Nonconsensual sex is always wrong, but that doesn’t mean consensual sex is always right. Whether or not the student who would come to be known as Jane Doe — at the time under the influence of alcohol and ketamine, in an upstairs room full of fraternity brothers — had agreed at some point to sex has become a flashpoint in the discourse around Cornell University’s rape investigation. But regardless of where one falls on that debate, we should all be able to name the way a 20-year-old sophomore was treated by her peers as degrading and perverse, deserving of sanction regardless of the legal outcome of the case.
And while the dozens of frat brothers who were sent a Snapchat message advertising an intoxicated woman as “free pussy” were not under legal obligation to intervene, their broad refusal to do so should also be regarded as a moral failure. The lurid account has haunted the public imagination since The Cornell Daily Sun, a student newspaper, published the details in mid-September. While the alleged assault happened in 2024, its re-emergence this year has resulted in a steady drip of shocking and at times conflicting evidence into the public conversation.
Campus sexual assault isn’t new. Something about this case — the coarseness, the extremity, the failure of trusted institutions to forcefully respond — has triggered widespread revulsion, a sickening shared sense that a boundary no one thought to name has been broken. It has attracted a different kind of attention, as well — with some observers defending the perpetrators, some interrogating the rush to judge them.
There are discussions to be had about agency, responsibility and justice. But we don’t have the shared language to talk about what, exactly, went wrong.
Source: New York Times Top Stories · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing