The ERA would provide the basis for Congress to enact stronger laws on gender-based violence, including restoring the civil rights remedy in VAWA—giving women like Jane Doe further recourse.
Women across the country expressed outrage this week over news stemming from the 2024 case of a young woman attending Cornell who alleges in a civil lawsuit she was pressured to take drugs and gang-raped in a fraternity house on campus. The civil suit and subsequent pressure have led the district attorney to reopen the criminal investigation—a positive step, make no mistake. But it leads us to wonder: why was the investigation closed in the first place? Why did it take a civil lawsuit, and thousands of people being angry on the internet, for the district attorney to take Jane Doe’s case seriously? And as we approach the tenth anniversary of #MeToo, what will it take to create lasting change when it comes to the epidemic of sexual violence in our country?
That last question is one that longtime readers of Ms. know we’ve been asking since our inception. This week we launched a new Substack-exclusive column, in which our editors hand-select ground-breaking, timely or just plain interesting articles from the Ms. archive for our readers. Our first offering is a feature story from the October 1985 issue, by Ellen Sweet: “Date Rape: The Story of an Epidemic and Those Who Deny It.” (You can click here to subscribe and get the next edition in your inbox.)
As many noted this week, the case of the Cornell student is evidence of an epidemic that feminists have been sounding the alarm about for decades. “This is not a dark chapter in Cornell’s history, it’s a morbid pattern,” wrote the editorial board of the Cornell Daily Sun, in a scathing editorial. I think we can all agree that that morbid pattern extends far beyond the bounds of Cornell’s campus. From fraternity houses to Capitol hill, it’s a pattern that has served to silence women and protect the powerful since time immemorial. But it’s a pattern we have the power to disrupt.
Jane Doe’s case reminds me of the case of Christy Brzonkala, who sued Virginia Tech, along with two men who had allegedly gang-raped her on campus when she was a student. Brzonkala sued under the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA)—a law that in its initial form gave survivors a civil rights remedy to sue their assailants for gender-based violence in civil court. The defendants argued that this provision was unconstitutional, a claim rejected by almost every court to hear it until the Supreme Court ultimately sided with the two men in United States v. Morrison in 2000. Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist authored the opinion—unsurprisingly, given that prior to VAWA’s passage he had strenuously lobbied against the Act and the civil rights remedy in particular, in direct violation of judicial ethics.
“There are many reasons to fight for an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution. But Brzonkala’s case offers a particularly poignant one,” wrote Victoria Nourse for Ms. in 2024. I think Jane Doe’s case is yet another reason.
The ERA would provide the basis for Congress to enact stronger laws on gender-based violence, including restoring the civil rights remedy in VAWA, giving women like Doe and Brzonkala further recourse. But of course, that all hinges on an ERA-friendly Congress—one willing to pass the Joint Resolution recognizing that the ERA has been ratified, and is the 28th Amendment to the Constitution. And an ERA-friendly Congress hinges on the upcoming midterms. Yet another reason to make a plan to vote early!
Yesterday, we released the first part of “The Pipeline to Predators”—a four-part Ms. investigation into the modeling industry’s connections to Jeffrey Epstein and other powerful predators, and survivors’ fight for accountability, which debuts in full in our Fall print issue. As Justine Andronici reports, the former models who spoke with Ms. say that industry-connected abusers—including Epstein—and their enablers often used the women’s desire to launch or advance their modeling careers to groom and manipulate them. “He gave me the exact thing I wanted: my big, huge goal,” Epstein survivor Lisa Phillips told Andronici. “It was a huge deal, and was wonderful, and should’ve stopped there, but it didn’t.”
Like I said, this violence is part of a larger pattern—one we have the power to disrupt.
