On Sunday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) spoke at a town hall hosted by More Perfect University and detailed the allegations by a former Cornell student identified as Jane Doe, who alleges she was drugged and sexually assaulted by multiple fraternity members two years ago:
Just about two years ago, seven men drugged and gang raped a 20 year old woman. They lured her into a fraternity house. They drugged her with ketamine. They then posted to a group chat that she was in capacity, and seven men took turns gang raping her for seven hours. Their fraternity knew this was reported to Cornell University, and after looking into this matter, they expelled two of them and made the rest write essays as their form of punishment.
Everything AOC said was a lie. The woman who is now alleging in a civil suit that she was gang raped at Cornell, that she was lured in, that she was given ketamine against her will — none of this happened. But that’s the point. Facts don’t matter. Only the narrative matters, obviously. And the narrative is that women must never be treated as responsible adults. It’s not possible.
The seven Cornell men who decided to join in on a gangbang of a 20-year-old woman at a frat house are disgusting. They participated in evil, but there is literally zero evidence that they raped the Jane Doe in question. We know that because we have her original criminal report to the police, but none of that matters because the narrative has now outpaced the facts.
What’s worse, we’re seeing mob justice enforced by the legal authorities. We’ve seen this before. Derek Chauvin, the cop at the center of George Floyd’s death, was railroaded and is now going to spend enormous chunks of his life in prison. We saw this with the Duke lacrosse case, where the men acted badly, but not criminally.
Here’s the rule: if you’re a member of a group deemed a victimized minority group by the Left, even if you’re a member of a statistical majority like, say, women who are a statistical majority in the United States, that means that you are a victim, even if you can’t show any evidence that you are a victim.
Even if you told the cops and in text messages that you weren’t a victim. There’s also no statute of limitations. We’re supposed to take you at your word. Consent is the only thing that matters. So even if nothing bad happened, but then if you come around two years later and you totally flip your story, we still have to take you at your word.
The men in the Cornell 7 case violated basic morality. And the woman and law enforcement officers who are now trying to enforce her ever-changing version of the story are violating not only basic morality, but basic standards of Anglo-American law. This is insane.
So Kathy Hochul, New York’s governor, has decided to step in under public pressure, according to The New York Times.
Hochul said, “New information has raised serious questions about how this case was handled, and I’ve lost faith in the Tompkins County D.A.’s ability to fairly oversee it.” She said the young woman at the center of this case deserves to know that every fact will be examined and justice pursued.
So what is at the center of this apparent new revelation? She said in her original statement to the police that, with “One hundred percent confidence, I was raped.” The problem is that she apparently doesn’t know the definition of the word rape, because in the same exact report, she described a series of consensual events. Lawyers for at least three of the seven men named in Jane Doe’s lawsuit have issued statements denying criminal wrongdoing.
In hours of interviews during the university investigation in the winter of 2024, the seven men denied wrongdoing. Four said they had consensual sexual interactions with Jane Doe and three denied participating in sex altogether. So The New York Times did a long, deep dive, and it demonstrates how Jane Doe’s story shifted. Remember, the governor of New York is stepping into a dead criminal case based on nothing except public pressure.
Literally no crucial new information has emerged. None. All that happened is that the woman in question filed a civil lawsuit and completely flipped her story. Here is the story from The New York Times:
There was a crucial three-week period between the fraternity party and Jane Doe’s decision to take her story to the campus police, accusing multiple fraternity brothers of sexual assault and alleging that she was coerced into taking ketamine. What had not been known publicly until now were the detailed filings collected during the private Title IX proceedings: hundreds of pages of emails, text messages, photographs and interviews with Jane Doe, her friends, and those accused.
So the day after this event occurred, according to her original criminal report to the police, she was intoxicated. She went voluntarily to the frat house to meet a dude. She voluntarily engaged in sex with him. She voluntarily engaged in sex with others. When she asked them not to do things, they stopped.
That is all in her original police report. The next day, apparently one of the defendants wrote, “I just wanted to apologize for how things went down the other night.” He said he and another defendant both felt terrible for being too under the influence of drugs and alcohol to “shut it down and kick people out before it got out of hand.”
She replied and reassured him: “At the end of the day, none of the sexual stuff was illegal. And honestly, I really like being with you.” Okay, but then what happened? Her reputation started to follow her around campus. Basically, people found out that she had engaged in this risky and disgusting sexual behavior.
This doesn’t mean the men are free of the moral consequences of their actions. But this is the reason why she was upset. Not because she was raped, but because her reputation was getting around town. So she was uncomfortable. She didn’t give any indicators of “no.” And her plan was that she would pass out and then later she could retroactively charge them with rape.
None of this amounts to sexual assault. There’s evidence that a woman did something that was deeply risky, and the men took advantage of the fact that she was doing something deeply risky.
There is no evidence of rape. No responsible prosecutor, based on the evidence available, including text messages, would have brought a case.
It doesn’t matter to the Left. She must have been raped. Abdul Rahman El-Sayed, the Democratic Senate candidate in Michigan, said, “A young woman bravely reported she was sexually assaulted in 2024 by seven men at their fraternity. But instead of protecting her, Cornell University protected her abusers, letting them off with a slap on the wrist. It’s outrageous and a failure of both the institution and societal norms that consistently make light of sexual assault. The law isn’t helping. New York’s voluntary intoxication loophole makes it nearly impossible for survivors to seek justice if they drink or use substances prior to an assault. Because of this loophole, Jane Doe assailants may never be held accountable under the law.”
It is not a voluntary intoxication loophole. New York’s law says that if you get drunk and you voluntarily have sex with someone, then they cannot be charged with rape just because you were drunk. The law says that if they intoxicated you against your will, that is a different story.
But if we are now going to charge every person with rape who had sex with a drunk person while they themselves were drunk, or while the drunk person said that they wanted it and then later said they didn’t want it — I’m sorry to tell you how life actually works, but you’re going to have to shut down every single bar in the country if that is the way you want the law to work.
That is the only way to prevent “rape” if this is how you define rape. El-Sayed says, I want my daughters to grow up in a world that is safe. Women deserve to feel safe on campus. That means perpetrators must be held accountable for violating women to the fullest extent of the law. And we need federal action to ensure that those who commit sexual assault and the institutions that protect them face consequences.
No one is harsher with regard to rape than I am. I believe that rapists should be castrated or executed, not given five years in prison. And maybe I would feel better if we just said that these guys were members of Hamas. If we said the members of Hamas, then presumably then they’d be off the hook because, you know, free Palestine.
My colleague Matt Walsh is exactly right. He says, “You can perfectly understand the case of the Cornell 7 and the reaction to it once you understand that feminists fundamentally reject the idea that women can ever be truly responsible for any wrongdoing of any kind.” Which is why, when there’s a disgusting drug- and alcohol-fueled orgy, the woman is somehow automatically the victim and the men are somehow automatically responsible.
The drunk men have just as valid a claim to being raped as the drunk woman. But feminists aren’t using normal logic. They’re using feminist logic, which again starts with the presupposition that women, by definition, cannot truly be at fault for anything, ever. In their view, that’s simply a fact of the universe.
If you want to know what has driven so many men into the arms of disgusting human beings like Andrew Tate, it’s this. It is the idea that women are out to get you. That even if a woman consents, she can later decide she didn’t with her magic time machine, and that the governor of New York will get involved personally and then try to revise how the law ought to work.
This isn’t even about believing “all women,” a statement which in and of itself is silly. You should never believe all men. You should never believe all women. You should believe credible information.
But this case is about believing one woman. So should we believe what she said back in 2024? Or should we believe what she told the cops, which changed, or what she’s saying two years later? Or should we believe things that she didn’t even say that politicians are now pretending she said?
Or should we believe the governor of New York, who is siccing law enforcement authorities on these men two years after the events in question, after the woman has now changed her story multiple times?
What the men did was wrong and sinful and gross and evil, but not because it was rape, but because it was wrong. This is the difference between morality and Left-wing ideas of ethics.
Consent is not the only standard of morality. Engaging in a group orgy fueled by alcohol and drugs is wrong. But that means that what she also engaged in was wrong. Not because she was raped, but because she blemished her soul. But there’s something going on here that, on a systemic level, is even more dangerous than immoral personal behavior.
And that is a law enforcement system that decides to go back and destroy people based on a mob outside the doors shouting and screaming.
That violates basic standards of equal justice under the law.
And we should all be troubled by that as American citizens, because that is unworkable.
