When a friend first used the word sensationalizing about the Cornell case, my body bristled. Nothing about our friendship or her politics gave me reason to expect dismissal. Still, I found myself primed to defend something she had not attacked.
She was recounting a conversation with a friend of hers, a fraternity member who seems to mistake misogyny for independent thought. On their way to a party, they were crammed into an Uber with an assortment of people you’d expect to find together only in your early twenties. When the conversation drifted from postgrad woes to Cornell, she did what I usually recommend with men like him: she let him talk.
He began, naturally, by acknowledging that what happened at Cornell was bad. With that obligation fulfilled, he turned to the public response. People were fitting the account, he argued, into a familiar story of fraternity men drugging and gang-raping a woman. If they read the details, they would be less appalled.
He seemed reassured. There is something fascinating and frightening about how differently the same words can move us. His body loosened to remain sturdy; mine tightened to keep from unraveling.
What stayed with me was the possibility that he was right about the audience.
The civil lawsuit alleges that seven members of Cornell’s Chi Phi fraternity sexually assaulted a woman identified as Jane Doe in October 2024. Attorneys for several defendants have denied the allegations.
Reading the filings and surrounding reporting more closely, I had to concede that parts of the story had been sensationalized. I felt no corresponding desire to calm down. I did not come away thinking we had cared too much. I came away wondering why caring seemed to require so much embellishment.
Some public retellings had begun to follow the logic of an urban legend, gathering details that became more certain with every repetition. A supportive essay in The Stanford Daily describes an assault occurring “in front of 50 bystanders” and says the men were “punished with essays.” Membership in a group chat does not establish that every member witnessed an assault. The men who treated her body as a group invitation have earned my contempt on the strength of their own words. What the others knew, encouraged, or failed to do still demands answers.
Reported disciplinary outcomes included expulsions, suspensions, a campus ban, and lesser sanctions. We do not have to pretend an institution did nothing to argue that it failed to do enough.
Those corrections should make us ask what our outrage depends on. The impulse to make a story easier to defend can add to its horror. It can also remove whatever an audience finds disqualifying. A woman’s initial interest in sex becomes something even her advocates may hesitate to acknowledge, because it threatens the version people have rallied around. The need to protect that version is precisely what should trouble us.
In a police summary obtained by CNN, Doe described initial willingness to participate in a threesome, alongside refusals, coercion, and significant intoxication. Her civil complaint alleges that she lacked the capacity to consent from the outset. An expression of willingness is not proof of capacity, much less permission for everything that follows.
What are we condemning if learning that a woman initially wanted some sexual contact makes us less concerned about the contact she did not want?
Would you care if a woman agreed to an orgy, refused the last man, and he continued anyway? If she had done something similar forty times before and this time she did not want to? If he were her boyfriend of six months? If she were the girl who got with the man you had a crush on?
None of these circumstances makes her refusal less binding. Nor does an incapacitated woman have to say no for her inability to consent to matter. Sexual assault is already violent. A woman does not have to be grabbed off the street for a violation of her autonomy to count as violence.
The Columbia Sundial’s “The ‘Cornell Seven’ Is Really About Liberalism” gave me good reason to fear that criticizing sensationalism would become another way to defend men against feminist fury. The article invokes female agency while approvingly quoting Camille Paglia’s claim that going upstairs with a man means “you are consenting to sex.” Apparently, a woman can exercise agency by entering a room, but expecting to retain it once she gets there is asking too much.
We live in a society practiced in making refusal costly. A girl pushed into an unwanted hug learns that someone else’s disappointment outranks her discomfort. Later, even the language of “withholding” imagines sex being unfairly kept from its rightful recipient. Once she has wanted anything, people begin looking for the moment she made herself responsible for everything.
But a defense can reject that entitlement and still make a woman’s earlier choices the condition of its sympathy. Doe’s lawsuit alleges that she was pressured to take ketamine, a drug she had never used. That detail belongs in her account. When it becomes a reason her suffering should move us—she had never even done this before—inexperience begins functioning as a moral qualification.
A woman who has taken ketamine before may hear the outrage and, for a moment, feel held by it. Then she hears why this particular woman deserves sympathy and begins considering which parts of herself she would have to leave out. Would they care if I had taken it willingly? If I had liked it?
Having used a drug before, agreeing to take it on a particular night, and consenting to sex are separate questions. Our defense has to remain intact when a woman has made choices its audience dislikes. Otherwise, the rules of rape culture survive inside an argument against rape: we defend one woman by establishing how little she resembles the women we have learned to distrust.
The cost falls on Doe herself, too. A woman should not have to wonder whether her actual account will disappoint the people defending her. What happens when correcting them begins to look like helping the people who want to discredit her? Strangers can supply the exaggeration; she can inherit the accusation of having exaggerated.
I hear that anticipation of disbelief in a passage from Doe’s statement to police. She described thinking that “if I passed out and the men had sex with me, then they could be charged with Rape.”
A reader determined to dismiss her could seize on that sentence as calculation. I read it as the terrible work of anticipating the terms on which anyone might acknowledge her pain. What haunts me is the possibility of a woman already in distress having to imagine what would finally make that distress undeniable.
It is the horror of bleeding out on the pavement and having to consider whether the arrangement of your limbs will make someone care. There is the pain, and then there is the work of making it recognizable.
As though, if she could feel nothing, someone else might finally feel something.
I understand why we reach for a version of sexual violence with no room for argument. There is comfort in imagining we would recognize it immediately, that the men capable of it would be obvious to us. It preserves something of the logic of stranger danger: violence comes from outside the world we know, and safety means keeping it there. It asks less of us than a woman describing harm by a man we love.
For those of us rallying around her, every individual case becomes a proxy for our personhood. We defend the woman at its center knowing that the conclusions will be applied to everyone else. Once a story has secured an audience’s concern, questioning it can feel almost like defacing a memorial.
I recognize that fear in my own initial defensiveness. I was enlisted in a war of attrition before I was born. I came from a woman who came from a woman. My first shelter was a woman’s body, and even there my safety depended on how the world treated her. There is little room to be relaxed about a premise you are constantly being asked to reestablish: that you matter.
That fear is familiar in conversations about colorism or misogyny within the Black community. Naming an internal harm is treated as a gift to people who already despise us. Why give them ammunition? But the most vulnerable people inside a group cannot become the price of its unity. A feminist defense cannot protect itself by asking some women to disappear from it.
Someone will turn criticism of sensationalism into permission to dismiss Doe. Someone will hear that she initially wanted sexual contact and decide they have heard enough. Their misuse of those details cannot dictate whether we acknowledge them. We cannot let people who make care conditional set the terms of our solidarity.
Jane Doe should not have to carry every woman’s personhood alongside her own account. But if we insist that we are all Jane Doe, our defense has to include the woman who wanted sex, the woman who took the drug willingly, the woman nobody likes.
A woman should be able to tell us more about what happened without becoming less deserving of our concern.
I want our outrage to survive the details.
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on Wikimedia under CC License
