Student safety advocates in the US call the start of the fall semester at universities “the red zone”. Fraternities, sororities and off-campus bars throw parties welcoming students back to school. It’s supposed to be fun, but it can also be dangerous: more than 50% of sexual assaults that occur at colleges happen during that six- to 10-week period.
It was mid-October of 2024, during the red zone and just before a deluge of Halloween celebrations, when, a former Cornell University student says, she was gang-raped by a group of fraternity brothers. Recent attention on these allegations sparked widespread outrage this week, reviving a contentious national debate about how authorities respond to allegations of sexual assault on US college campuses.
The anonymous young woman at the center of the story – known as Jane Doe in court documents – filed a civil lawsuit last month, accusing seven men of plying her with drugs and alcohol and assaulting her over the course of seven hours at their fraternity house. The woman originally went to the house to visit a friend; she claims she arrived intoxicated and willingly took the party drug ketamine with the men. Later, she says, she became incapacitated by the drug, which is a dissociative anesthetic, while the men “commanded” her to keep snorting it.
Jane Doe also alleges that the Ivy League university’s ensuing internal investigation was too lenient toward the men. None have ever been charged with a crime. Two were expelled for their misconduct, while five were given lighter punishments: writing an essay, attending a workshop or serving a suspension. Some still attend the school. All seven men denied wrongdoing during Cornell’s investigation.
Public outcry over the case reached a breaking point on Thursday, when the New York governor Kathy Hochul stepped in to appoint a new special prosecutor to investigate the incident, which the original district attorney declined to prosecute. Now, state attorney general Leticia James will decide whether or not to take the case to a grand jury, which would decide whether there was enough evidence to charge the men with a crime.
In a statement, Cornell University defended its investigation of the incident. It closed the fraternity chapter involved and barred the group from campus. “We will continue to examine and strengthen our policies to ensure we are doing all we can to foster a culture where sexual misconduct is never tolerated, those who come forward are supported, and individuals found responsible through our processes are held accountable,” the statement read. (Cornell directed the Guardian to this statement when reached for comment.) After intense public pressure, the university agreed to hire external, independent lawyers to investigate whether its handling of the allegations was appropriate.
Matthew Van Houten, the Tompkins county district attorney, has said that he did not pursue the case two years ago because the woman’s first account to police did not say that she was drugged, incapacitated or forced into sex. He later said he did not read her full interview, only a shorter statement written by campus police and signed by Jane Doe. Her full statement included the sentence: “I can say with 100 percent confidence that I was raped,” but this did not make it into the final statement sent to Van Houten.
In the immediate aftermath of the incident, the woman exchanged friendly messages with some of the men, expressing concern about rumors that were spreading on campus about the event. She also maintains that the alleged assault began as a consensual encounter. It is common for sexual assault survivors to downplay their experiences as a coping mechanism. False rape accusations are incredibly rare.
One of the most damning pieces of evidence in the lawsuit involves screenshots of Snapchat messages sent in a fraternity group chat; at one point, an alleged participant named Jonathan Newell referred to Jane Doe as “free pussy”, advertising the alleged assault as it unfolded.
What upsets many women most about this case is how normalized such actions seem. About one in four undergraduate women experience sexual violence during college; 60% of rapes involving university students involve perpetrators who are known to the victims. Last year, a survey of female undergrads at Cornell found that 35% of respondents experienced “nonconsensual sexual contact involving physical force, threats of force or incapacitation”. That figure was up from 23% in 2023.
“There are so many people in America who find this so familiar,” said Lisa Wade, an associate professor at Tulane and author of American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus. “Not just the incident itself, but also the response by Cornell.”
As the case plays out in the courts, the so-called “Cornell 7” have become the literal faces of the enduring prevalence of sexual assault on campus, and the institutional failure that allows that behavior to flourish. Their names and images are plastered on social media posts calling for accountability. The Cornell Daily Sun, a student newspaper that has doggedly covered the lawsuit, led the way with an op-ed column titled “Cornell Won’t, We Will”. The piece began by listing the alleged assailants’ names. “We know who you are and we refuse to let you benefit from this University’s concealment,” wrote the editorial board.
A former South Park writer named Toby Morton launched a website detailing the specifics of what Jane Doe alleges each man did to her. Morton wrote on Instagram that he plans to sponsor billboards about the case. The actor Florence Pugh weighed in, pleading on social media for men to be “as horrified and as sickened as us [women]”. She added that “college/schools/universities repeatedly fail women around the world [building] men [who] get taught through time and time again that they can do extreme harm and won’t be harmed in return”.
When content creator and commentator Michael Tracey threatened to release the name and personal details of Jane Doe – going against decades of established journalistic norms for reporting on alleged rape victims – women flooded TikTok in her defense. The Spartacus-style rallying cry of “I’m Jane Doe” hit feeds, with users sharing stories of their own experiences with sexual assault. “All of us women are jane doe, and we will all continue to ban [sic] together for her,” reads the caption of one clip liked more than 267,000 times.
College admissions advisers told the New York Post that some of their high school clients pulled their early decision applications to Cornell because they would not feel safe in the community.
This outpouring recalls the early days of #MeToo, a global hashtag campaign against sexual abuse ignited in the wake of initial allegations against convicted rapist and former film producer Harvey Weinstein. But Wade, the Tulane professor, said she sees this case as “metabolizing the failure of #MeToo”, which promised a so-called reckoning in 2017. Ten years later, manosphere influencers teach their followers to see women as sex objects, and Americans re-elected a man who infamously bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy”.
Sexual assault survivors have long faced victim-shaming. Jane Doe’s narrative is complicated, and the New York Times reported that the alleged victim did not realize she had been raped until she read someone else describe the event as such on a social media forum; she had texted one of the accused that: “At the end of the day non of the sexual stuff was illegal and honestly i really liked being w u and matt.” This is not an unusual trauma response: it is common for victims to continue relationships with their abusers, as it provides some semblance of control over the situation.
But the messy timeline emboldens bad actors and conservative commentators who seek to advance an anti-woman agenda. These young men have not been convicted of a crime, and it would be difficult for prosecutors to convict them of rape due to a New York state legal loophole that does not consider a victim to be incapacitated if she willingly contributes to her own intoxication. (Jane Doe stated she arrived at the fraternity house drunk and willingly took substances with the men, though she also says they coerced her into snorting ketamine.)
The Free Press, a vocally “anti-woke” publication run by Bari Weiss, chastised the “court of public opinion” for “already puni[shing]” the Cornell 7. Dasha Nekrasova, one of the edgelord hosts of the Red Scare podcast, spent much of this week trying to shame Jane Doe and calling women who are upset over the lack of accountability in this case “deranged”.
“There’s a sadness, cynicism and deep disappointment that is also driving the response to this,” Wade said. “#MeToo happened, and nobody cared. Here it is again.”
Elizabeth Armstrong, a professor at the University of Michigan who studies gender inequities in universities, says that there have been “big waves of outrage” over sexual assault on campuses since the 1980s, when Mary Koss first coined the term “date rape”. The last national dialogue took place around 2015, when a Columbia University student carried a mattress around campus for a performance art piece based on her sexual assault.
More than a decade later, the issue has only gotten worse. The Trump administration has gutted Title IX protections, which prohibit sex-based discrimination in universities that receive federal funding, and limited the definition of what constitutes sexual harassment under it. Just this week, Trump announced that universities no longer have to investigate assaults on students that take place off-campus. (The Cornell case occurred at a frat house.) “We have an administration that is actively rolling back protections for student survivors,” said Amanda Walsh, deputy director for external affairs at the Victim Rights Law Center.
But Walsh, who works closely with survivors, says that gen Z women have much less internalized shame over their assaults than previous generations, who were often taught that women invite sexual assault through their actions. “It feels like the focus has shifted away from talking about what the woman did, and more appropriately to exploring the behavior of the men involved,” she said. “I always admire how much they focus on the behavior of the person who harmed them, rather than asking: ‘What could I have done differently? Why did this happen to me? I see college students really pushing back against that.”
The Cornell case has revived discussions on abolishing Greek life, the student social club system that is behind fraternities and sororities in the US. This week, a Vogue article called for universities to “ban frats once and for all”. It’s not unprecedented: the Pennsylvania liberal arts college Swarthmore did so in 2019, after campus publications leaked racist, sexist and homophobic documents written by fraternities. “That would be a really real change, but I doubt that will happen,” said Armstrong.
Elizabeth Allan, who leads the Hazing Prevention Research Lab at the University of Maine, added: “It’s important for everyone [in Greek life] to think how these groups might reflect larger societal norms and expectations and the ways in which [bad] behavior is reinforced.”
Most of all, Walsh worries how all the attention on this case will affect Jane Doe, and the countless other anonymous victims who are sure to come after her. “I’ve been in this field long enough to know that however much support she receives is exactly how much negativity she’ll get on the other side,” Walsh said. “At this point, with the political moment and online response, it almost feels like supporting a survivor of sexual violence feels political or partisan, which is wild.”
