The New York Times pushed another alert to my phone yesterday about the Cornell case. Jane Doe, the paper reports, wrote to faculty that she felt disbelieved by the university’s president after she reported being raped. The Times has been chasing this story for weeks, and the rest of the national press has followed in lockstep. What almost none of the coverage addresses is the record itself, which is far more complicated than the headlines suggest.
Some of the facts are not in dispute. In October 2024, a 20-year-old Cornell sophomore went to a party at the Chi Phi house. A fraternity official told her beforehand that she should not go, and fraternity members, her friends, and she herself all said as much to Cornell’s investigators. She went anyway. She later said on a recorded call that she was “10 shots deep” when she arrived. She took ketamine at the house, and a sexual encounter with a group of young men followed. The local district attorney declined to bring charges in 2024. According to her lawyer, Cornell’s Title IX process ended with 2 of the men expelled and the other 5 suspended. Now that she has filed a civil suit naming all 7, the criminal case has been handed to New York Attorney General Letitia James as a special prosecutor.
In the days afterward, she kept texting the men. In texts first published by TMZ, she told one of them, “Our body, our choice.” She told Cornell’s Title IX investigators that she did not think of herself as a victim until she saw the night described online as a gang rape. Her lawyer says she was in denial and still processing what happened. People do process trauma in strange ways. However, a young woman invoking the feminist movement’s favorite slogan to defend her own choices in the days after is not a detail we should ignore.
None of this excuses the young men. The messages passed around the fraternity’s Snapchat group that night were vile, and no gentleman would have sent them or answered them. Every one of those men should have known better than to be in that room. Every one of them chose to drink, chose to do drugs, and chose to participate. They have earned the consequences Cornell imposed.
What I cannot accept is the idea that only one side of that room made choices. She was warned and went anyway. She chose to drink heavily before she ever arrived, and her own texts afterward describe at least part of that night as something she wanted. As her faculties slipped away, theirs were slipping away too. Somehow, the young men are to be crucified for ungentlemanly behavior, while the young woman is held to no standard of conduct at all. Saying so has become nearly unspeakable, because once the word “rape” enters the conversation, every bit of her own agency is supposed to vanish.
There are real rape victims in this country — women who never consented to anything, who were attacked, and who deserve to be believed and defended. I am not shifting blame away from them. I am questioning whether this case belongs in that category, and I think the record gives a reasonable person every reason to ask. Lumping a night like this together with those cases does real victims no favors. It cheapens what happened to them.
We were told for decades that men and women are exactly equal and should be treated exactly equally. We were told that holding a door for a woman was condescending, that chivalry was a relic, and that young men had no business thinking of themselves as anyone’s protector. We were told that a woman’s body was her own business and that sexual liberation was a moral good. Then, when something goes wrong in the exercise of all that liberation, we revert instantly to a standard that holds the men wholly responsible and the women not at all. Young men notice this. Many of them now feel like the designated villains in every story, and we act surprised when they turn sullen and combative.
The press has its own reasons for loving this story, and those reasons have more to do with fraternities than with the facts. For years, the media and universities have wanted Greek life gone. The Chi Phi fraternity is a convenient villain. The same night in an off-campus apartment would not have generated as much controversy.
The deeper problem is not the fraternity. It is a society that embraced hedonism, sneered at self-control, and mocked chivalry as patriarchal misogyny. If those seven young men and that young woman had been raised with the “patriarchal” values the progressive left so despises, none of them would have engaged in that behavior.
Christians have always understood the consequences of society rejecting the Judeo-Christian social and moral ethic. A sexual ethic built on consent alone, with no higher law above it, cannot tell anyone what they ought to want — only what they are permitted to take. A growing number of atheists now admit that the West functioned better with a Judeo-Christian moral ethic than it does without one. You can have that ethic, or you can have a world where the most uninhibited take what they can get and everyone sorts out the blame in court afterward. Cornell is one of the results of the latter.
Train up your sons to treasure young women, to protect them, and to exercise self-control. Train up your daughters to understand that modesty and self-control are virtues, not oppression. Teach all of them not to do drugs. Teach them that loving your neighbor means doing unto others as you would have them do unto you. We need to go back to a moral ethic that tells young men and young women alike that their choices matter and that every one of them is responsible for the choices they make.
