On September 16, a woman filed a civil lawsuit alleging that seven members of Cornell University’s Chi Phi fraternity drugged and sexually assaulted her at the frat house in October 2024. Cornell is an Ivy League school, a place that sells itself on excellence and character. The details are hard to read, and they get worse.
The woman alleges she was pressured into snorting ketamine, smoking marijuana and drinking alcohol until she was completely incapacitated. She says she was then raped for more than four hours. The complaint alleges the men invited other fraternity members to join in through a group chat. The message reportedly said, “FREE PUSSY”, posted while a woman lay unconscious and was being sexually assaulted. She was 20 years old.
She went to campus police, and Cornell says it ran its own investigation. The seven men were placed on temporary suspension the same day, and, would you believe it, they were then given the chance to mitigate their conduct by submitting essays. Cornell denies that was the only consequence, and it is true that the chapter was barred from campus and none of the men faced criminal charges. But seriously, an essay.
One other fact is that Cornell has also expelled students involved in Palestine protests. It appears that a placard during peaceful protests gets you a harsher response than being one of seven alleged rapists, and not every one of them was expelled. I would like someone in charge to explain that math, “cause the math ain’t mathing”.
Now, after the lawsuit and the outcry, Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten says the case will go to a grand jury. He called the behaviour of certain members “disgusting and morally reprehensible.” However, there is a complication. He says her first sworn statement did not allege she was drugged against her will or gang raped and described the drug use and sexual conduct as consensual. Her lawyer counters that apart from her first contact with campus police, no one trained in interviewing rape survivors ever spoke to her. Any court will have to weigh those competing accounts, and the men are entitled to the presumption of innocence. But anyone who has worked with survivors knows that a first statement, made weeks after the event, by a young woman who may have been unconscious for much of it, is rarely the whole story. The question worth asking is why nobody went back and asked properly.
Here is what I cannot get past. Seven men allegedly did this. Many more were reportedly in that group chat. “Not all men”, we always say. Fine. But every man who read those messages and did nothing, who did not call for help, did not knock on a door, did not tell the others to stop, is part of the story too. They may not have laid a hand on her physically but they were not man enough to end it. Their silence is deafening, and it says something about the world that produced them.
That world is not getting better. In 2026, sexual assault, sexism and misogyny are on the rise. Read the comments under any article about this case and the same lines appear, mostly from men and, depressingly, from some women. She shouldn’t have been drunk. She shouldn’t have taken drugs. Why did she put herself in that situation? Why is it always the woman who has to govern herself, and never the men who should just stop raping?
Australia should not feel smug about any of this.
The 2021 National Student Safety Survey found that one in twenty students had been sexually assaulted in a university setting since starting university. That works out at an average of 275 students every week. Experts have warned the true figure could be higher, since the survey ran during lockdowns. Assaults cluster in the places that should be safest.
Student accommodation, clubs and societies each accounted for roughly a quarter of the most serious incidents, and two in three victims knew some or all of the perpetrators. These are the residential colleges and social circles that operate a lot like a fraternity.
The reporting numbers should worry us most. Only 5.6 per cent of students who were sexually assaulted made a formal complaint to their university. Why would they, when they see how it often goes? The third National Student Safety Survey is running right now, until October 12. Universities will publish the results, express their deep concern and promise to do better. We have heard it all before, and sadly nothing changes.
Women are furious because we have had enough. We are tired of being told to carry the risk, watch our drinks, stay in groups, avoid the ‘frat house’, and then be blamed when it happens anyway.
Every new detail from Cornell suggests a wider culture, one where a group of men could allegedly treat an unconscious woman as a joke, and the people in charge assumed a few essays would do. It is time institutions, and the men in those group chats, stopped treating this as somebody else’s problem.