WASHINGTON: Thousands of American women have taken to social media to support the alleged victim of a gang rape at an elite US university, in a case that sparked a national outcry, after a political commentator threatened to reveal her identity.

Messages of support with the hashtag #lAmJaneDoe a pseudonym commonly used in the US legal system to protect a person`s identity have proliferated on TikTok, X and Instagram since a man named Michael Tracey asked people to help him find the former Cornell University student in order to `evaluate her veracity`. In a symbolic gesture, women wrote posts and made videos claiming to be the alleged victim, in a bid to make it harder to identify her and defend the right of sexual assault victims to remain anonymous.

`He is trying to expose her identity, we won`t let him,` one young woman says on TikTok in a video viewed over 4 million times.

`I am Jane Doe.` In her lawsuit, the woman says that in 2024, when she was 20, she was drugged with ketamine, assaulted and raped by seven members of the Chi Phi fraternity, a social club for male students.-AFP