Last month, a former student at Cornell University in New York filed a lawsuit alleging that she was drugged and raped by seven men who were members of a campus fraternity in 2024. The men reportedly forced her to repeatedly snort ketamine while they raped her, and they sent a group text out to their fraternity with 57 members on it to join in. None of them reported the incident to the police.
Weeks after the incident, the survivor, known as “Jane Doe” in the lawsuit, reported the assault to the university and campus police. In response, the university conducted an investigation that resulted in the expulsion of only two of the men, while the others were merely suspended and had to write essays reflecting on their actions. The local district attorney at the time also declined to pursue criminal charges against any of them even though in her initial report to the police she clearly said, “I can say with 100% confidence I was raped.”
The traumatic experience forced Jane to drop out of school, while five of the seven men who assaulted her were allowed to continue their education. In September of this year she filed a lawsuit against the university and the men.
This story confirms what women and survivors already know: sexual violence in this country is constant. One in five women is raped in her lifetime. At universities nationally, one in five female college students say they were sexually assaulted during their years on campus, and most of these assaults go unreported, some for fear of exactly what happened at Cornell. Cornell’s own student survey, released in November 2025, found that 35 percent of undergraduate women reported being sexually assaulted during their time there.
The way this investigation was handled shows how the experiences of women are trivialized by those in power. And how many times has a story like this repeated across elite campuses? Young men at elite universities like Cornell are often the children of the wealthy, who have power and financial connections that can get them out of trouble. They can treat women in this way and face no consequences.
This mirrors how society works outside of college campuses. Look at the Epstein network: wealthy elites could sexually traffic young girls for years because they had money, connections, and protection. And predators like those in the Epstein Files don’t emerge from nowhere; they go to elite schools for the rich like Cornell. They are raised in a world where they think their wealth and power allows them to do whatever they want.
Cornell has pursued harsher punishments for pro-Palestine student activists than it has for students accused of rape. Since the start of the genocide in Gaza in October 2023, Cornell has both suspended and expelled students from campus for participating in peaceful protests against Israel’s genocide. Cornell’s president has even backed his car into pro-Palestine protestors on campus. In the eyes of Cornell, protesting genocide gets you expelled, while sexual assault gets you an extra writing assignment. We see these same priorities at elite universities across the country.
The culture of male dominance that enables this violence is everywhere. Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of War, is now promoting testosterone screenings in the military. On billboards, in magazines, commercials, TV shows and movies, women’s mostly naked bodies are used to sell everything. Advertisers and fashion companies profit from women’s bodies. Men absorb these daily messages and are encouraged to see women as objects rather than human beings worthy of dignity.
We live in a male-dominated society that values men’s lives over women’s, one that accepts and even encourages violence against women. But although men are overwhelmingly the perpetrators, the roots of this epidemic go far beyond individual men. We live in a society where disregard for human life is normal and expected, where workers must sell their labor to corporations just to survive, and where corporations use us up and throw us away. The bosses who run this society have always used discrimination, whether by gender, race, ethnicity or religion, to divide us and protect their control.
But organized together, we can look out for one another. We can band together to punish and stop sexual predators. Ultimately, the fight to end violence against women and win equality for women is simultaneously a fight to build a different society, one where all people, men and women, have control over our own bodies and our own lives and collectively run society in our own interests.
