ford and her family reportedly had to flee their home because of threats and harassment. According to her lawyers, her email was hacked and she was impersonated online. Her entire life was turned upside down. Meanwhile, Kavanaugh was praised by Donald Trump and now has a lifetime appointment on the supreme court.
It happened with E Jean Carroll, who accused Trump of sexually assaulting her back in 1996. Trump said Carroll was not his “type” and “totally lying”. His lawyer asked Carroll why she didn’t scream during the alleged attack and why she didn’t go to the police at the time. Carroll’s life was upended and the Trump administration opened a criminal investigation into her.
