After a woman filed a lawsuit accusing seven men of sexually assaulting her on Cornell University’s campus, one of the men, Matthew Ingalls, was set to be served with papers informing him of the allegations.
But there was a problem. The address that the lawyer for the woman who filed the lawsuit — known as Jane Doe — had found for Mr. Ingalls was incorrect. It belonged to the family of a different Matthew Ingalls, a Marine sergeant who had no connection to Cornell.
So on Sept. 26, the mother of the wrong Matthew Ingalls was served with the court papers intended for the man accused by Jane Doe, she told The Free Press. The address remained on the public docket for the lawsuit, in full view for online sleuths. And since then, family members have been deluged with threats and had garbage thrown on their lawn, said John C. Manly, a lawyer representing them.
In an interview on Friday, Ms. Ingalls said she and her family had received dozens of violent death threats over social media, the phone and in text messages. Some informed them that they knew where they lived. She has had trouble sleeping and working at her job as a paralegal.
“My son is a good man,” Ms. Ingalls. “He’s a good Marine. And he didn’t deserve any of this.”
Now, responding to the threats against Mr. Ingalls’s family, the judge overseeing the lawsuit has sealed certain documents. In a strongly worded order, she denounced “threats and doxxing,” which she described as “brash, reckless and ultimately dangerous internet vigilantism.”
The judge ordered the lawyer for Jane Doe, Thomas P. Giuffra, to refile the sealed documents with the personal addresses redacted.
“Everyone involved, be it the public, parties or their attorneys, needs to do their part in bringing the temperature down before someone gets hurt,” Phaedra F. Perry-Bond, of state Supreme Court in Manhattan, wrote.
In a statement, Mr. Giuffra said that his team identified “a man who was the same age, same name” as the person Jane Doe had accused of rape.
“We are very sorry that an error was made under these circumstances and apologize to this gentleman and his family,” Mr. Giuffra said.
All the men accused by Jane Doe have denied wrongdoing. None has been charged with a crime.
The episode has highlighted the fervor surrounding the Cornell rape accusations, which have provoked widespread outrage and a reckoning over sexual assault on campuses across the nation.
It also speaks to a larger phenomenon. At times, across the internet and social media, would-be vigilantes have seized on scraps of unverified — or in some cases mistaken — information about those accused of wrongdoing. Such frenzies have wound up targeting people completely uninvolved in the matters that have stoked the flames of viral rage.
“You just see it again and again and again: People who have nothing to do with the case now suddenly have their lives upended,” said Whitney Phillips, an associate professor of information politics and media ethics at the University of Oregon.
Dr. Phillips said that for “for all of the good intentions that might exist,” this sort of digital justice system always carries risks. “This all doesn’t seem like a very big deal until it happens to you or your mother,” she said.
“And then it becomes a conversation of, ‘There but for the grace of the internet go you.’”
Experts on these online mobs warned that the fallout often persists long after the attention moves on, from the emotional trauma to the sometimes-lasting damage to employment and earnings.
In 2012, the director Spike Lee reposted the address that he believed to belong to George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer who fatally shot Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Black teenager. But the home belonged to an elderly couple, who were forced to flee their home after receiving death threats. Mr. Lee later apologized and reached a settlement with the couple.
After the mass shooting last year at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, where two gunmen killed 15 people at a Hanukkah celebration, large accounts on X and Facebook misidentified one of the suspects as a Pakistani man with the same name, spreading his photos and personal information across social media.
The man said online that he was terrified and could not “even go outside safely.”
The online frenzy around Cornell has extended to Gillio Lopes, one of the accused men who has denied any wrongdoing. Internet sleuths dug into his apparent work history, including in posts by users on X that claimed he owned an artificial intelligence company. Some were viewed hundreds of thousands of times.
It all helped fuel a torrent of furious emails and social media backlash toward a small, veteran- and women-owned consulting firm in Texas that had a name similar to the one identified by social media users as Mr. Lopes’s company.
But it was the wrong business.
In a series of online pleas, the chief executive, Zaira Vidrio, made clear that she had never employed Mr. Lopes — and lamented that she lacked the time, money and reach to combat the misinformation.
“We don’t have the resources,” she said on Instagram. “I do not have a big following.”
In an interview, Mr. Manly noted that Mr. Giuffra, Jane Doe’s lawyer, had spoken out about her identity being revealed by figures online. He pointed out what he saw as a double standard.
“I noticed he’s on CNN saying Jane Doe’s being doxxed,” Mr. Manly said. “Well, what about the innocent person,” he said, referring to the wrongly identified Matthew Ingalls. “And his address is there for the world to see?”
After weeks of harassment, Ms. Ingalls said she reported the threats to the local police. She was incredulous about how people had taken out their rage.
“The public has amazed me with the way they behaved throughout this,” she said. “I just don’t believe that people can behave this way.”
Hurubie Meko contributed reporting.
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