Thomas Giuffra, the lawyer for a former Cornell University student who says she was raped by fraternity members in October 2024, told BBC Newshour that he and his client have both received death threats since the case became public. Giuffra had earlier said on 4 October that his client had received multiple threats warning her to drop her civil lawsuit or face harm, and that he had been threatened as well.
Giuffra said a threat had reached him on the morning of 4 October. He said people trying to unmask his client had also targeted at least three women wrongly identified as her, and that those women had been threatened too. New York law allows plaintiffs in sexual assault cases to sue under a pseudonym, and his client has become distressed, at attempts by a network of online men organised in dox attempts to find and publish her name. He has described those attempts as an effort to shame her.
He also said more than seven fraternity members may have been involved, and that the district attorney failed in 2024 to subpoena evidence he considers crucial. The Tompkins County district attorney's office did not review additional witness statements and anonymous tips before deciding against charges.
The lawsuit
The woman, identified in court papers as Jane Doe, filed the lawsuit on 16 September 2026 against Cornell, the Chi Phi fraternity, seven of its former members and others. She says she was pressured to take ketamine and then sexually assaulted by several men over a period of hours at the Chi Phi house in Ithaca, New York, on the night of 19 October 2024. She was 20 at the time. The complaint also cites messages in a fraternity Snapchat group which, she says, invited other members into the room where she lay.
Seven men are named as defendants. In interviews during Cornell's administrative investigation over the winter of 2024, all seven denied wrongdoing and four said they had sexual contact with the woman that was consensual. Lawyers for at least three of the men have issued statements denying criminal wrongdoing; one said his client had posted an immature comment on Snapchat and had done nothing else. None of the seven has been charged with a crime.
The prosecutor's decision
Matthew Van Houten, the Tompkins County district attorney, declined to bring charges in 2024. He said the sworn statement Doe gave Cornell police in November 2024 described her drug use and sexual conduct as "voluntary, conscious and consensual" and did not say that sex continued after she withdrew consent. He said his office had not reviewed a photograph of the Snapchat messages and that they would not have changed his decision. Van Houten reopened the investigation in late September and said he intended to put the case before a grand jury with Doe's cooperation.
Giuffra disputed the prosecutor's account. He said transcripts from Cornell's confidential Title IX investigation record his client telling a Cornell police officer she was completely certain she had been raped, and said she had been traumatised and unable to function when she gave the earlier statement. Van Houten said his office should have been informed of that remark if it was accurate.
Governor Kathy Hochul criticised Cornell police for leaving the remark out of the material passed to prosecutors and appointed New York Attorney General Letitia James as special prosecutor to oversee the reopened case. Cornell said its police had shared the investigative material with the district attorney's office in November 2024.
Cornell's response
Cornell president Michael Kotlikoff told student government on 29 September that two of the accused men were expelled and two were suspended for at least two semesters. Doe's complaint says some of the men were allowed to reduce their penalties by writing essays, which Cornell denies. The university placed the fraternity's Xi chapter under temporary suspension on 8 November 2024 and the chapter remains barred from campus. Trey Robb, interim executive director of the national Chi Phi organisation, said the Cornell chapter voted to dismiss the men three days after the woman spoke to police. Kotlikoff said on 3 October that the university's board of trustees would announce an independent review of its handling of the case.
The Cornell seven
Matthew Ingalls and Jonathan Newell were found responsible for sexual assault by a Cornell disciplinary panel and expelled. Jane Doe says Ingalls invited her to the fraternity house for a threesome and gave her alcohol and ketamine. She says Newell manipulated her into taking ketamine, left bruises on her body and sent the Snapchat message that brought other men into the room. The panel found Ingalls willing to "manipulate, exploit and endanger" her.
Winston Lee, who she says snorted ketamine off her body and forced oral sex on her, received a two-year suspension, disciplinary probation, a no-contact order, a sexual harassment course and reflection papers. Gillio Lopes, who she says had sex with her without consent, was suspended for three semesters on similar terms. Diego Sarabia, who she says insulted her and then kissed her without consent, had already graduated and was banned from campus for three years. Scott Norris and Scott Kretzschmar, who she says came into the room where she lay undressed after Newell's message, received no-contact orders, training and reflection papers. Cornell found Kretzschmar responsible for attempted sexual exploitation. The university says published accounts of the individual punishments are inaccurate.
All seven denied wrongdoing in Cornell's investigation. Lee and Lopes told investigators that she started sexual contact without asking for their consent, and Lee said she told him they were all consenting adults. A third man said he considered himself the victim because she performed oral sex on him while he was too incapacitated to consent. Norris said he took Newell's message for crude humour, stayed about five minutes and neither took drugs nor had sex. Kretzschmar said he checked that she was all right.
Jeremy Saland, Kretzschmar's lawyer, said his client took part in a lewd group chat and did nothing else, and was never accused of rape or found responsible for it. Norris said through his lawyer that he briefly entered the room and joined the Snapchat chat, and that Cornell did not find him responsible for sexual activity or drug use. Kretzschmar comes from Casco Township in St Clair County, Michigan, where he played high school football for Marine City. Norris comes from Canandaigua, New York.
Trump said he felt badly for the seven men. The Daily Wire ran their accounts of the night under a headline telling readers they were being lied to about the case, and wrote that the men had been doxxed online and smeared as rapists. Michael Tracey has taken up their complaints of harassment, and Aidan Thompson wrote that they had a right to face their accuser. A family with no connection to the case was targeted online after being confused with one of the men, the Daily Wire reported.
Toby Morton, a former South Park writer, launched a website on 28 September naming the seven men. He said billboards would follow and that he was coming for the Cornell staff who gave the men a break.
Trump comments
President Donald Trump told reporters as he left the White House for a rally in Alabama that he felt badly for the seven men and called James corrupt. He said anyone James investigates "won't get a fair shake." Trump and James have been in conflict since her civil fraud case against him, in which a judge found in 2024 that he had inflated the value of his assets by billions of dollars.
Trump said in September 2018 that he felt "so badly" for Brett Kavanaugh, his Supreme Court nominee, after Christine Blasey Ford said Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her at a party when they were teenagers. In November 2017 he backed Roy Moore, the Republican Senate candidate in Alabama accused of sexual misconduct with teenage girls, telling reporters that Moore denied it. In November 2024 he picked Pete Hegseth, who had paid a woman who accused him of sexually assaulting her in 2017, as defence secretary and Matt Gaetz as attorney general. Gaetz withdrew. A House Ethics Committee report in December 2024 found that Gaetz had regularly paid women for sex and had sex with a 17-year-old girl. Kavanaugh, Moore, Hegseth and Gaetz have all denied wrongdoing.
A federal jury in Manhattan found in May 2023 that Trump had sexually abused the writer E. Jean Carroll in a department store dressing room in the mid-1990s and had defamed her, and awarded her $5 million. Judge Lewis Kaplan wrote in July 2023 that the verdict meant Trump had raped Carroll as the word is commonly understood, although the jury did not find rape under New York's narrower legal definition. The US Supreme Court declined to hear Trump's appeal on 29 June 2026 and refused to reconsider on 18 August, making the verdict final. A second jury ordered Trump in 2024 to pay Carroll $83.3 million for defamation, a judgment he is asking the Supreme Court to review. Trump denies Carroll's account and has called the case lawfare.
Jeffrey Epstein, who died in a Manhattan jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges, was a friend and Palm Beach neighbour of Trump. Congressional Democrats released in September 2025 a sexually suggestive letter bearing Trump's name and signature from an album compiled for Epstein's 50th birthday in 2003. The White House says the letter is fake, and Trump sued The Wall Street Journal after it reported on the letter in July 2025. Attorney General Pam Bondi told Trump his name appears many times in the Justice Department's Epstein files, which he has resisted releasing in full.
Katie Johnson, the pseudonym used by a woman who sued Trump and Epstein in 2016, said both men sexually abused her at parties at Epstein's New York home in 1994, when she was 13. She was due to speak publicly for the first time at a press conference in Los Angeles on 2 November 2016, six days before the presidential election. Her lawyer, Lisa Bloom, cancelled it that evening, saying her client had received threats that day and was living in fear. Bloom wrote on X at 5.15pm that day that her firm's website and emails had reportedly been hacked and that "Anonymous" claimed responsibility, prominent Anonymous affiliated accounts responded to deny the allegations and pointed at Trump supporter troll and disinformation networks as the culprits. She linked to a post by an X account whose handle begins 0HOUR1, which presented itself as "Anonymous." The same account later launched a pro-Trump "Million Trump March" planned for 30 June 2017, which was cancelled that April amid fraud concerns over its crowdfunding, according to accounts that tracked the campaign. An account posted: "No LiveStream for you Lisa Bloom HA HA HA HA HA." Bloom said every Trump accuser she represented had been threatened. The woman, who had refiled as Jane Doe, dropped the suit on 4 November.
Kelsie Taggart, a vice president at the Democratic-aligned research group American Bridge 21st Century, said Trump had never cared about justice for victims of sexual assault, including Epstein's victims and Jane Doe. Asked about the president's remarks, Giuffra said: "It has nothing to do with politics."
Aidan Thompson
Aidan Thompson, who lists himself as the founder of AFpost, a right-wing news account on X, wrote from his personal account @aidannonx on 29 September 2026 that numerous unrelated sources at Cornell had identified the plaintiff, and gave a woman's name. He wrote that the seven men had a right to face their accuser and that "we have a right to publish her identity if we discover it." The Tompkins County district attorney had withheld Doe's original statement from release because it contained details that could identify her.
AFpost posted the same name on the evening of 1 October, US Eastern time. Hours later Thompson wrote on @aidannonx that the identification was confirmed and called the woman "Cornell's Jane HOE". A women's rights account that tracks femicide wrote on Threads that Thompson had named the wrong woman.
Thompson was an economics student and member of the University of Kansas College Republicans in December 2024, when he told his university newspaper: "I would consider myself a Christian nationalist." He said all immigration, legal and illegal, should stop for at least a decade, that entry should then favour people most likely to assimilate and that Europeans were the best fit. He said what he was most invested in was Trump protecting Christians.
Laura Loomer, the right-wing activist, wrote on X in June 2026 that Thompson runs AFpost for Nick Fuentes, a Holocaust denier widely seen as the leader of the white nationalist groyper movement. She also claimed that Thompson had met Peter Thiel and Tucker Carlson to discuss investment in the account. Thompson has denied being a groyper or being affiliated with Fuentes, Loomer wrote.
Michael Tracey
Michael Tracey, a blogger who publishes on Substack and has appeared repeatedly on Tucker Carlson Tonight, posted what he believed to be the identity of a woman who had filed a lawsuit under the pseudonym Jane Doe 16 days earlier. The post appeared early on 2 October 2026. Tracey subsequently deleted it, saying his point had been made.
He later defended his attempt to identify the woman as "journalistic diligence" protected by freedom of speech, while stating that he did not intend to encourage threats or harassment against her. Tracey also expressed sympathy for seven men accused of gang raping Jane Doe, citing what he described as "harassment" directed at them.
Capitol Police removed Michael Tracey from a news conference outside the US Capitol on 3 September 2025, where survivors of Jeffrey Epstein's abuse were demanding the release of Justice Department files. Rather than questioning officials about the files, Tracey challenged the credibility of Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein's most prominent victims, who had died earlier that year by suicide. He pressed her former lawyer, Bradley Edwards, to explain "why the public should believe her". Edwards declined to engage and moved to another journalist, but Tracey persisted, interrupting the proceedings despite objections from survivors. Representative Ro Khanna told him his question had been heard, while Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene reportedly instructed Capitol Police to remove him.
Tracey subsequently portrayed his removal as retaliation for asking an uncomfortable question. His continued interruptions, however, provided a potential justification for removal independent of his views. Federal law prohibits certain forms of intentional disruption on Capitol grounds, although whether that law applied to his conduct remains unestablished. Neither Capitol Police nor Greene's office provided an official explanation for his removal when contacted by the US Press Freedom Tracker.
Tracey has argued that press coverage of the Epstein files is conspiratorial. Julie K. Brown, the Miami Herald reporter whose investigation preceded Epstein's 2019 arrest, has suggested Tracey is paid to play down Epstein's abuse. Tracey confronted Brown over the suggestion at a White House Correspondents' Dinner afterparty in April 2026, then nearly came to blows with journalist Jim Acosta and was removed by security. He later challenged Acosta on social media to fight him outside his hotel.
In February 2021 Tracey wrote that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's account of the 6 January attack on the Capitol, in which she disclosed that she is a survivor of sexual assault, was "a masterclass in emotional manipulation." He first said he had not been referring to her disclosure and then repeated the criticism.
Tracey says he has been a registered Democrat all his life. He backed Bernie Sanders in 2016 and Tulsi Gabbard in 2020, and wrote in November 2024 that he would vote for neither Trump nor Kamala Harris. He was a recurring guest on Fox News's Tucker Carlson Tonight in 2019 and guest-hosted Glenn Greenwald's System Update in 2024.
'I am Jane Doe'
Large numbers of social media users, most of them women, responded to the attempts to name her by posting "I am Jane Doe" in solidarity with the plaintiff and to make any leaked name harder to confirm. Many added accounts of their own sexual assaults. Amee Vanderpool, a lawyer who writes a Substack newsletter, posted that anyone trying to identify Jane Doe need look no further, because she was Jane Doe. Suzie Rizzo, an activist, wrote on X that because Tracey and other men were trying to publish the victim's name, "we're all Jane Doe!"
Kelsey Combe, a photographer in the Midwest, said she posted the phrase to stand with the plaintiff and to confuse AI systems. An AI tool then named Combe as the woman suing Cornell. She had the claim removed and was met by critics asking what she had expected. Most women share some part of Jane Doe's experience, she said: "So we are all Jane Doe until nobody is."
Wendy Lea Brewer, 48, a singer who writes about her own sexual abuse in her songs, posted Instagram reels captioned "I am Jane Doe" and "It's time to speak". Before finding the posts she had felt she was screaming into the void, she said, adding: "We have had enough." Emma Davidson Tribbs, founding director of the National Women's Defense League, said moments like this give people the courage to speak and can drive change.
Nigel Tatem, a Cornell computer science student who spoke publicly about the case, said his family had been doxxed afterwards.
Protests at Cornell
Activists smashed windows and spray-painted the Chi Phi and Sigma Alpha Mu houses on the night of 11 November 2024, weeks after Jane Doe's report to police. A group calling itself Riot Moon claimed responsibility and declared a campaign against fraternities as mass perpetrators of sexual violence on campus.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez opened a town hall in downtown Ithaca on 27 September 2026 by addressing the lawsuit and criticising a culture of rape at elite institutions. Dozens of students spoke at a Student Assembly hearing on 1 October, some describing their own assaults and several breaking down in tears. The assembly unanimously passed a resolution demanding a full account of the university's investigation, disclosure of the disciplinary measures and annual reports on future cases.
Sophia Riley Sim, a junior, skipped classes the week the lawsuit became public. "I cried about it then, and I am still completely devastated," she said. Saanya Agarwal, the student government's women's issues representative, said: "We are going to fight." Adriana Vink, who attended the hearing with her mother, said Cornell was complicit in the rape culture on campus. Adalena Crotty said the case "shines a light on the consistent protection of perpetrators." Jane Wang, a public policy student, said the paperwork of reporting her own case had added to her distress. Lani Lin-Kissick, a junior, said that when the campus alert went out in 2024 her friends did not expect Cornell to do anything.
Students protested on campus on the evening of 5 October. Organisers unaffiliated with the university have called a rally and walkout under the banner "We Demand Answers!" for 13 October, seeking reform of Title IX procedures and of the Cornell Division of Public Safety. Hannah Shvets, a senior who sits on Ithaca's Common Council, wants the university to hand all violent-crime reporting to the Ithaca police.
The campus 'burnerverse'
Maddie Kowalski was a 19-year-old University of Florida student and member of the Delta Zeta sorority when an anonymous X account, @SteveCumfull, posted footage of her on 2 November 2025 with a caption naming her and her sorority. The footage shows two men raping her in Gainesville while she was too intoxicated to consent. A second clip, filmed that autumn at a house near campus long associated with the Florida chapter of Phi Delta Theta, showed her incapacitated on the floor with men standing over her. Posts about her were viewed more than 8.5 million times and her name trended nationally on X.
Current students and alumni run the accounts behind the posts, part of a loose network of anonymous college-sports accounts on X that members call the burnerverse, or BV, with clusters around many large universities. Members trade sexual images and rumours on campus apps such as Snapchat and YikYak, then move them to X, where aggregation sites and sports-media personalities amplify them. The network's practices date to June 2024 and an account called Arthur Cacciatore. Some account holders say they want their posts picked up by Barstool and ESPN. A friend of Kowalski's said prospective fraternity members at one university are encouraged to run burner accounts.
Accounts in the network published Kowalski's father's LinkedIn profile, his golf handicap and old photographs of her, and sent her threatening messages. Callers phoned her parents through the night with sexual threats, and one call was broadcast live on X Spaces. Someone created a cryptocurrency token in her name, and posters took bets on whether she would kill herself. Her lawyer, Adam Ludwin, said the timing and pattern of the posts appeared co-ordinated. She withdrew from classes and moved home. When her father arrived at her apartment, she tried to take her own life.
At least 10 women have been doxxed by the network, most of them aged 18 to 21. Addison King, a student at another university, was doxxed in March 2026 after a video said to show her was shared, and accounts spread a rumour that she had been unfaithful.
Gainesville police took over Kowalski's case from campus police, obtained subscriber and account records from X and traced two accounts to University of Florida IP addresses. In August 2026 they charged three men with sexual cyberharassment. Police affidavits link Kamran Ahmed to @SteveCumfull; he also faces a felony count of sexual cyberharassment for financial gain. Brendan Pitfield has pleaded not guilty. Jacob Gomberg is a former Florida baseball pitcher. The charges cover publishing the footage, and none of the three is accused of the assault. Kowalski has sued all three in federal court in northern Florida.
The University of Florida dropped a Title IX investigation after about a month because the footage was filmed off campus. Theta Chi placed Ahmed and Pitfield on interim suspension. Phi Delta Theta's Florida chapter, suspended until 2030 for hazing, kept operating after notice of the suspension and posted promotional material in August 2026.
Mary Kate Cornett, a 19-year-old University of Mississippi student, received thousands of texts and voicemails in February 2025, many telling her to kill herself, after X accounts attached her name and photograph to a false anonymous rumour that she had slept with her boyfriend's father. ESPN host Pat McAfee referred to the rumour on his show and Barstool Sports personalities repeated it; McAfee and several Barstool figures later apologised. Police arrived with guns drawn at her mother's home in Houston after a hoax emergency call. Cornett reported the harassment to Oxford police, university police and the FBI.
The federal TAKE IT DOWN Act requires platforms to remove reported intimate images within 48 hours of a valid request. The Federal Trade Commission began enforcing it in May 2026.
The online rape trade
Europol announced in July 2026 the results of Project Medusa, a cross-border police operation that began in April. German and British police led it, with help from the US, Brazil, Canada, France, Hungary, the Netherlands and Spain. Investigators identified more than 150 offenders and victims, opened more than 270 new leads and arrested 57 people. The National Crime Agency arrested eight people in Britain and safeguarded eight survivors. German journalists Isabell Beer and Isabel Stroh had passed the information to German police that set the inquiry going.
Men in the networks meet on encrypted messaging services, forums and closed chat groups, most often to target their own partners. They swap accounts of their assaults, plan attacks together, trade prescription medicines and narcotics, share advice on avoiding detection and post photographs and videos of the abuse, the agencies said. Most victims know and trust the men who attack them, and some are abused by several connected men over decades. Nigel Leary, deputy director of the NCA, said the abuse was increasingly organised through co-ordinated networks.
An undercover investigation published in March 2026 found a pornography website on which married men uploaded videos of drugging their wives and assaulting them while they were unconscious. The site drew more than 62 million visits in a month and hosted more than 20,000 videos labelled as sleep content, some viewed more than 50,000 times. In a linked chat group, men advertised livestreams of drugged women being abused at $20 a viewer, and one member sold a sedative. A private Telegram group of nearly 1,000 users was devoted to advice on drugging partners. Polish police arrested a man identified as one of its members in April 2026.
Dominique Pelicot was sentenced to 20 years in France in 2024 for drugging his wife, Gisèle, and recruiting men online to rape her; 50 other men were convicted. A German court jailed Fernando P. for eight years and six months for abusing his wife and sharing video of it online. Zhenhao Zou was convicted in Britain in 2025 of raping 10 women and jailed for life with a minimum term of 24 years. Darren Conway, 52, of Enfield in north London, pleaded guilty in September 2026 to using an online chat room to urge other members to assault drugged or sleeping women and to share images of the attacks.
Siobhan Blake, who leads rape prosecutions at the Crown Prosecution Service, said the abuse was some of the most horrifying she had seen in her career. Amanda Stanhope, a survivor, said: "It is a huge relief they finally recognised the scale of this." Ciara Bergman, chief executive of Rape Crisis England and Wales, said the scale and co-ordination of the abuse on the forums was deeply alarming. About one in four women in England and Wales have been raped or sexually assaulted since the age of 16, and about two in five rapes of women are committed by a partner or former partner, according to the charity.
Court filings in the Cornell case describe a closed fraternity group chat used on the night of the assault she reports.
Survivors of sexual assault in the US can reach the National Sexual Assault Hotline, run by RAINN, at 800-656-4673, 24 hours a day. Anyone in crisis can call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, in the US and Canada.
