If the internet is not real life, how do we explain the JP Morgan harassment case? In this viral story, a senior female executive at the US bank JP Morgan was alleged to have subjected a male subordinate to a sustained campaign of aggressive sexual harassment. The man, initially identified only as “John Doe”, claimed that the woman repeatedly sexually harassed him, spiking his drink with date-rape drugs and Viagra before coercing him into sexual activity.

The story went viral partly by inverting the usual pattern of #MeToo sexual harassment allegations, which usually involve a man exploiting some kind of power asymmetry at work to pressure a woman into sex. It did so, too, when the alleged harasser was swiftly revealed as Lorna Hajdini, a blonde and conventionally attractive woman in her late-30s, which then elicited a wave of vaguely kinky wish-fulfillment jokes online.

But the bulk of the ribaldry, too offensive to repost here, concerns the way the story turned out to invert the “Send Bobs” stereotype of horny, ineloquent men from the subcontinent. It was clear, even while the court filings remained anonymized, that its allegations concerned racial as well as sexual abuse, alleging that Hajdini called the complainant “my little brown boy” and threatened to report him and his family to ICE. Then, when the accuser’s identity was revealed as 31-year-old Chirayu Rana, an Indian-origin banker, the peanut gallery got going, decreeing that the whole lawsuit was little more than a university-graduate version of the meme of the sex-crazed Indian.

In reality, regardless of the veracity or otherwise of the stereotype about sexualized online comments, I doubt any of it is relevant to Chirayu Rana. Someone who can persuade JP Morgan to give him a job belongs to the global monoculture, not one of the regional ones stereotypically prone to hornyposting at strangers on Facebook. Beneath the lurid allegations and racist memes, the more plausible read is that this was just about someone changing jobs as his career flatlined.

Allegedly, after his initial complaint, Rana tried to negotiate a payout worth millions. He was unsuccessful, though, and eventually left for Bregal Sagemount, an investment firm, with no payout. Now, the New York Post reports that he “enjoyed something of a journeyman career through some of the most prestigious finance shops on Wall Street”, and left this latest position for unknown reasons around three weeks before he filed the case against JP Morgan.

Ultimately, of course, it will be for the court to decide whether any racial or sexual harassment actually happened. If I were of a betting disposition, I confess my money would not be on Rana receiving a payout. Regardless, we shouldn’t be in too great a rush to map this story to crude online stereotypes, either the predatory “cougar” girlboss or the sexually inappropriate foreigner. More likely, this was a bog-standard banker who job-hopped too often to have good future prospects and, realizing this, tried to cash in his chips by weaponizing HR.

Unfortunately for him, if entertainingly for the internet, he instead went inadvertently viral. After that, I doubt he’ll get another banking job. His best bet now is probably to go full Hawk Tuah and start a podcast.

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Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd.

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