A Cornell student’s lawsuit has sparked feminist outrage and raised urgent questions about why survivors so often need public pressure to make institutions act.
Content warning: This piece includes graphic discussions of gang rape, as well as spoilers for the new A24 film Primetime.
Feminists on the internet are erupting in rage and recognition after a former Cornell University student filed a lawsuit alleging she was pressured to take ketamine and was subsequently gang-raped for seven hours at a Cornell fraternity house.
In her 101-page complaint, Doe, a former Cornell student who was 20 at the time of the attack, says she went to the Chi Phi house to meet a friend after a night out. Two fraternity members pressured her to take what they said was ketamine and began sexually assaulting her while she was unable to consent. One of the young men then posted “free pussy” in a Snapchat group called “Chi Phi Actives,” allegedly inviting other members upstairs.
When Doe reported the assault to Cornell University police, the seven students accused in her complaint were given temporary suspensions. After the police report, the fraternity chapter was placed on indefinite suspension. In the end, only two were expelled. The other five were assigned workshops and essay-writing assignments, according to The Washington Post. (Cornell has not confirmed the individual outcomes, citing federal student privacy law.) None of the seven men have been criminally charged.
Doe suffers lasting damage from the assault, which she alleges took place a little less than two years ago, in October 2024. “She’s not in college anymore because of this,” Doe’s lawyer Thomas Giuffra told local news outlet WCBS. “She’s barely hanging on for what these guys did to her.”
News about Doe filing the lawsuit broke right before Cornell’s 2026 Family Weekend (Sept. 25–27), and both current and former students and parents are outraged. An online petition with over 1,500 signatures pledges no more donations to the university without “accountability for administrators,” including firing “complicit” school officials; “transparency” and public investigations; and “remedy and prevention,” including a public policy and stringent new policies.
One alumna posted online: “I will be donating exactly $0.07 this year. I don’t want any confusion or false explanation why I’m not sending my usual amount. I think an insultingly low donation sends a more pointed message than one skipped entirely.” A commenter implored the alumna to instead “send your regular donation amount to a rape crisis center instead. And send Cornell the receipt.”
Feminists online were furious that the gang rape continued while everyone else in the Snapchat chat knew about it, and that once again, the punishment seemed more concerned with protecting the involved men’s futures than seeking real justice for the young woman victim.
“I’m no longer tired—I’m enraged by schools protecting boys, in fear of their future being wrecked,” actor Florence Pugh posted. “What about the life that those girls then have to endure, with the knowledge that his reputation is more precious than her truth? Or to feel that no one with the power to do something cares that you were abused. It’s further soul-destroying.”
“Yes, I think we actually should ruin the futures of adult men who drug and gang rape a woman, thanks for asking,” another woman posted.
The story is breaking through the news cycle because it seems to have unleashed a familiar kind of feminist anger: at the men accused of sexual violence, at the people who may have stood by and at the institutions whose response is now under scrutiny. For many women reacting to the case, Jane Doe’s lawsuit has become a way to name the culture that allows assaults to happen and makes survivors fight to be heard.
The message described in Doe’s lawsuit—“free pussy” to a large group of men, of so-called brothers—raises a question that goes beyond the men she has accused: What kind of fraternity culture makes it possible to send that invitation to a group chat?
People saw it had a chance to challenge it or seek help. Silence in that moment matters, too.
“It’s actually the playbook,” Epstein survivor Jess Michaels said in a survivor rally in Union Square about the gang rape, “from private corporations to college campuses to government to churches to locker rooms—same silence, same cases, rarely investigated, rarely prosecuted.”
“Men think they can absolve themselves from being part of rape culture because they don’t rape,” LA-based artist Johannah Toruno posted, but “all men must examine their relationship to rape culture and reflect on how they uphold the normalization of rape.”
Accountability cannot begin only after an assault becomes public. It also depends on whether peers are willing to confront cruelty toward women before it becomes an accepted part of belonging.
Rebecca Minor, a queer therapist and author of Raising Trans Kids, posted online in the wake of the news: The way we move forward involves changing the culture in which aggression in boys is rewarded. “I want us to raise boys who create cultures with one another” and “where cruelty toward women costs you belonging instead of earning it.”
This can’t just be a conversation that remains specific to Cornell—because this isn’t a crime that just happens at Cornell. I remember starting college shortly after a jury convicted Stanford swimmer Brock Turner of three felony sexual assault counts. In January 2015, Turner raped an unconscious woman, later identified as Chanel Miller, behind a dumpster outside a fraternity party on Stanford’s campus. Two graduate students intervened and tackled Turner when he tried to run away. After his conviction, he was sentenced to six months in jail and three years of probation, but instead served only three months before being released for good behavior.
His trial went viral—even before the #MeToo movement—along with the victim’s impact statement to the judge and jury. I can still recall her words:
“You should have never done this to me … [and] you should have never made me fight so long to tell you. … But here we are. The damage is done, no one can undo it.”
The timing of Doe’s case is poetic, what with the recent release of Lance Oppenheimer’s Primetime. The film explores the massive popularity of (and problematic end to) To Catch a Predator, with Pattinson playing host Chris Hansen. The A24 film explores the strange-bedfellows alliance between the anti-pedophile vigilante group called Perverted Justice and the NBC television crew. Throughout To Catch a Predator’s three-year run, volunteers with Perverted Justice posed as children online. When men reached out to them, these actors would document when and how the conversations turned sexual and if asked, invite them to meet at a decoy house. There, Hansen confronted them with his iconic opener: “Have a seat,” and police officers arrested them when they tried to leave.
… Who benefits when the public must create the pressure that institutions should already feel?
But as the show grew in popularity, Hansen and his producers pushed to expose bigger and more well-connected men—“whales” as opposed to “bottom-feeders.” (This is a dramatization from the film.) They found their “whale” in local assistant district attorney Bill Conradt of Terrell, Texas, who was caught messaging “Dan,” an actor posing as a young boy. Hansen and his team coordinated with police, who led a sting on Conradt’s home. As the camera crew and SWAT team burst into his home, Conradt shot and killed himself in front of rolling cameras.
At its heart, Oppenheimer’s film raises questions about justice driven by television ratings—namely, justice driven by the Internet’s greatest profit: attention. It also asks what happens when the demand to expose wrongdoing becomes entangled with the demand for an audience.
The circumstances at Cornell are different, but the question carries over: Who benefits when the public must create the pressure that institutions should already feel?
But as pedophiles and predators continue to occupy the highest echelons of the U.S. government and walk free at universities across the country, Primetime captures why public exposure can feel like the only recourse left when institutions fail to act.
The Cornell case now has a consequential new development: This week, Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten says his office is reopening its investigation and acknowledged his office relied on campus police’s investigation rather than conducting its own. As the feminist platform Cheer Up Luv posted Monday: “It is both satisfying yet utterly depressing to see this case reopened, clearly because of the mass outrage on social media. Online activism is a powerful tool, but survivors shouldn’t have to face trial by social media to receive justice. We should live in a world where gang rape is taken seriously.”
Public outrage helped bring the case back into view, but it cannot be the primary way that we seek justice. What matters now is whether Cornell and law enforcement answer the questions raised by Doe’s lawsuit … and whether the next student who comes forward has to wait for the Internet to demand those answers.
Resources to help survivors of sexual assault include the National Sex Assault Hotline (800-656-4673) and The Rape, Abuse, & Incest National Network (RAINN) online hotline.
