The Instagram storm began on Monday, September 28. “I did not go to Cornell. I went to a different Ivy in New York. Title IX betrayed me there too,” posted one Columbia graduate turned pro-Israel influencer. Another widely liked and shared post highlighted Emma Sulkowicz, the since-graduated Columbia student who says she was raped on campus; throughout 2014 and 2015, she carried a mattress from class to class as a form of protest. (Columbia’s Title IX office found no evidence for that claim, and no charges were brought either by the police or the Manhattan District Attorney.)
Another Instagram post, with over 350,000 likes as of this piece’s publication and first reported in UnHerd, calls to “remove their heads in a public setting,” showing the likenesses of the “Cornell Seven.” And everywhere, far beyond Columbia’s gates and our student bodies’ bespoke social media algorithms, women are gender-warring and declaring, “I am Jane Doe.”
We believe that this collective frenzy is deeply unproductive, neglects any and all facts of the case which disagree with the “preferred” narrative, and infantilizes women. It has also ushered in a climate on campus in which it is difficult to disagree with the maximalist position on what happened on October 19 and October 20, 2024, to one “Jane Doe” at Cornell’s Chi Phi frat house. (The woman bringing forth the allegations is doing so anonymously; “Jane Doe” is the pseudonym she uses in her September 16 lawsuit.)
The Problem With the Frenzy
The seeds had already been sown the week prior by The Cornell Daily Sun, the Upstate New York Ivy’s principal student-run publication. In a September 21 cri de coeur, entitled “Cornell Won’t, We Will,” the editorial board wrote:
Cornell has failed to protect its students. Cornell has failed to address the growing issue of sexual assault on campus with its pathetic task force. Cornell has failed the student allegedly raped by those seven men at Chi Phi in October 2024. Cornell has failed her. Cornell has failed us.
The Daily Sun also named the seven men who had participated, or been complicit, in the alleged gang-rape of Doe. By October 3, the top three rows of the campus daily were devoted to covering—from a single perspective—the “Cornell Seven.”
To date, the closest thing the Daily Sun has published to a “contrarian” position, in relation to its editorial bottom line, is an October 8 op-ed on how the incessant social-media posting reflects a lack of “respect for Jane Doe,” “respect for survivors of sexual assault everywhere,” and “respect for yourselves.” (The Daily Sun did not respond to Sundial’s request for comment.)
Such a crusade neglects the complexity of the matter.
Doe initially reported the incident to Cornell Police, the university’s safety force, three weeks after the incident had occurred and only once she had been disinvited from Chi Phi’s Halloween party. The seemingly progressive Tompkins County District Attorney then found that “Jane Doe’s statement described her participation in drug use and sexual conduct as voluntary, conscious, and consensual.” He declined to press charges. An array of statements uncovered from Doe herself following the alleged rape, further calls into question whether it’s prudent to jump to any definitive conclusion, no less the one many Columbians have: What occurred was absolutely rape, all women’s experiences are represented in what happened to Doe, and if you disagree you are deeply suspect.
The social media freak-out has had real-world manifestations as well. On the morning of October 5, a Cornell administration building was vandalized, the glass door smashed, and the walls graffitied: “At Cornell, rapists are prosecuted protestors are expelled.” Later in the day, students assembled at a campus rally, which, according to The Free Press’s coverage, featured signs such as “I don’t want to go to school with rapists.” Two days later, the Ithaca Common Council voted to halt all Cornell and Cornell student organization special event permits—because of an incident that occurred two years ago.
Columbians appeared to take inspiration from what happened in Ithaca. On October 8, a rally was organized by a group called “Epstein off Columbia,” where students protested outside the main gates on Broadway and 116th Street to “#stopsexualviolence from the frat house to the White House.” Per the Columbia Daily Spectator’s reporting, demands included: “end sexual violence end capitalism,” “arrest & convict the Cornell 7,” and “expel rapists not protesters!” There have since been similar rallies across the city, and on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
With all the evidence that suggests what happened to Doe heavily complicates the armchair verdicts that so many have reached, it’s worth taking a pause before jumping to wide-sweeping conclusions. And certainly before posting, sans reprieve, and attacking those who dissent. The fact that various journalists and commentators have exercised a healthy degree of skepticism over the Cornell case is a welcome development. This was not the case with the 2006 Duke Lacrosse case or the 2014 University of Virginia case, and both ended up being disproven as false allegations. While the case of the “Cornell Seven” shouldn’t automatically be put in the same bucket as Duke and UVA—with both, the entire story has since revealed itself to be fabricated, and this is not the case with Doe’s accusations—a rational sense of scrutiny has still not translated into discourse on college campuses and into our algorithms.
Why the Discourse Infantilizes Women
If it is indeed the case that a reasonably consensual but regrettable encounter occurred, it’s worth pondering the implication of this hysteria.
In a liberal society, women are allowed to make bad decisions, ones that may later reveal themselves as deleterious. The discourse, nonetheless, seems to omit the possibility that consensual sex, to the woman participating in it, can later reveal itself as traumatic and immoral. Consensual sex can leave someone feeling ashamed, degraded, disgusted with herself and the people she has slept with, and acts she has agreed to the night before.
The relentless Instagramming also claims to defend women while relying on a rather diminished conception of female agency. It is true that women are more physically vulnerable than men in most sexual situations. That is one reason why sexual encounters involving multiple men and one woman may deserve particular scrutiny, and one reason women have good reason to be cautious about whom they trust and the situations they put themselves in.
Camille Paglia, the heterodox feminist theorist, is of especial use here; if not from a legalistic perspective, a cultural one. “It’s absolutely infantilizing to women. It must stop,” she once said on our era’s ever-expanding perception of rape. “If you go to a fraternity house party with chaos going on in the living room area and a young man says to you, ‘Would you like to go up to my room?’ I’m sorry, ok, you are consenting to sex.” She continued, “It’s not right, of course, for anyone to impose themselves sexually on another person. Naturally. But women must realize they are now free. The sexual revolution has been won. Why are we coddling young women?”
Women are adults. Doe was, even if she fell one year short of America’s abnormally high drinking age. She is now suing a downtown Ithaca bar and her sorority for allowing her to drink. (The bar claims it did not sell “alcoholic beverages to any visibly intoxicated person,” as Doe claims in her suit, or to anyone underage.) And Cornell, as with the law, also infantilizes its students. Since 2018, the university has barred hard-alcohol consumption in Greek life, regardless of the age of the drinkers.
With a 21-year drinking age and Cornell’s hard-alcohol ban in place, and Doe circumventing both rules anyway, this itself proves that adults do have the freedom to make bad decisions. Yet that freedom becomes meaningless when we only recognize it when the decision ends well, and when the narrative is one which confirms the story we tell ourselves about America’s libertine sexual ethic always producing palatable results.
The case has also become a vessel for grievances that extend far beyond Cornell. Women who have had degrading sexual experiences or moments where they felt used or humiliated can easily see themselves in Doe. That sense of identification or compassion might be understandable, but it also means that people are often reacting to far more than the particular facts in front of them.
This case hit home for Christina because she’d been through an experience which later proved itself similarly degrading, albeit in different ways from Doe’s own. When she was 19 and 20, she entered a deeply traumatic romantic relationship with an older man. A significant part of the trauma was sexual, where she had participated in things she is now profoundly ashamed of.
But she also knows how tempting it is to look back and reinterpret the sex as coercion, and even rape.
Yet, what contributed to her participation in such acts was the larger rhetoric surrounding it—the seductive world of sexual liberation and taboo. At first it sounded cool, and doing it would mean she’s not a “prude,” but the aftermath left her feeling gross.
This helps explain why the rhetoric so quickly expands from seven men at Cornell to men generally. Once a viral allegation becomes a repository for every bad encounter, every resentment toward men, and every fear women have carried into their own relationships, disagreement begins to feel personal. Questioning the reaction to the Cornell case and Doe’s wide-sweeping claims about it starts to be mistaken for questioning women’s experiences writ large.
Beyond the “Cornell Seven”
Of course, one can go too far the other way. What happened that night was, to say the least, deeply unfortunate. To deny that, or insinuate that it was “based,” or even mock Doe as the “rapist,” as has been commonplace on social media, we find repellent.
The media framing of cases like this fuels a cycle of gender polarization, whether it’s the right-wing manosphere or the posts “in solidarity.” The danger now is that the most extreme voices on each side come to represent the entire debate. The arguments become retaliatory, and accountability and reason slowly devolve into tribal loyalty. What we want to avoid is the media frenzy turning into a self-reinforcing memetic cycle, where each side becomes more suspicious of the other, and the actual facts begin to disappear beneath emotional responses. It even transcends age, to an extent. One mother recently wrote in USA Today that when her daughter texted her a photo of her with her best friend from a frat house, she “thought of Jane Doe.”
The sexual revolution created a hyper-liberal, pro-sex culture that insists that ‘women can do whatever they want with their bodies.’ In the world that, for better or worse, follows from it, we cannot claim to stand for sexual freedom and then recoil in disgust when there’s a possibility that a young woman simply chose to exercise it.
Drug-fueled orgies may be morally appalling and violating to those who chose to participate in them—even the men participating in them—but we probably do not want to live in a society where that is illegal.
Between the opposing poles of a culture wedded to celebrating degeneracy while insisting we coddle women, and a conservative alternative equally totalitarian in its demands for “purity,” is a third way.
We don’t have all the answers. What is clear to us, though, is that such liberalism as practiced in the opening decades of the 21st century—all the sexual freedom and none of the consequences—does not work; neither do punitive and reactionary laws or unsubstantiated media frenzies. A more dignified sexual ethic would recognize the agency of men and women alike, and have a greater share of adults, including college students, making adult decisions. It also probably wouldn’t celebrate depraved and extreme acts for their own sake as “empowering,” even if they’re consensual.
No civil suit will get us there. Neither will student paper editorial boards publishing activist pieces, one crop of Columbians stymying debate and the others self-censoring, or one more woman posting, “I am Jane Doe.”
Ms. Ma is a junior at Barnard College studying English and philosophy. She is a staff writer for Sundial.
Mr. Mohammadi is a junior at Columbia College studying American studies. He is a deputy editor for Sundial.
The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Sundial editorial board as a whole or any other members of the staff.
I do not believe her.