Choosing to drink or take drugs is not consent to sex. New York Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie must allow a vote to close the state’s voluntary intoxication loophole.
Ten years ago, Judge Aaron Persky sentenced Stanford University student and swimmer Brock Turner to six months in county jail for sexually assaulting an unconscious woman behind a dumpster at a frat party. Turner was convicted of three felonies. He served three months.
Feminists didn’t just get angry—we organized. Two years later, we recalled Persky with nearly 62 percent of the vote, backed by a coalition of women’s rights organizations including the Feminist Majority Foundation (publisher of Ms.).
We also spent years fighting to hold Stanford (where we are professor emerita and alum, respectively) to account.
Like Cornell, Stanford routinely fails survivors. Its discipline was so lenient that, as of 2015, it had expelled exactly one student for sexual assault in its entire history. Even Brock Turner, arguably the most famous campus perpetrator of all time, was not expelled—he withdrew voluntarily.
The university clung for three years to a flawed homegrown survey which found that only 1.9 percent of students were sexually assaulted, an obvious underestimate. Eventually, the student body voted to force Stanford to join the standardized AAU survey used by its peer schools. That survey ultimately showed that 38.5 percent of undergraduate women reported nonconsensual sexual contact.
Institutional betrayal at elite colleges such as Stanford and Cornell is the rule, not the exception. After the Turner scandal, Stanford promised the survivor—award-winning author Chanel Miller—a plaque bearing her own words at the site of her assault … then rejected the words she chose. Stanford held out until the faculty Senate and both student legislatures demanded it keep its promise.
Stanford has retaliated against those who criticize its handling of sexual violence, according to New York Times reporting. The university also continued to allow fraternities to operate, despite decades of research linking them to sexual violence.
… Attending just one fraternity party a month is associated with a 38 percent increase in odds of sexual assault for an undergraduate female student …
Now the same crisis has arrived at Cornell. It is time to organize again.
In a lawsuit filed last month, a former Cornell student identified as Jane Doe alleges that in October 2024, members of the Chi Phi fraternity pressured her, then a sophomore, to take ketamine and that multiple members of the fraternity sexually assaulted her in the frat house during a crowded party. She says her ordeal lasted until 5:45 a.m. At 1:42 a.m., her complaint says, one of the men wrote in a fraternity Snapchat group called “Chi Phi Actives” that there was “free pussy” upstairs. According to ABC News, another accused student in the same text chain wrote “boys come whip it out” along with a photo of the victim in bed. The content of these text messages is bone-chilling. The victim described feeling she was used as “bait.” Fifty-seven men received that invitation. None stopped the alleged assault.
Doe went to the Cornell police in November 2024. According to The New York Times, Cornell expelled two of the seven men she accused in her lawsuit and gave various lesser sanctions to the rest, including writing “reflection papers.” As of Oct. 4, 2026, there has been no prosecution.
When the lawsuit drew national attention, Tompkins County District Attorney Van Houten defended his decision not to file charges, saying the victim’s 2024 statement described what happened as “voluntary, conscious and consensual.” This, despite her statement to police that she was certain she had been raped. Van Houten’s public undermining of the victim’s credibility based on his own shoddy investigation dumbfounded legal experts and enraged women and survivors. Gov. Kathy Hochul furiously replaced Van Houten, naming New York Attorney General Letitia James special prosecutor to handle the renewed investigation.
Although the Cornell case may seem uniquely terrible, the only unusual thing is that the victim reported it. National studies find that between 4.5 and 11.5 percent of college women who are raped report it to police. When drugs or alcohol are involved, one national study put the figure at 2.7 percent.
Despite Van Houten’s many failures, he also pointed to something real: the law. Under New York penal law, a person too intoxicated to consent counts as “mentally incapacitated” only if the substance was given to them without their consent. Unless they are unconscious or physically unable to communicate, a person who is stumbling, slurring and incoherent is treated as capable of consent, so long as they took the drink or the drug willingly.
(Take two minutes of your day and send New York state Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie an email to demand a vote on a bill that closes the voluntary intoxication loophole. If you want to do more, you can also call his office at 518-455-3791.)
Sexual assault is not caused by alcohol. It is caused by rapists choosing to rape …
New York is among a minority of states with such a rule.
Look at what that rule assumes: If someone else spikes your drink, the law says you could not consent. If you poured it yourself, the law says you could, however incapacitated you were. That is consent manufactured out of a decision to drink. It rests on the oldest victim-blaming idea there is: A woman who gets drunk is asking for it.
The only natural consequence of drinking too much is a hangover. Sexual assault is not caused by alcohol. It is caused by rapists choosing to rape, and nothing else. This idea has no place in New York law or anywhere.
On a college campus, this rule covers the rare case and leaves out the common one. One federal study found that inability to consent due to intoxication is far more common in campus rape than use of force.
In her doctoral dissertation, the second author of this essay (Tsurkov) analyzed the full data from the 2019 Association of American Universities survey of 181,752 students at 33 universities and found:
- Almost 16 percent of undergraduate women had experienced nonconsensual penetration since entering college.
- Two-thirds of the students who had been assaulted had been drinking beforehand.
- Only 3.7 percent of respondents were certain that they had been given a substance without their knowledge.
As for Cornell’s Chi Phi, research has repeatedly established that fraternities are extremely dangerous to college women: A federal study found that attending just one fraternity party a month is associated with a 38 percent increase in odds of sexual assault for an undergraduate female student.
At Cornell, the role of fraternities in sexual assault is well established.
- Cornell’s own 2025 study showed that Greek-affiliated women are 80 percent more likely to be assaulted than their non-Greek classmates.
- Cornell’s 2019 survey found that 23 percent of undergraduate women who described nonconsensual sexual contact said it took place in a fraternity house.
Cornell knew or should have known exactly how menacing its fraternities were for its women students long before Jane Doe stumbled into Chi Phi in 2024.
The New York “voluntary intoxication” loophole thus flies in the face of research and must go. A bill to close the loophole would let prosecutors bring charges when a victim was too intoxicated to appraise or control their conduct and a reasonable person in the defendant’s position should have known it. Even Van Houten conceded that, had it been law, “we would have, under the law, had to investigate further.”
Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie must stop blocking progress and bring the voluntary intoxication bill to a vote immediately.
The Senate passed a bill to close the loophole by 60 to 0 in June. It has passed versions of it at least four times since 2019.
In the Assembly, more than 90 of 150 members are cosponsors. Gov. Hochul recently announced her support for the bill.
But has never come to a vote—because Speaker Carl Heastie, who decides what reaches the floor, has consistently refused to bring it to a vote. Forced by the pressure created by the Cornell case, he convened a working group that is due to report by the end of the year.
A bill that a majority of his chamber has already endorsed does not need a working group. It needs a vote.
Take Action
Many people failed this survivor: Cornell administrators, the police, the prosecutor, and the fraternity brothers who knew what was happening and did nothing. But above all, the law failed her.
We cannot allow political gatekeeping to preserve a law that protects perpetrators and abandons victims. Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie must stop blocking progress and bring the voluntary intoxication bill to a vote immediately. New Yorkers deserve to know where each of their elected officials stands on victim blaming.
When we recalled Judge Persky over his light sentence in the Turner case, we showed what can happen when women and survivors demand accountability for the way they are treated by the justice system. New York’s accused campus rapists cannot continue to get a free pass—and Speaker Heastie must let the Assembly do its job.
In 2026, with feminist victories few and far in between, this is a tangible change each of us can be a part of. Take two minutes of your day and send Speaker Heastie an email with just a few clicks to demand a vote on this bill. If you want to do more, you can also call his office at 518-455-3791.
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A note from Ms. editors: We want to hear from you for The Majority, a new campaign collecting stories about how reproductive freedom has enabled readers to build the lives they want and need.
Poll after poll shows a majority of Americans support reproductive healthcare access. Yet public debate overlooks the lives shaped by abortion access, contraception, IVF, miscarriage care, maternal healthcare or comprehensive sex education—countless women who chose to pursue an education, have children, not have children, protect their health and chart their own future. What’s your reproductive freedom story? Add your voice. Together, these stories will help show not only why reproductive freedom remains a majority value, but also what it makes possible.
