Cornell Didn’t Just Fail One Woman. It Failed Everyone Watching.

6 min read

We wonder how we end up with the Epstein files, the Weinsteins, the Diddys, the Woody Allens, the Roman Polanskis, and why powerful men walk free. We forward the petitions, share the threads, say never again, and then we turn around and watch Cornell University, one of the most prestigious universities in the world, offer young men accused of gang-raping a 20-year-old woman the opportunity to mitigate their punishment by writing an essay.

We need to sit with that for a second, because what does an essay actually repair, remedy, or restore? What does it tell the next young woman who arrives at that campus about what her safety is worth? Sadly, we have become so accustomed to institutions failing women that we have started to process these failures the way we process bad weather—unfortunate, unpleasant, and ultimately unchangeable. I can’t believe I have to say this (I wish I could scream it), but it’s none of those things.

Here is what the lawsuit, filed on September 14 in the Manhattan Supreme Court, alleges: Jane Doe, the 20-year-old student, went to a Chi Phi fraternity house at Cornell in October 2024 to see a friend—one of the men accused. She says she was already drunk from a party at Cornell’s Tri-Delta house, and two men at the Chi Phi party pressured her into snorting ketamine—a powerful dissociative anesthetic. She was then sexually assaulted by seven men over the course of several hours. At 1:42 A.M., one of those men sent a message to a Snapchat group called “Chi Phi Actives” that read: “free pussy.” More men came to the room, and the assault continued, including the men snorting lines of ketamine off her naked body. The assault didn’t end until about 6 A.M. The entire time, her phone was on the other side of the room, and she felt, according to the complaint, that there was no way to escape.

She didn’t report it for three weeks, and when she did, her friends were the ones who had to encourage her to come forward, which tells us everything we need to know about what women have been taught to expect from the systems designed to protect them. She filed a report, and Cornell conducted an internal investigation that involved at least 12 hearings. In the end, there were no criminal charges filed. Only two of the seven men were expelled. The others were offered the chance to write essays as a form of mitigation. And Jane Doe? She withdrew from Cornell. She left home to attend that university, drawn by its promise of sisterhood, opportunity, and safety, and she left without her degree and without justice.

The outrage has now spilled past our group chats, many of us quietly seething. Yesterday, Florence Pugh wrote an extensive public letter saying she was “no longer tired—I’m enraged by schools protecting boys, in fear of their futures being wrecked. What about the life that those girls then have to endure, with the knowledge that his reputation is more precious than her truth?” Josh Gad put it a bit more plainly: “When we start setting a precedent that our girls and women can be brutally raped, and the resulting disciplinary action is to hand out (checks notes) ESSAYS (like it’s Bart Simpson being a lil’ rascal)…we have lost our fucking minds.” By Sunday night, that outrage appears to have worked, for now: Matthew Van Houten, the Tompkins County district attorney—whose office covers Ithaca, where Cornell is based, and who chose not to bring charges in 2024—said in a statement on September 28 that he is reopening the case and reconsidering his original decision, and will present it to a grand jury.

Let’s see how this one plays out. Because institutions that fail women rarely fix themselves without being forced to, and a grand jury announcement is not yet justice. Because we have been here before, and we know public pressure has a short memory even when the wounds don’t. Because for Jane Doe, the DA’s announcement is just that: It’s two years late and the beginning of a fight she should never have had to wage alone, not after such cruelty.

Some may call this an aberration, or say my skepticism is premature, but what it is, in truth, is that we have seen this to be the operating procedure. More than 90 percent of campus sexual assaults go unreported. Of those that are reported, only 12 percent result in expulsion, and less than 7 percent result in criminal charges. These aren’t statistics about a system that’s trying and falling short. No, this is about a system that has decided, at every structural level, that the comfort and future of the accused matters more than the safety and survival of the survivor. Because, well, you know, boys will be boys.

I call bullshit. And we all must collectively call bullshit on this system that has found it is acceptable to savagely hurt women and say, well, men can’t control themselves and their perversion, so let’s all just be understanding. And here is what makes me particularly furious about this Cornell case: the lawsuit alleges that Cornell knew. That police had already responded to a drug-related incident at the Chi Phi house approximately one week before Jane Doe was assaulted. It also alleges a culture of ketamine use at that fraternity house that university officials were aware of and didn’t address seriously. The very institution that was supposed to keep her safe had warning signs and didn’t act on them. And then, when the worst happened, it offered her assailants a pen and paper.

And my fury is running deeper and more personal now because I run a program for public high school girls from underserved communities in NYC. Young, promising scholars who are dreaming, fighting hardest to get into rooms like Cornell. Who do everything right, earn every opportunity, and dream of one day moving hundreds of miles from home with suitcases full of hope and intention. And what I’m supposed to tell them is that when they get there, the institution will protect them? That the sisterhood they join will hold them? That if something happens to them, the response will be proportionate to the harm? Cornell’s response was not proportionate to the harm. Its supposed accountability is a failure and an insult to women all over the world.

There’s a version of this conversation that asks us to reserve judgment until the lawsuit is adjudicated, to remember that these are allegations, to wait for the full legal process to play out. I’m not interested in that version of this conversation, because the facts that are not in dispute are already damning enough. Jane Doe is no longer in college. The men named in her lawsuit were given the chance to put pen to paper, call it accountability, and move on. That asymmetry isn’t a legal technicality; it’s the greatest moral failure, and it belongs to Cornell as much as it does to the men she has named in the suit.

We talk a great deal about the culture we are building on campuses and for the next generation. We talk about prevention training and bystander intervention and task forces and surveys. Cornell even launched a Presidential Task Force on Campus Sexual Assault after this incident, which is exactly the kind of response that looks like accountability on paper without requiring any in practice. A task force doesn’t give Jane Doe her degree back, does it? A task force doesn’t undo the weeks she spent carrying what happened to her alone, afraid, and distressed before she could bring herself to report it. A task force doesn’t explain to the next young woman who arrives at that campus, suitcase full of hope, why the men who allegedly raped another promising student were given an essay prompt while she was forced to withdraw, broken and robbed of the future she had earned.

So, yes, we get the documents, eventually, and every single time, the story is the same: the institution knew, the institution protected itself, and the woman was left to figure out what came next alone.