We should get the facts and the law straight before holding a moral panic — but we should still demand a more moral society.
We should get the facts and the law straight before holding a moral panic — but we should still demand a more moral society.
M oral panics are not always bad. Sometimes, they represent an overdue societal correction against some entrenched injustice. But they are always dangerous, and we should always have a clear head about the fact that we are in one. So it is with the “Cornell Seven” case. Righteous anger can be a good thing when it flows from the evidence, but it should never be a tool for shouting down the evidence or ignoring the law. Both our moral sensibilities and the value of due process matter more, rather than less, when people are worked up to a fever pitch on social media.
“Jane Doe,” the thus-far anonymous alleged victim, now says that she was raped on October 19–20, 2024, by seven members of the same fraternity at Cornell, where she was a 20-year-old junior. The central issue in every rape case has to be this one: Did he do it? The surrounding facts may show aggravating or mitigating factors; they may or may not tell us bad things about the victim or other possible accomplices or bystanders. But the essential question has to come first: Did he rape her? If so, he’s a violent criminal and should be treated by the law and society like any other predatory felon. If not, we’re not dealing with a rape.
Of course, a non-rape can still be many sorts of morally dreadful behavior, but it doesn’t become rape just by the application of hot rhetoric. Sadly, after decades of assaults by progressives and feminists on traditional moral frameworks and rules, we don’t really have a coherent language to deal with immoral sexual behavior that doesn’t cross the line into crime. We’d be in a better place if we had those sorts of standards. It’s hard to teach your sons, or your daughters for that matter, moral rules if you treat the whole idea of moral rules with contempt.
As a matter of evidence, the “did he do it” question plays out differently with different kinds of rape. In the textbook stranger rape, where a woman didn’t know her assailant or at least didn’t consent to be at all sexually or romantically involved with him, there’s usually no debate about the crime, and the only question is whether you have the right man. In the textbook “date rape” situation, where there was sex at the end of a voluntary encounter, the issue is whether it was consensual or not. In that case, you know the man and must determine whether there was a crime. While the Cornell case is more elaborate and debauched than the paradigmatic date rape case, it comes down to the same basic question: Did they do it?
The State of the Evidence
Most of what we think we know about this case is hearsay or speculation. There is actually very little evidence in the public record thus far. So, while we can discuss what appears to be known or in dispute, it’s entirely possible that most of the people making confident assertions about those facts actually don’t have any idea what happened. I certainly don’t.
First, we have the complaint in a civil lawsuit filed two weeks ago in Manhattan by “Jane Doe,” the alleged victim. A civil complaint is just allegations, although it does give us Jane Doe’s side of the story as of September 2026 — albeit filtered carefully through her lawyers, none of it in her own voice. There’s a difference between “believe women” and “believe women’s lawyers.”
Second, the complaint cites just one item of corroborating evidence, that being a screenshot of a Snapchat message. While we are told that Jane Doe noticed bruising the next morning and medicated herself for a possible urinary tract infection, and that she filed a report with the university 19 days after the alleged assault, we are not told whether she ever sought medical attention or told anybody else what happened before then.
Third, we have the word of Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten, who has publicly described his bases for not bringing criminal charges when he investigated the case in 2024. According to Van Houten, Jane Doe provided a very detailed, six-page, single-spaced statement, which included “20 handwritten corrections,” leading Van Houten and his investigators to conclude that “that document was thorough, it was comprehensive, it was candid — it said exactly everything that happened.” If Van Houten is accurately describing the contents of that contemporaneous statement, it severely undermines Jane Doe’s current story and amply justifies him in not bringing criminal charges at the time. But we have not actually seen the 2024 statement, so that, too, is hearsay unless and until it becomes public. And Van Houten’s own incentives are to spin this case so that his reasons for not bringing indictments seem ironclad.
CBS News reporter Mahsa Saeidi now claims to have exclusively seen a transcript of a statement Jane Doe made to the Cornell police. Van Houten says that he never saw this statement.
Fourth, Cornell has released a series of statements on its handling of the case in November 2024, February 2025, September 21, 2026, and September 28, 2026, although these are vague and also carefully lawyered due in part to universities’ fear of crossing federal privacy laws by discussing the discipline of particular students. In the latest statement, Cornell recited the process it used (although in saying that “the complainant and respondents had the opportunity to testify and present evidence,” it doesn’t actually say whether they did so), and the university disputed specific accusations in the complaint, saying that it imposed
a range of sanctions, which included expulsions and suspensions from Cornell. None of the individuals charged were offered the opportunity to write essays as a sole consequence of their involvement. In addition, the involved fraternity chapter was closed in 2024 and remains barred from campus. Any suggestion that the university did not impose consequential punishments for those involved is false.
The complaint, while stating that Cornell conducted “at least twelve” hearings on the case, alleges that after “temporary suspensions” were imposed, the seven men “were afforded the opportunity to mitigate their conduct by submitting essays to CORNELL,” and otherwise charges the university with “failing to discipline or remove the Student Defendants . . . from campus afterwards, all the while sheltering them from speaking to law enforcement, and silencing victims.” Unlike the question of what happened in a roomful of drunk people late at night, the question of whether Cornell expelled anybody ought to be one that can be resolved by hard evidence.
We do not, thus far, have any statements from the seven accused rapists, or indeed from any witnesses. For all we know, there could be such statements that damn or exonerate the men; we just have no idea if they exist or what they might say.
The Facts, Known and Unknown
So, what did happen? Jane Doe’s complaint says that she started drinking vodka at her sorority house and was already intoxicated when she got to a bar, which served her at least one drink even though she was underaged and drunk (she is suing the bar). She then went to the fraternity house, where she alleges that one of the men “propositioned her with having a threesome with her and another one of his fraternity brothers.” Things went badly off the rails from there.
Did she agree? The complaint doesn’t say. It instead insists that, “in her drunken state, Plaintiff was incapable of consenting to this proposition.” That, however, is simply not the standard under New York law — at least, not the criminal law. The New York Penal Code offers three avenues to prove rape (other than the victim being underage). Third-degree rape under Section 130.25 punishes sex “without such person’s consent where such lack of consent is by reason of some factor other than incapacity to consent.” Second-degree rape under Section 130.30 requires proof that the victim was “incapable of consent by reason of being mentally disabled or mentally incapacitated.” First-degree rape under Section 130.35 requires proof that the victim was “incapable of consent by reason of being physically helpless.” As Sunny Hostin of The View — who is rarely a voice of sanity, but is also an experienced prosecutor of sex offenses — noted, New York law doesn’t consider a victim to be incapacitated, physically or mentally, simply because she was voluntarily intoxicated and had impaired judgment.
From here on, we have sharply conflicting accounts from Jane Doe herself. According to Van Houten, her 2024 statement shows that she consented not only to the threesome but also to the orgy that followed with five other frat brothers. If that’s true, it’s case closed for rape; if it’s not true but it’s what was in her statement at the time, Van Houten acted entirely correctly in refusing to bring charges. Moreover, if she said conflicting things then (with the chance to press criminal charges) and now (when she is suing the university and others for money in Manhattan), that would tend to suggest that the later account is the less credible one. The CBS account of Jane Doe’s statement to the Cornell police is less emphatic on this point but seems consistent with having consented to at least some of what happened:
The transcript shows she distinguished the initial sexual activity from what she says happened later, and when asked whether she was OK with the initial encounter, she said, “Yeah, as much as I can be because, again, I was super drunk when I got there. . . . But I was pretty OK with all of this.” Jane Doe added, according to the transcript, “And then, of course, I was being hit at the same time. Physically hit very, very hard.” . . . She said she didn’t remember the end of the night “where I was raped” and didn’t know how many people had sex with her. When describing what happened later in the night, the transcript says Jane Doe said, “I can say with 100% confidence I was raped.”
According to what we’ve been told about the 2024 statement, the two men who initiated the encounter were in fairly impaired condition themselves:
Jane Doe agreed—per her statement, she was “pretty okay with having this threesome” as well as titillated by the possibility that the two men might be sexually attracted to each other—but the encounter ended when both men proved too drunk to perform. Her friend lost his erection and fell asleep; the other man started dry heaving.
The second man seems not to be one of the seven accused rapists. Jane Doe and the men were drinking and snorting ketamine as things progressed, allegedly taking hits of the drug off one another’s sexual organs and other body parts. Jane Doe alleges in her complaint that she had never taken the drug before and that she was also given marijuana and rum. While her lawyers say (with conspicuous use of the passive voice) that she “was plied with alcohol and drugs to the point of intoxication,” they don’t actually indicate that this was involuntary.
Where things get particularly depraved is the 1:42 a.m. text message, sent by one of the defendants to a fraternity-wide Snapchat group, “announcing that there was ‘free p****’ upstairs, referring to Plaintiff.” That brought in more eager young men. Again, Jane Doe now claims that she didn’t consent to the continuing sex acts, but her 2024 statement apparently said otherwise. This went on for another four hours.
If the evidence available to him at the time was as he described, it is very hard to see how Van Houten could have charged the initial sexual encounters as rape, and understandable that he thought Jane Doe would be a very poor witness given her admissions of consent and voluntary intoxication and drug use. That said, an aggressive prosecutor might well look at these facts and try to make a case that she was sufficiently out of her mind on booze and drugs by a certain hour that a bunch of guys who only arrived on the scene late in the evening should have been on notice that she was in no position to consent to anything. But that is a hard case to make and one that could easily result in committing a lot of resources (the Tompkins County DA’s office has about ten prosecutors for a county of 105,000 people) to a case the appeals courts might throw out in a heartbeat.
Right and Wrong
So much for the law. Should we nonetheless denounce these men? I have no trouble whatsoever saying that everybody involved in this case behaved with outright moral depravity.
Put yourself in the shoes of one of the fraternity brothers, closing in on two in the morning, encountering a young woman who has been drinking and doing drugs for the past four hours and must be visibly drunk. In this situation, should you have sex with this woman? There’s an obvious answer that gets you out of all manner of troubles: no, because she’s not your wife. If that’s not a showstopper for you, she’s not your fiancée or your girlfriend, either. In order to even consider sex in this situation, you must first have accepted the moral parameters of a casual sex culture.
That’s the hard part of getting further into the moral questions: We’re already through the looking glass once you accept that it’s just fine for young men and women to have casual sex, or for that matter threesomes or more, with people they don’t even know very well. The casual sex culture will, typically, be lubricated with lots of booze. Things get much worse once drugs are introduced to the picture. And don’t get me started on the overall ickiness of a bunch of men wanting to have sex with one woman in each other’s presence. Once upon a time, we recognized that sense of ickiness as a symptom of moral conscience and decency, too.
Then we get to the part that dominates the current conversation: Do drunk young men have an obligation to look out for drunk young women with impaired judgment? I think so. But if you think it through, this assumption is fundamentally patriarchal. She was young, but they were young, too. She was drinking and taking drugs, but so were they. She made a bad decision that may haunt her, and so did they. What makes them bear all the responsibility? For my part, I am happy to answer that question with because they are men, and men have certain duties that women do not. By nature, they’re bigger and stronger than her. By nature, women suffer more consequences from ill-considered sex than men do. As a society, we should demand a certain level of chivalrous obligation from men toward women. But demanding that of men is not a blow against patriarchy; it is patriarchy. It is the belief that men have duties to protect women that go beyond treating sex as solely a question of consent, as if it is a commercial transaction.
And yes, that also means that a properly ordered moral society would demand that the bystanders here not just walk away, but intervene to get the girl home to bed where she belonged, whether she wanted it or not. But we don’t get men like that if we don’t raise men to have a sense of patriarchal responsibility and beat into their heads that a woman’s sex life is never any of their damn business.
Indeed, men should have duties toward women that define their role in society for many of the same reasons why we should demand a heightened level of obligation from mothers toward their children, who are weak and defenseless — and, in the same way, all women toward all children. We only just finished, in the Lindsay Clancy case, hearing from a disturbing number of women who reject that kind of ethic of responsibility.
Then there’s the question of whether the law should be changed. But that raises its own questions of paternalism versus libertine free will. Is it properly the law’s business to tell women that they are not allowed to get drunk and have casual sex? That would be the effective conclusion of changing the law on impaired judgment. And if a woman isn’t responsible for what she does when she’s had a few too many drinks, is the man still criminally responsible if he is in the same condition? While it would not be the worst thing to make the law modestly more paternalistic in this regard, I don’t think we want to go that far, but it is hard to have two different standards in the law for impaired judgment, one for men and one for women.
We undoubtedly will learn more as we go along to inform the question of whether the Cornell case was actually a crime or not. But what we have heard so far suggests fairly strongly that it took place in a moral wasteland.