Sickening, enraging, heartbreaking… so many words have already been used about the alleged gang rape of a Cornell University student by her peers. I’d add despairing, because here we are again, faced with a situation in which the message is clear: the futures and reputations of promising young men matter more than the shattering of a young woman’s life.
Was I surprised to learn that, of the seven male students accused in late 2024, apparently only two were expelled from the Ivy League university? That the others were made to undertake workshops and write essays (I’m imagining, “Explain in 800 words why you sexually assaulted a fellow student and we’ll let you off”)? Not particularly—you probably aren’t either.
The female student, known only as Jane Doe, went to the Cornell University Police Department about three weeks after the alleged attack. There was an internal investigation and several hearings—no external police involvement, no criminal charges. She has dropped out of school, her future in pieces. Or, as her lawyer put it: “She’s barely hanging on for what these guys did to her.”
Little wonder that she’s now suing Cornell, and those seven fraternity members, citing its failure to protect her. According to her court filing, while visiting a friend at the Chi Pi fraternity (motto: “truth, honor, and personal integrity”), she was pressured into taking drugs by two male students, after which she was subjected to a brutal gang rape that lasted for hours, her body moved from room to room before she finally lost consciousness.
One of the men sent a message to a group Snapchat inviting other fraternity members to join in, saying there was “free pussy.” Don’t take my word for that—there’s a screenshot of the thread, in which another student replied, “I fucking love Chi Pi.” That’s the fraternity with a stated mission to “build better men,” by the way.
So much about this case is disturbing, but I keep coming back to that Snapchat group thread—specifically the men who saw those messages and didn’t raise the alarm, or at the very least tell their fellow frat boys to back off. That can only mean that they didn’t think anything of it in a culture where sexual assault is as normalized as keg parties, or that they didn’t think it was any of their business. I’m not sure which is worse.
We’ve long known that schools, colleges, and universities the world over are failing the victims of sexual assault and protecting those who perpetrate it. But it’s getting harder and harder to believe that they aren’t breeding a generation of young men who think they can inflict unimaginable horror on others without fear of consequence. If they believe it, it’s because it’s true: in England and Wales, fewer than three in 1,000 rapes (the ones that are reported) result in a basic charge or summons. In the US, fewer than four percent of violent sex crimes result in convictions.
We see it all around us: presidents, sports stars, celebrities… even Supreme Court justices are accused of sexual assault, and somehow it all goes away. As Chanel Miller, the Stanford student who was sexually assaulted by “star athlete” Brock Turner in 2015, wrote in her memoir: “My pain was never more valuable than his potential.”
It all sends the clearest message possible that boys and men can get away with rape, and that girls and women shouldn’t bother reporting it (according to Jane Doe’s filing, the campus police didn’t even bother calling her back after the first time she contacted them).
Obviously, this is where I say “not all men.” But it’s also men who often stay silent when this stuff happens. I remember starting conversations with the men in my life about Gisèle Pelicot, after weeks and weeks in which women had been talking about little else. None of them knew what I was going on about.
