Social media has exploded in the past few weeks with the sensational story of an alleged 2024 gang rape by seven members of a Cornell fraternity who teamed up sexually on a female student. One of the men even sent a lewd text message to summon others to have their turn at the young woman, who by then was heavily under the influence of drugs and alcohol. Celebrities are obsessed with the story, and politicians such as Kathy Hochul and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have joined in the demagoguery. A moral panic is on. Cooler heads should wait for more evidence.
Was it even a rape? We don’t know. No criminal charges were brought, and Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten says that this was because the alleged “Jane Doe” victim provided a detailed written statement at the time admitting that she consented to the whole thing. If so, the fact that she was drunk and using ketamine, and that the young men behaved with boorish depravity, is not a prosecutable crime under New York law. The full written statement has not been made public, but Van Houten has provided excerpts, and if the evidence available to his office was as he described, he made the right call.
Nonetheless, being an elected official amid a media feeding frenzy, Van Houten has reopened the investigation and will consider any new evidence. We hope that he brings charges if, and only if, he has been sincerely convinced that the evidence supports convictions under the law. The liberal laws of the Empire State demand that men be responsible for their decisions, but they also recognize that women have agency to make their own choices, too. Protecting them from their own decisions would require new and different laws that would raise other issues; doing so requires legislative debate rather than retroactive change by prosecutors.
The case went viral only this month, two years after the fact, when Jane Doe filed a civil suit in Manhattan seeking money damages from an array of defendants including Cornell, the bar that served her, and the national organizations of the fraternity and her own sorority. That she may be telling a different story now than she did before does not inspire confidence in her credibility. Additional reporting suggests that she was embarrassed socially after the incident and was convinced by her roommate that this should be treated as a rape. There remain many questions unanswered by anything but hearsay and speculation.
We have seen rape-charge hoaxes before, most notoriously in this setting in the 2006 Duke lacrosse team case, which took eight years to fully resolve. But victims of the trauma of sexual assault do sometimes come forward haltingly and in stages, especially when they may feel shame (justly or not) at some of their own decisions. Cases of this nature demand both a fair hearing for the alleged victim and careful, sensitive consideration of the evidence and the credibility of testimony on all sides. If hard cases make bad law, they make worse politics.
Stepping back from the criminal case, however, the picture of debauchery and moral callousness by all involved, especially the young men, rightly appalls. Cornell was correct to close down that fraternity. A culture of casual sex, especially when mixed with drugs and large amounts of alcohol, numbs the moral senses, degrades women, and hands men over to their basest instincts. That none of the men involved in or aware of what was happening removed an intoxicated and drug-addled young woman from this situation should be a cause for shame and reflection. A civilization that fails to demand more than that from its young men will get what it asks for.