Shame On You, Cornell

I have tried to find a calm way to write about what happened at Cornell, and I can't, so I'm not going to pretend.

In October 2024, a 20-year-old student walked into the Chi Phi fraternity house in Ithaca. According to the lawsuit she filed last month, she was pushed into taking ketamine and other drugs, and then seven members of that fraternity raped her. The lawsuit says that while it was happening, one of them sent a message to the fraternity's group chat inviting his brothers upstairs, describing her in language so vile I refuse to print it. Read that again and tell me they saw her as a human being. They didn't. They treated her like an object, something to be passed around a house and advertised to their friends.

I know the “men” named in the suit haven't been convicted, and I know at least one of them denies it, and a jury can decide what they did. What I don't need a jury for is what Cornell did afterward, because Cornell did it in plain sight.

She did everything we beg survivors to do. Less than three weeks later, on November 8, 2024, she walked into Cornell University Police and reported it, and Cornell went on to run a Title IX investigation that lasted months and included more than 50 interviews. After all of that, not one arrest was made and not one charge was filed, and not one of those “men” has ever had to look a judge in the eye. She left Cornell, the school her lawyer calls her dream school, while they got to keep their freedom.

Then her lawsuit revealed something disgusting: the accused “men” were allegedly given the chance to soften their punishment by writing essays, as if an alleged gang rape were something you could reflect your way out of in a few double-spaced pages.

Cornell swears that isn't true. The university says essays were never anyone's only consequence, and its president reportedly told student government that two of the “men” were expelled, two were suspended, one graduated before he could be punished, and two were found not responsible. If that's the truth, then I want to know where it was for the last two years, and why Cornell sat on it until a lawsuit and a national firestorm dragged it into the open. The university hid behind privacy law while a survivor carried all of this alone, and now it wants credit for being tough. That isn't discretion, and from where I sit, it looks a hell of a lot like a cover-up.

What makes me enraged is that, by Cornell's own account, its panel looked at the evidence and found some of these “men” responsible, enough to expel two of them, and yet the criminal justice system did nothing at all. The Tompkins County district attorney now admits his office never independently investigated.

If seven “men” did this to a woman in a parking lot, they would be in handcuffs before sunrise. Put it inside a fraternity at an Ivy League school, though, and somehow it becomes a code-of-conduct matter, handled behind closed doors and quietly buried. Expulsion is not justice for gang rape, and getting kicked out of Cornell is not prison. If these “men” are guilty, they belong rotting in a cell, not at some other college with a fresh start and a clean record.

And look at how fast the people in charge moved once they were embarrassed. She sued on September 14, and within days The Cornell Daily Sun, a student newspaper, broke the story. On September 28, the district attorney suddenly decided the case was worth reopening, and by October 2 Cornell had agreed to an outside review and Governor Kathy Hochul, saying she had lost faith in the local DA, had handed the case to Attorney General Letitia James.

That is the lesson every student should take from this. The system does not move for survivors; it moves to protect itself. It took college kids running a student paper to do what police, prosecutors and one of the richest universities on earth couldn't be bothered to do.

Shame on Cornell, shame on every official who looked at this and shrugged, and shame on everyone who decided her suffering was a public relations problem to be managed.

Jane Doe trusted the system, and the system failed her in every way it could. It only woke up because the rest of us started screaming, so we have to keep screaming until it stays awake.

-Luke H. Johnson