A twenty-year-old woman went to a fraternity house at Cornell University on October 19, 2024. She knew one of the men there. She was interested in him. She had been drinking, and at some point that night she consented to sexual activity with him.
None of that gave anyone else permission to touch her.
That sentence should not be necessary in 2026, and yet nearly everything that has happened since Jane Doe accused seven members of Cornell’s Chi Phi fraternity of sexually assaulting her demonstrates why it still is.
Her civil lawsuit alleges that after she arrived at the fraternity house, she was pressured to consume additional substances, including ketamine, became severely impaired, and was sexually assaulted by multiple men over the course of the night. Cornell’s own Title IX investigation later involved more than fifty interviews and twelve days of hearings. Some students were suspended or expelled. The fraternity chapter was shut down. But no criminal charges were filed.
Now, almost two years later, New York Attorney General Letitia James has been appointed special prosecutor to review the case after Gov. Kathy Hochul removed the local district attorney from it. Hochul said Thursday that Jane Doe had been failed by people who had an obligation to protect her. And she’s right.
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The allegations themselves are horrifying.
What surrounds them is what makes this case so important.
Because almost immediately, the old script returned and people started looking for reasons to blame her. But what had she consumed? How much did she drink? Didn’t she want one of the men? Didn’t she agree to sex with him? What about the messages she sent afterward, when she sounded confused or contradictory? Didn’t she change her story?
Look closely at where all that attention goes.
Toward her.
That’s one of the oldest tricks rape culture uses. Find some decision a woman made before she says she was assaulted and make that decision more important than the decisions made by any of the men around her.
She drank, she liked him, she consented to him, she went upstairs, she used drugs, she didn’t immediately understand what had happened — therefore, somehow, the responsibility shifts back to her.
It’s another pathetic attempt to turn a woman’s previous consent, impaired judgment, confusion or humanity into blanket permission for whatever someone else chooses to do next.
And the evidence that’s emerged this week makes that argument particularly grotesque. CBS obtained the transcript of Jane Doe’s 2024 interview with Cornell police. Whatever ambiguity people may now want to manufacture around her earliest written statements, she told investigators then that she could say with “100% confidence” that she had been raped. The district attorney who originally declined prosecution later acknowledged that he relied on a police summary and hadn’t seen the full interview transcript. AP News
That matters because another familiar part of rape culture is demanding that a traumatized woman produce a flawless narrative immediately.
Trauma doesn’t work that way. Human beings don’t work that way.
A person can initially minimize something terrible because acknowledging what happened is unimaginably unbearable. She may remember pieces at different times. She may struggle with the fact that an encounter that began consensually became something else. She can send a message afterward that sounds casual, confused or contradictory and still know that someone violated her.
Consent is not something a man obtains once and owns for the rest of the night. It can be withdrawn. It applies to a particular person and a particular act. And when someone becomes too impaired to make meaningful choices about what is happening to her, her body does not become available to whoever happens to be standing nearby.
That should be so fucking obvious it’s insulting that we still have to say it at all.
And then there’s the fraternity group chat.
CBS reported this week that a photograph of Jane Doe was circulated in a Snapchat group on the night she was assaulted. According to the lawsuit and investigative records, a message was sent to the fraternity group suggesting that a woman upstairs was available for sex. One frat member later told campus investigators that about 50 members were on that particular Snapchat thread. A man in the chat wrote, “Like you can walk in and whip it out.” After Jane Doe’s photograph was posted, someone asked whether the “shop” was still open. The answer was yes.
Shop.
A woman reduced to a place of business. A human being talked about as though she were something open or closed depending on whether men could still get access to her.
This is where the conversation has to become larger than the seven men named in a lawsuit.
Rape culture doesn’t suddenly appear at the moment a sexual assault occurs. It’s built beforehand in all the ways women are taught to be seen as bodies first and people second. It grows in conversations where men rate women walking by them, in jokes about which woman is hot enough to fuck, in the endless sexual commentary some men use as social currency with other men, and in the assumption that pushing a woman past her limits is clever or some kind of victory rather than predatory.
I knew men like that when I was younger. I’ve known them throughout my life. Men who seemed incapable of talking about women without reducing them to bodies, sexual possibilities or rankings. Men who would say things once they became comfortable enough around other men that told me exactly how they saw women.
I never stay friends with them.
Sometimes that meant realizing somebody I thought was a person of character only to find out he was far from it. Many friendships ended. That isn’t heroic. It didn’t require years of education about patriarchy or masculinity or cultural conditioning. All it required was recognizing that this kind of behavior was wrong.
If I’m being truthful, it has always been harder for me to keep male friends because too many men eventually reveal attitudes about women I want nothing to do with. So I have very little patience for the defense that degrading women is simply how men are socialized and that we therefore need endless patience while grown men slowly unlearn it.
The friends we keep matter too. I have ended far too many friendships with men after learning how they really talked about women, what they laughed at, what they excused or what they were willing to tolerate from other men. I’ve walked away from people I once liked because once you hear enough, you know. I don’t need somebody to commit a crime before I decide I don’t want him in my life. If a man shows me that he sees women as objects, entertainment or something to be ranked, used or degraded, that tells me plenty. There are men who are no longer my friends precisely because of this.
Culture might be able to explain behavior. But it certainly doesn’t excuse it.
There are things you know are wrong because another human being is standing in front of you. And if you aren’t the man willing to speak when another man crosses that line, then your private belief that you are one of the “good ones” does very little for anyone.
That’s where the other men surrounding this case matter.
About 50 fraternity members were reportedly on the Snapchat thread where a photograph of Jane Doe and messages about access to her were circulating. We don’t know which of those men opened every message, what each one saw or what each one understood in the moment, and there’s no reason to pretend that we do.
What we do know is disturbing enough.
Someone felt comfortable inviting 50 men, letting them all know she was there.
Fifty men.
And other men in that digital room posted the photograph. Men wrote messages, read messages and responded to them. A woman who was too impaired to protect herself was being discussed among fraternity brothers as though access to her body were an opportunity.
The meaningful question for other men is not simply whether they themselves would ever commit rape. That’s an absurdly low standard for decency. The harder question is what they do when the man crossing the line is someone they know, someone they like or someone whose friendship they don’t want to lose.
Do you tell him he’s being a pig when he talks about a woman that way? Do you object when everyone else laughs? Do you stop protecting him because admitting what he did would make the friend group uncomfortable? Do you walk away when somebody shows you who he is?
That’s where character actually matters. Not in privately knowing that rape is wrong, but in what you are willing to do when speaking up costs you something.
The social cost is part of the point. Every culture teaches people what it will tolerate, and silence is one of the ways that tolerance is communicated.
I’ve watched women talking about Jane Doe all week. Women are furious. Women are sharing information about the case and pushing back against every attempt to blame her. Women began posting #IAmJaneDoe after Michael Tracey, who describes himself as a journalist, publicly sought Jane Doe’s identity and said he would publish identifying information about her. And on October 2, he says he did exactly that. Tracey later removed the information, but only after publishing what he says was her identity and declaring that the “principle had been served.”
Think about what that says about where the scrutiny always goes.
A woman says seven men raped her. Their names are already public in her civil lawsuit: Matthew Ingalls, Johnathan Newell, Lee Jun Hyung, also known as Winston Lee, Gillio Lopes, Diego Sarabia, Scott Norris and Scott Kretzschmar. She’s the one proceeding under a pseudonym for her own protection, and yet people have actively worked to strip that protection away. Tracey publicly solicited information that could identify her and then published what he says was her identity himself.
The men are already known. And still the hunt turns toward the woman.
That’s not accountability. It’s intimidation.
And that’s not incidental to the culture surrounding sexual violence. It’s part of it.
Women know that reporting rape can mean putting every decision they have ever made on trial. Their drinking, sex lives, clothing, friendships, relationships, messages and behavior before and after the assault all become available for strangers to dissect. People begin searching for the detail that will let them never look at what the man did.
The standard imposed on women is impossible because there’s always another reason waiting to discredit them. If she drinks, the drinking becomes the story. If she stays sober, someone asks why she went there at all. If she fights back, people question whether she fought hard enough; if she freezes, they ask why she didn’t fight. If she reports immediately, she can be accused of destroying a man’s life. If she waits, the delay becomes evidence against her. If she knew him, people call it regret. If she didn’t know him, they ask why she put herself somewhere unsafe.
The details change, but the purpose doesn’t. Always finding some way to move responsibility away from the man.
Earlier this year, we were confronted with reporting I still haven’t been able to shake: an investigation into Motherless.com and online communities built around videos of unconscious women being sexually assaulted. CNN found thousands of videos categorized around sleeping or unconscious women and entered a private Telegram group where men discussed incapacitating women. One man told an investigator that he crushed pills into his wife’s drink so he could rape her while she slept.
Think about how far gone a culture has to be for that to become a community. These were not men privately struggling with some ugly impulse and trying to stop themselves. They were finding one another. Sharing material. Trading information. Encouraging one another. Turning the sexual violation of unconscious women into entertainment, instructions and belonging.
This isn’t some separate category of misogyny. It grows from the same culture that normalizes women as objects, treats consent as negotiable, excuses men, and teaches other men that silence is easier than confrontation. The difference isn’t the underlying belief. The difference is how far someone is willing to take it.
We saw another version of that normalization only days ago at a MAHA summit in Washington. Dr. Oz introduced Russell Brand by joking that Brand had been backstage hugging Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins and had taken MAHA “to a whole new level.” Brand then said, “She initiated that contact,” and Oz laughed. Brand is currently awaiting trial in London on charges including rape and sexual assault involving six women.
It was a rape joke. A joke about consent.
But there’s another question here too: why the fuck was Russell Brand on that stage in the first place? He wasn’t some random guest who wandered into the room. He was officially moderating a government-policy panel with the administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and CMS’s Medicaid director. He had been invited into the room, handed the microphone and treated as somebody whose presence belonged there.
That’s what normalization looks like before anyone ever laughs at the joke. The invitation was part of it. The platform was part of it. The willingness to treat a man awaiting trial on rape and sexual-assault charges as a perfectly ordinary public figure was part of it. Then he made a joke about consent, Oz laughed, and some people in the crowd laughed with him.
Sexual violence becomes material. Consent becomes a punchline. A man facing rape charges becomes just another guest onstage with senior government officials. And then people wonder why women keep saying the culture itself is the problem.
The same failure of accountability appears in the troubled-teen industry, where Paris Hilton has spent years forcing attention onto what happened to young people inside residential treatment programs. She has described the physical and psychological abuse she endured as a teenager and pushed lawmakers to create stronger federal oversight. Her advocacy helped move the bipartisan Stop Institutional Child Abuse Act through Congress, after years of survivors describing mistreatment inside programs that were supposed to protect them.
This is the pattern of institutional protection.
Organizations gain power and reputations they want to preserve. People inside them are harmed. Survivors speak. Institutions manage risk. And then individuals move on. Programs either close or rebrand. People responsible for harmful cultures land somewhere else. Everyone around them is encouraged to forget, while the person who was hurt is expected to keep carrying what happened.
We see versions of that pattern in universities, corporations, athletics, churches, schools, treatment facilities and families. The institution, reputation, and careers usually survive, while the people who were harmed are told to heal quietly.
And underneath all of it is a question that keeps returning whenever men accused of sexual violence face consequences: what will this do to their futures?
Their educations. Their careers. Their reputations. Their opportunities.
Jane Doe was twenty years old too.
Cornell was her school. She had a future there. She had an education she expected to continue and a life that didn’t include spending years explaining one night to police officers, university investigators, lawyers and strangers on the internet.
I don’t give a damn about preserving the future prospects of a man who commits sexual violence. I care about the future of the woman he harmed. If his own actions change the course of his life, that’s not a tragedy inflicted on him. That’s consequences.
Why is the woman’s future so easily reduced to aftermath?
That question matters far beyond Cornell.
It mattered when people worried about Brock Turner’s future. It matters every time an institution quietly moves someone along rather than confront what happened.
And it matters every time somebody says we have to be careful not to ruin a young man’s life before they spend even a moment considering the life of the woman he harmed.
Accountability is not ruining someone’s future. Actions have consequences. What happened to the person harmed has consequences too.
And I am tired of men treating rape culture as something women are responsible for talking about while men stand to the side congratulating themselves for personally not being rapists.
Men need to be talking about Jane Doe.
They need to be talking with other men about what was said in that fraternity chat. They need to be talking about the friends they keep, the things they laugh at, the things they allow to pass without comment and the men they continue protecting after they know better.
Not because women need men to mansplain sexual violence to them or validate what they already know. Men need to speak because men are part of the culture in which other men learn what they can get away with.
If your friend talks about women like objects, call him out. If he thinks getting a woman more intoxicated improves his chances of having sex with her, stop him. If he makes rape jokes, tell him they are not funny. If he tells you something that makes your stomach turn, believe what you just learned about him and act accordingly.
Don’t protect him because he’s your friend. Don’t excuse him because confronting him would be uncomfortable. Don’t leave the woman to deal with the consequences while you preserve the friendship. And if standing against him costs you that friendship, lose the friendship.
Women have been paying a much higher price for men’s silence for a very long time.
Jane Doe spoke.
Other women saw someone trying to expose her identity and stood beside her.
Men need to stand beside her too.
The question isn’t whether men know rape is wrong.
They know.
The question is what they are willing to do about the men around them before another woman is left carrying the consequences of everyone else’s silence.
Sources: AP News: Cornell investigation and special prosecutor; AP News: Cornell Title IX investigation and Jane Doe’s account; CBS News: Jane Doe’s police interview transcript; CBS News: Jane Doe timeline, messages and investigation; CBS News: Cornell Title IX records and fraternity Snapchat thread; Washington Post: Cornell fraternity messages; Reuters: Cornell rape allegations and campus response; CNN: Motherless.com and Telegram investigation; The Independent: Russell Brand and Dr. Oz at the MAHA Summit; MAHA Summit: 2026 agenda; AP News: Paris Hilton and the Stop Institutional Child Abuse Act.
Think of your mother. Your sister. Your wife. Your daughter. Your niece. Your favorite aunt. Your favorite teacher. Women who helped shape who you become. Their rape is okay?
Every woman is at least one of these roles, often more, in every man’s life. There are no exceptions. What man among us has the standing and the competence to discount those roles for any woman they encounter? To degrade their status to a penis target?
If our role as a man originated in prehistoric times as protector, when did predator of women become acceptable?
War is mass rape. We can rape nations as well as a woman and do it regularly. It is no accident that the invader’s “privilege” often takes the form of unrestrained rape of random women they have “conquered.”
We do, indeed, have a long way to go in educating our boys to become men who honor the privacy of all women—especially those who may be exceptionally vulnerable.
There is a word for men who operate contrary to that prescription: coward.
Respect should not be optional. Self-respect depends on behaving accordingly.
Thank you for making the point so pointedly.
We have a lot of work to do, don’t we?
100% this.