I've been calling all week for the media to reveal the identity of John Dwyer's accuser. Meanwhile, I've been seeing if I couldn't work out her identity from the information reported in the paper. This morning I reported that I had a name, and was 90% sure I was right. Turns out I am. Many thanks to Stefan Sharkansky for independently confirming the accuser's identity.

In what follows, I'll recreate my research for the interested reader. There are no doubt more economical and elegant ways to Google one's way to gold, but this is, for better or worse, the route I took.

We know from the media that the accuser is 27, that she passed the California bar in July 2002, that she now works in a public interest law firm in San Francisco, and that she was active in the Berkeley Law Foundation while at Boalt. So, I went to the website of the Berkeley Law Foundation, where I found a list of the Board of Directors. I googled each name, and found that one member of the board, Jennifer Reisch, is a Boalt grad working at Public Advocates, Inc., a public interest law firm in SF. I looked up Jennifer Reisch in the database listing all who passed the July 2002 California bar, and found that she did indeed take and pass the bar at that time. I doublechecked to make sure that she graduated from Boalt in 2002, and found that she did: she even received an honor for her work in the International Human Rights Clinic. I wanted to be sure that she was 27, and discovered that a Jennifer Reisch graduated from Yale in 1996 (which would make her 27 now). If this is the same Jennifer Reisch, she was at the time an officer in both the Yale Students for Reproductive Rights and the Yale chapter of NOW (at the moment of this writing, the Yale Daily News server is down, so I am linking to cached pages on Google). As far as I can tell, the identity of John Dwyer's accuser is Jennifer Reisch.

A caveat: if I am in fact wrong, I apologize in advance for dragging Jennifer Reisch's name into this, and will retract my claim the moment she informs me that I have indeed mistaken her for someone else.

Outing Dwyer's accuser is serious business, so I want to take a moment to clarify my motives. My most immediate, practical point is that at this point anyone with an hour to spare, a little creativity, and access to a search engine can discover the name of Dwyer's accuser. By printing data about her, the media has made her identity publicly available in the very act of concealing it. We might as well connect the dots and move forward, out of the morally crystalline mythography of victimhood and into the realm of complex and contradictory fact.

My other, larger point--one I have been making for upwards of a week on this blog--is that it is not possible to cover this story adequately unless the identity of the accuser is part of it. John Dwyer's accuser has made it very clear via her lawyer Laura Stevens that the role of the media in this case is to ensure that John Dwyer never works in a university setting again. She has made it clear, via her lawyer, that the court of public opinion is to be used to ruin Dwyer. She has at the same time expected not to be scrutinized by the same court of opinion. She wants us to judge and condemn Dwyer, but she does not want us to know who she is. She wants us, in other words, to consent to the social death of a man even though we are not in full possession of the facts that supposedly condemn him. The media has complied with this wish, largely, I think, because of policies that require reporters to respect the wishes of "victims" who want to remain anonymous. But the public does not have to comply, and a smart, discerning public should refuse to be manipulated in such a way. If the court of public opinion is to be the judge in this case, let it make its judgements on the basis of all available information. It's my hope that by making public a name that should be a part of this unfolding story, the story itself will cease to be a scripted vehicle for feminist victimology and will begin to be reported in a more thorough, searching, and intellectually honest way.