Most sexual assaults in America are never reported to police, and few of those that are ever reach the national news. A generation ago, an allegation like the one now unfolding at Cornell might have been swept under the rug, if it surfaced at all. Instead it has drawn the attention of The New York Times and politicians across the nation, including the governor of New York. Why?
In October 2024, a sophomore at Cornell went to a party at the Chi Phi fraternity house, became intoxicated, and had sex with seven men. Last month she sued the university and her alleged assailants. The university has since expelled two of the men through its Title IX process. This week, the county district attorney, who had initially declined to bring charges, reopened their investigation after prompting from Governor Kathy Hochul, the media frenzy, and learning that their office never received the police interview in which the student, known in court filings as Jane Doe, said she was raped.
Meanwhile, the Times obtained hundreds of pages from the Title IX file that complicate the story. After the party, Jane described the night to her roommates without calling it assault. She later assured one of the accused men that nothing sexual that night had been illegal. What seemed to distress her most was the gossip—rumors calling her a slut, which she asked friends to deny. After being disinvited from the next Chi Phi party, she replied bitterly that, “The woman will always get the short end of the stick.” Jane then encountered an anonymous post online alleging that the fraternity had drugged and gang-raped a student. That, she told investigators, was “the first time I had ever heard the narrative change that I wasn’t a whore and that I was assaulted.” By November her story morphed into one in which she was the victim of rape, intoxicated past the point of consent.
Jane Doe certainly was a victim, but perhaps not of clear-cut sexual assault.
Readers predictably sorted into two camps. To many feminists, it is a referendum on the dangers of Greek life, and how trauma can lead to delayed or confused reporting of sexual assaults, frustrated by a system that blames victims. To many conservatives, it reads as regret laundered into an accusation that thwarts due process. To both sides, it reads as different forms of a miscarriage of justice, and a culture that does not know how to talk about the boundaries of consent.
Deciding what really happened is the job of investigators and, perhaps, a jury. But the public debate is not really about that one night. The story serves as the latest spectacle in a growing gendered divide in culture and politics, and two incompatible lies we tell young people about sex.
The first lie, told mostly by the cultural left, is that sex is morally weightless, or even something to be unbridledly celebrated, so long as everything was consensual. Young women are told, and shown in fictional media such as Sex and the City (written by men), that men and women experience casual sex in the same way, and that it would be an affront to feminism to not embrace women’s hard-won sexual freedom. Advocating for caution, prudence, and the necessity of emotional bond before entering into a sexual relationship is a fine line into slut-shaming, and a slippery slope toward regressive paternalism.
The second lie, told mostly by religious conservatives, is that the old order of stigma kept women safe, that shame is how a decent society protects its daughters. What went wrong began with the sexual revolution, they argue, and a culture that normalizes drinking, partying, and casual sex, rather than the conduct of particular men. A woman who goes upstairs at a fraternity party has written her own ending, and holding men to a standard of decency beyond what the law requires risks a slide toward the presumption of guilt.
Both sides hold a truth that exposes the other’s lies.
Feminists are right that many young women are exploited and misled, though much of that misleading has been brought on by their own side, in a way that enables exploitation. Modern culture told them, through countless television plots and campus orientation sessions, that consent exhausts the whole of sexual ethics. Then women discover that the sexual marketplace does not work that way. The gossip arrives. The men ghost them. They feel worse than they were promised they would, and too often they think they are the problem, because hookup culture seems to be working for everyone else. Wait, no it doesn’t, but isn’t it unfeminist of us to say so?
Conservatives, for their part, are right that men and women differ, and that sexual choices carry moral consequences. Regret, however sincere, is not a crime. Advising young women to be careful about where and how much they drink is no more victim-blaming than advising people to lock their doors or exercise street smarts at night. But shame and prudence have never been much of a shield. The era of chaperones for mixed-gender events was also the era in which allegations like this one were swept under the rug, and silence remains the norm: in the Justice Department’s National Crime Victimization Survey, roughly four in five rapes and sexual assaults of female college students went unreported to police.
Jane Doe’s timeline shows how stigma works in practice. Her first instinct was not to seek help but to ask her friends to deny that the night had happened. Silence protected her reputation for a while; eventually, becoming a victim restored it. Neither served the truth, and both continue to enable the—to use a technical term, as a psychologist—absolute clusterfuck of drinking culture and hookup culture on college campuses. At least 50 percent of sexual assaults among college students involve alcohol.
When consent is the only moral vocabulary on offer, every bad sexual experience must be sorted into one of two bins: consensual, and therefore your own business and your own fault, or nonconsensual, and therefore a crime. Jane Doe’s own words capture it: she could be either a “whore” or a victim, with nothing in between. The sexual revolution has left us without language for a night that was degrading, reckless, or cruel without being criminal, and no way to be wronged without first being cleared of promiscuity.
Psychologists have termed “concept creep“ to describe the process by which terms like trauma and abuse—or sexual assault—expand to cover ever-milder experiences. Part of what drives that creep may be the psychological weight carried by moral responsibility, particularly for sensitive sexual topics. The normal social feedback loop by which people adjust their behavior becomes disrupted by shame or privacy, and people often reach for simpler black-and-white narratives of victim and perpetrator.
Men have been misled as well. The same culture that promised women sexual liberation implied to men that nothing is owed beyond consent: not discretion, not gentleness, not basic regard the next morning. One of the accused later apologized to Jane, writing that he had been too drunk to stop things before they got out of hand. It was an admirable confession, but not without risk. In the totalizing moral calculus of victim and perpetrator, admitting any wrongdoing, especially with alcohol muddying the waters of consent, could be ruinous. When drunk sexual immorality invites men to be accused of being the worst sort of predator, and invites women to be accused of being either victims or sluts, every incentive points away from candor. She has reason to self-victimize; he has reason to deny everything and diminish her. Each account becomes an act of self-preservation.
Due process, meaning the presumption of innocence, is among the great achievements of liberal civilization. But when many people share a room, as witnesses or participants in an ethically questionable act, each can assume that intervening is someone else’s job—what psychologists call the bystander effect. Perhaps that context is what most unsettled so many readers—the image of a house full of young men in which no one seems to have thought it his place to say “this might be wrong.” Whatever happened that night, this diffusion of responsibility and the gossip that followed reflects a failure of culture that no institutional policy could have prevented.
Truthfulness is a cooperative behavior, and cooperation survives only where social norms make honesty cheaper than spin. The first step is telling young people the truth about human nature and the moral underbelly of sex, even when it flatters neither side. If a young woman could say that a night was humiliating and that she regrets it without becoming a pariah, she would not need the word “rape” to recover her standing, and when the word was used, it would carry its full weight. If men were held to standards of decency that extend beyond the threshold of legality, fewer nights would end in either regret or crime. And if both accuser and accused were treated as persons rather than symbols in a culture war, the question in the room could shift from whose side one is on to what actually happened.
