Sexual Assault Is a Free Speech Issue

It is a testament to the deeply misogynistic nature of social media that, shortly after the horrifying sexual misconduct allegations against seven Cornell frat members made news last month, people on the internet immediately started trying to dox the victim.

Over the past few weeks, right-wing provocateurs and random troll accounts alike have attempted to publicly identify Jane Doe, the anonymous former Cornell student who accused seven Chi Phi fraternity members of sexually assaulting her in 2024. The drive to publicize her name and other personal details is stomach-turning—but according to Mary Anne Franks, in the context of the history of social media and sexual assault, it’s all too common.

Franks is a professor at George Washington University Law School specializing in the intersection of civil rights, free speech, and technology. She is also the president and legislative tech policy director at the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, where she has spent years fighting online abuse and image-based sexual abuse. For decades, Franks has had a front-row seat to the myriad ways in which men on the internet have been abusive toward women, as well as some of the constitutional arguments invoked by independent commentator Michael Tracey, who has argued that his doxing of Jane Doe is legal under the First Amendment.

“When you have a cultural fetishization of an abstract notion of free speech, one thing that it does is it disembodies a conversation,” Franks says. “Somehow physical safety becomes oppositional to this supreme value of speech.”

With her work at the CCRI, as well as her history advocating for legislation criminalizing nonconsensual intimate images in all 50 US states, Franks hopes to reframe the conversation by making clear that “sexual abuse is a free speech issue. It silences people, and when we allow sexual abuse to happen with impunity, we are essentially saying, ‘We do not care about women’s voices.’”

I spoke to Franks as the Cornell story was rippling through social media. During our discussion, we discussed the doxing of Jane Doe, the “Elon Muskification” of the internet, the terrifying world of the far-right “burnerverse,” and Cornell’s troubling history of looking the other way when it comes to the abuse and objectification of women. Check it out below.