There is a mechanism by which a lawsuit becomes something else. A woman files a civil complaint — in this case, a 101-page one, alleging she was drugged and raped by several members of the Xi chapter of Cornell’s Chi Phi fraternity in October 2024 — and names the university, the fraternity, seven members and others. The accused deny wrongdoing; the courts begin their slow work. And then, outside the legal system entirely, a second process starts running: anonymous people decide that the right response to a rape allegation is to make the accuser afraid to be alive.
The woman known as Jane Doe is now living at her parents’ home — CNN is withholding its location at her lawyer’s request — and, her attorney Thomas Giuffra says, she spent Wednesday taping paper over the windows of the house she grew up in, “so people can’t see into her house to take a shot at her.” This was the day after someone called in a false report to her hometown police: a man had shot and killed his mother and turned the gun on his sister, at that address.
A police officer, believing he was responding to an active shooting, arrived at the house Tuesday evening and saw a car backing out of the driveway, according to a police report obtained by CNN. He apprehended the two men inside — Doe’s brother and her boyfriend — at gunpoint. Then her father came to the door. “I’m the dad. What’s going on?” he yelled, per the report, and told the officer his daughter was the Jane Doe of the Cornell case and that the family was “being threatened by numerous unknown people.”
“If you had a trigger-happy cop, or somebody had done the wrong thing, somebody could have ended up dead,” Giuffra told CNN on Wednesday. That is the point of swatting, of course — it is a way of sending armed men to someone’s home by proxy, using the police as the weapon. Local police are investigating the attempt, and the FBI is also looking into the events, according to Giuffra.
The swatting did not come out of nowhere. Giuffra estimates dozens of threats have been made against Doe since she filed her suit in mid-September. On Monday, her phone received a text containing three gun emojis. On Tuesday, shortly before police arrived, she got a call from someone claiming to share a first name with one of the seven men named in her complaint; per the police reports, she “began panicking” because the phone “wouldn’t stop ringing.” Before that night was over, Giuffra’s own wife received a threatening call. “These people have done so much research into (Doe),” he said. It isn’t clear whether the separate threats were connected.
Then there is the audio. Giuffra shared with CNN a recording of a call he says was placed to his office on Wednesday afternoon, in which a man identifies himself as “the person who called your client” and says:
I’m telling you guys simply, I think you should advise your client to withdraw the case. Otherwise blood will be shed.
Running alongside the direct threats is a public campaign to strip away the one protection Doe has, which is her anonymity. Her name was redacted in legal documents, so a handful of online personalities with large followings have set about finding it. One wrote on X to 347,000 followers in late September: “If you happen to know who this Cornell ‘Jane Doe’ is, get in touch and I would be happy to publish her name and identifying information.” He later claimed to have identified her and said he posted her identity before deleting it.
Meanwhile, the underlying case has shaken Cornell. The university, its campus police force and the Tompkins County District Attorney’s office have all faced scrutiny over how her claims were initially investigated, and students held a sit-in on the Ithaca campus on Wednesday. Her suit alleges fraternity members drugged and sexually assaulted her and invited others in a group chat to join the assault, and that the school failed to protect her or adequately punish the accused, all of whom deny wrongdoing.
What is easy to miss in the escalation is what it has already cost. Doe studied at Cornell’s Nolan School of Hotel Administration — attending, Giuffra said, was her “dream” — but left without graduating after the alleged assault. Earlier this year she was in New York City trying to break into the hotel industry, one of thousands of aspirational twentysomethings. After she filed the suit — “when everything hit the fan,” as Giuffra put it — she went home. “The dream is lost,” he told CNN.
She follows the coverage of her own case, because, Giuffra said, “it’s kind of hard to switch it off” for someone of her generation. She goes on walks; otherwise she stays inside, where her mother has taken time off work to be with her. “I don’t get shook up very easily, but this shook me up,” Giuffra said. “I didn’t want to have a body on my hands.”
Her father’s view, as relayed by the lawyer, is simpler: he can’t believe this grew out of his daughter “just trying to stand up for herself and be heard.”