Jane Manning

Jane Manning is a former sex crimes prosecutor, a victim rights advocate, and a leading expert in criminal justice and violence against women. As Director of the Women’s Equal Justice Project, she helps survivors of sexual assault navigate the criminal justice system.

She began her career as a prosecutor of domestic violence, sex crimes, and child abuse. In private practice, she represented a coalition of battered women’s organizations arguing, successfully, for reversal of a court decision allowing men who murdered wives or girlfriends to invoke the victim’s “nagging” as a mitigating factor. She then joined the international human rights organization Equality Now, where she coordinated a successful campaign for a strong and comprehensive law against human trafficking in New York State and helped draft New York’s first anti-trafficking statute. She served as president of the NYC chapter of NOW, where she helped lead successful campaigns to repeal New York’s statute of limitations on rape and to criminalize strangulation attacks. She trains first-year prosecutors annually on interviewing crime victims. At the Women’s Equal Justice Project, she is working to improve the justice system’s response to sexual assault, including the violent and under-prosecuted crime of drug-facilitated sexual assault.

Her commentary has appeared in the New York Times, the New York Daily News, Women’s Media Center Live with Robin Morgan, the Brian Lehrer Show, Buzzfeed, the New York Post, Good Day NY, and other venues.