For a while, Jane Doe rejected the suggestion. She and her attorneys debated the decision to remain anonymous before filing the lawsuit. “She didn’t want to be another woman hiding behind anonymity,” Giuffra said. “She wanted to take a stand.” He told me that he and his co-counsel, an attorney named Whitney Sears, warned her that using her name could spark a “storm” that would forever be associated with not just her, but her family. “You want to have this battle with these guys, but sometimes cooler heads have to prevail,” Giuffra said. Eventually, she agreed to listen to their suggestions. But, of course, a storm came anyway.
In a written confirmation attached to the court filing, Jane Doe asked to be referred to as “JANE DOE” in court records, in her own words. “What happened to me was devastating and humiliating,” she wrote. In her affirmations, she talks about shame, fear, extreme anxiety, and depression. She said the thought of her identity being revealed gave her “many sleepless nights.” Of the seven men named in her complaint, she added, “The defendants have no regard for my health or safety.”
The events of Oct. 19, 2024, were first documented in detail during a lengthy interview with the Cornell University Police Department by Jane Doe in November, about four weeks after the incident. She reportedly told police during that meeting, “I am 100 percent certain I was raped.” Her account was then summarized in a six-page “voluntary statement.”
In the document, she describes the beginning of a typical Saturday night on a college campus. The kind of uncertainty that’s familiar to any 20-year-old has been there since the late night: Jane Doe, a weightlifter, was at a Crunch Fitness in Ithaca when a thief took her car keys and stole her wallet, charging Walmart hundreds of dollars. She canceled her credit and debit cards, leaving her to rely on Apple Pay for the rest of the evening, and posted on her Snapchat story that she’d been mugged, but Jane Doe’s plan went ahead. However, due to the robbery, she was late to the sorority celebration. She started drinking Tito’s vodka from the bottle “to catch up with my sorority sisters.” Soon she was at a local bar for a “date night event,” drinking more alcohol and vaping. Around 10:30 good afternoonAfterward, she walked toward Chippie’s fraternity house, feeling “numb with cold and intoxication.”
She went on to describe her desire to meet her friend, a student named Matthew Ingalls, whom she had known since her freshman year and whom she described as someone she was romantically interested in. He invited her to have a threesome with one of his fraternity brothers, and Jane Doe remembers feeling “excited,” deducing that the men might be gay, “meaning they were part of my community because I’m bisexual.” Jane Doe later described a sexual encounter between herself, Ingalls, and another man, Jonathan Newell. She said she felt “fine” at first. When one of the men started to feel sick, she patted him on the back and told him it was OK if he needed to vomit. As night fell, however, things began to change. A third person enters the room. One of the men then started touching her. The second threesome soon began, and Jane Wuming heard the men say “It’s your turn.” She began to feel used. More men entered the room. The night became a blur. “To these people, I don’t matter as a person,” she told police. She remembers feeling like her phone was out of reach and knowing she didn’t have her wallet with her. In the evening, certain memories came back to her. When she was asked if she needed more ketamine, she realized she had already taken the drug on her couch before. She was later told she had also smoked cannabis and drank a high-strength rum, which she described as “Jamaican liquor”. She said she repeatedly shook the man’s hand away from her vagina and tried to hide her naked body under the covers. At one point, she looked around and said, “I don’t know who these people are.” She described feeling exhausted and “utterly disgusted by this situation.” When she was taken to a second, smaller room for another threesome, one of the men walked in and asked: “Are you guys still playing?” Jane Doe told police she replied: “‘Yes,’ in a sad and unenthusiastic tone.”