Tel Aviv Times

Annabel Richter was a 19 year old FIT student. She was fed fentanyl by a man named Moises Friere who told her it was cocaine. Friere knew what he was doing — he gave the drugs to two female students and didn’t take any himself. While Annabel was overdosing, Friere stripped off her clothes, took photos of her naked body, and then raped her instead of calling for help. Because of what he did, she is dead. There are no “I am Jane Doe” rallies for Annabel Richter. There is no daily coverage of her death on CNN. There are no New York Times investigations creating timelines of her last day. Unless you read local crime news in New York City, you will not have heard about this case. Why is Cornell’s Jane Doe of so much more interest to mainstream news than FIT’s Annabel Richter? Perhaps because news loves to create narratives about predatory white male college students and refuses to make national-news villains of men like Friere, who commit most of the actual crime in places like New York City. The NYT and CNN aren’t lying when they do 50 stories about Jane Doe and zero about Annabel Richter. They’re just exercising editorial judgment about which parts of the news you need to hear.