Sexual Assault Is a Free Speech Issue

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. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. EJ DICKSON: Mary Anne Franks, thank you so much for being here. MARY ANNE FRANKS: Thanks so much for having me on. So, I first started hearing the term “revenge porn” in 2011 or 2012. Obviously, technology and how we talk about it has evolved a ton since then. So for listeners who aren’t plugged into the work you do, I’m guessing terminology like image-based abuse or deepfake sexual abuse can seem sterile or maybe just confusing. Can you walk me through the evolution of these terms? Why is it better to be so formal about how we label them? One of the hardest things about trying to talk about these issues is figuring out the right names for them. So we think about the term “revenge porn,” which was used widely by, for lack of a better word, the perpetrators of this. It’s the kind of term that is very evocative, and people mostly know what you mean when you say that. But the troubling aspect of it was that it did seem to be the name that abusers were giving this conduct. Revenge suggests that there’s something that was done wrong by the victim. The term “porn” was really difficult for a lot of people because they thought of porn as being something consensual as opposed to nonconsensual. But it is an ongoing struggle because it is really difficult to communicate what we’re talking about clearly without falling into one of these pitfalls of either sounding as though we are blaming victims or sounding as though this is more trivial than it is in reality. Right. And the word “porn” kind of has functioned historically as a shorthand, but that’s also kind of unfair to people who make consensual porn, right? This is why, when we originally landed on the term nonconsensual pornography, what we were trying to emphasize was that pornography itself is not a moral judgment, but this is a nonconsensual version of that. I often think about the best term as being the one that the audience that I’m talking to is most likely to recognize quickly and understand. So for the purposes of what we’re about to talk about today, what are some good terms to establish here? Image-based sexual abuse is a good term. The way we talk about it at CCRI, the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, is anytime you have a failure of consent at any level of sexual expression or conduct, that’s a problem. So we’re worried about lack of consent to the actual sexual activity. That’s one. Then there’s lack of consent to being recorded engaging in a sexual activity. Then there’s lack of consent to having that recording distributed, and there is, of course, lack of consent to being manipulated in an image or a video, making it seem as though you were doing something that you were not. So we can think about all of those kinds of abuses happening. Sometimes more than one happens at a time. Sometimes we’re talking about recorded sexual assaults that are distributed. Sometimes we’re talking about consensual encounters that were recorded without consent. Sometimes we’re talking about consensual sexual activity that is recorded with consent but was not distributed with consent. So last month a former student from Cornell University filed a lawsuit alleging that in 2024, seven members of a school fraternity raped and assaulted her repeatedly over the course of seven hours inside of their frat house. Of course, that story’s everywhere now. It sparked a national discussion about consent, accountability, and safety, and rightfully so. What I’d really like to focus on here, though, is the chunk of Jane Doe’s lawsuit that takes place online. Basically, she says that early that night in 2024, one of the men who raped her also posted an explicit photograph of her body to his frat Snapchat group, announcing that she was upstairs and available, which was how other members of his fraternity even knew to enter the room she was inside of. In the most basic way, what makes the Snapchat component of this story worthy of discussion? Part of what we all know now about the way the message was conveyed was, it was a reduction of a human being to body parts, to speaking about a woman as though she were her genitalia, right? It’s not just the image, although that’s a big part of it, but it’s also this casual reference to a human being as this thing to be used, and a casual reference to a large group of men who then responded, not by thinking that anything was wrong about any of this behavior, but in fact rushing upstairs to see if they could participate in it. So it isn’t just that kind of alleged assault that is happening in real time, it is also the idea that you can broadcast it with the full confidence that not only will no one criticize you for it, but that this will be a further bonding exercise, a further social validation exercise. That’s what’s really chilling about it. And the Snapchat element of it, how does that sort of add to the depersonalization here? I think that the Snapchat platform was a way to encourage girls to send nude photos, with the confidence that they would disappear. Therefore you wouldn’t be worried about them leaking. I think that same mindset really is why the platform has continued to be successful in this sense. It’s this idea that it’s ephemeral somehow, one that almost gamifies what’s happening. How is the experience of going to college in 2026 in conversation with the work you do? What sorts of stories have you heard about bad behavior on college campuses that make you think, “Actually, there is a fix for this”? We have been hearing about fraternity sexual assault, and not just fraternity sexual assault, college assault that happens in many spaces, many places, and not just on college campuses. It is one of the experiences, unfortunately, that is so common for women in particular that whether they go to college or not, they are very highly likely to experience it all the same. But we do see higher concentrations of these group assaults happening in places that are male-dominated like fraternities and athletic teams. Let me back up and say, these kinds of experiences really show that when you take several men who have had all the privileges that one might want in a society, and you put them together, and you put them in an environment where the kinds of things they have been told are special about them may be challenged—and what I mean by that is college is sometimes the first place where a very privileged male, especially a privileged white male, might encounter the attitude that he is not particularly special or smart or interesting—that is going to create in that person a pretty pronounced sense of cognitive dissonance, and it’s the kind of thing that he is going to want to put out of his mind as quickly as possible, and the easiest way to do that is to dehumanize and to instrumentalize the very people that he thinks might be representative of his lack of specialness. So I think that’s why you see these male bonding experiences at these highly privileged places in these highly privileged bastions, right? Fraternities and athletic teams. Part of what they are told is that you are entitled to feeling as though you are the person on top at all times. So when we think about how incredibly influential these fraternities are, when you look at members of Congress, you look at presidents, you look at Supreme Court justices and how many of them have been members of fraternities, you can see that it’s one of the places where all of that privilege builds up over and over in all of these different ways. I think one of the things that has really resonated with people about this case was that it took place at Cornell, one of the most highly selective institutions in the country, an Ivy League school, somewhere where you think that something like this “couldn’t happen here.” I think that is one of the reasons why this story has lingered for so long and why it’s horrified so many people, just the level of privilege and the level of access to education that these boys have. You would think that maybe they would think twice about speaking publicly or speaking to each other in this way, but education really doesn’t insulate anyone from misogynistic behavior at all. What’s interesting is at Cornell is whatever punishment was given out, like essays or suspensions, maybe it seemed unfair in the moment to the guys that it happened to, but it wasn’t really punishment at all. So are they even really learning a lesson? It’s hard to know yet, with the ongoing litigation, what all the details are and what exactly happened, and we know that there’s obviously some kind of “there” there. But men in the context of these elite educational institutions would not think twice. One of the first viral email incidents that ever happened—early days of the internet, back in 1995—was actually an email that escaped containment out of Cornell. It was four Cornell undergrads who had written a list titled, I believe, “75 Reasons Why Women Shouldn't Have Free Speech,” and “Women” was followed by, in parentheses, “Bitches.” The 75 reasons included, I forget which number it was, but one of them was, “If she can’t speak, she can’t say no.” And that wasn't the only one of the 75 reasons that was very reflective of that same attitude of very casual sort of sexual violence. Part of the reaction was, this is shocking behavior. The other reaction was, boys will be boys. This was just a joke. It’s satire. They shouldn’t have been punished at all. And you even had some individuals saying that this is a violation of free speech and that Cornell was violating the First Amendment somehow by punishing them at all and expecting them to apologize. Do you remember any of the other 75 reasons on that list? A lot of them had to do with the fear of a female president. A lot of them had to do with saying that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote. There were several others that had to do with, she shouldn’t have to spea