Content Warning: This article contains discussion of sexual assault, which may be distressing or triggering for some readers. We encourage you to prioritize your mental and emotional well-being as you engage with this content. If you need support, please reach out to a trusted adult, mental health professional, or crisis resource.
The day I understood what it meant to be a woman, a frighteningly universal understanding, was the first time I was told to put on more clothes because what I was wearing would “provoke” others.
For the approximately 12 years leading up to that point, the message behind the “true” female purpose had been implied nearly every day, planting a seed inside my mind that my gender had put me at a disadvantage in the dynamics of the world, a disadvantage that would stick with me for the rest of my life.
Seeing the torture of womanhood over and over again is a completely dehumanizing experience, and its direct demonstration in the form of an alleged gang rape at an Ivy League school is incredibly alarming.
At Cornell University, located in Ithaca, NY, a student came forward with a horrifying report. In her account, she explains being purposefully intoxicated and then raped by seven men in a frat house. According to details spread across varying news sources, over 50 men were involved in a Snapchat group chat, where they vulgarly solicited and joked about there being “free p*ssy” available, referring to the “Jane Doe” who, according to the lawsuit, was actively being assaulted. To the best of current knowledge, not a single fraternity brother spoke up immediately.
This kind of behavior cannot be tolerated as a standard of college life. Yet, Cornell’s disciplinary office treated it as such.
In its recently updated, officially published statement on how it handled the case, Cornell denies the social-media-wide rumor that the only punishment for the involved Chi Phi students was an essay and claims Cornell used its resources as best it could until district attorney Matthew Van Houten took over the case.
Van Houten dismissed the case, saying it lacked enough evidence to warrant further investigation or criminal charges. But even when a local police investigator offered more evidence, he declined to consider it and kept the case closed, according to the New York Times.
Because he couldn’t assess the situation, special prosecutor Letitia James replaced Van Houten. Though she intends to bring full justice to the matter, the damage to Jane Doe and the concerns now raised among prospective college applicants are irreversible.
The Jane Doe who came forward with her story, who presumably worked hard through high school to reach Ivy League status, quietly left the university after her nightmarish experience.
This story, which went viral on social media, likely would have stayed buried without student journalists.
Cornell’s own newspaper, the Cornell Daily Sun (independent of university funding), was the first to expose the names and photos of the seven alleged rapists listed by Jane Doe, triggering a national, even global, uproar for this case.
Over 50 posts from people I knew were made on social media the day the case reopened to the public.
The downsides of this spread include social media’s excruciatingly fast pace, which often undermines the time these cases deserve and turns them into quick moral judgments for hundreds of followers. Once this case blew up across Instagram, X (Twitter), and TikTok, both anonymous users and political commentator Michael Tracy demanded to know Jane Doe’s true identity, adding to fear in women of their identity being unprotected if they decide to report sexual assault.
For high school students planning to attend college after graduation, uncertainty about on-campus safety was already worrisome. Now, the threat of organized sexual violence at universities poses additional anxiety for those in the process of applying.
“I have looked into colleges, and it’s made me a lot more cautious and concerned about it, especially because it [most recently] happened at an Ivy League school and that’s scary. That’s really scary,” senior Copper Wilkinson said.
American society treats these Ivy League titles as the pinnacle of higher learning, since all 8 Ivies were founded before the 20th century to pursue elite knowledge. High school students push themselves past unreasonable limits to attend these universities, promised they will graduate better than others with the same degree.
But Yale reported 27 rapes in 2025.
Cases of rape at Dartmouth increased from 3 in 2024 to 19 in 2025.
In 2024, 16.7% of women at UPenn reported an act of non-consensual sexual contact by physical force or inability to consent.
And to top it all off, Cornell published that in 2025, 35% of undergraduate women reported an instance of non-consensual sexual conduct since entering their time at the university.
“The more awareness it gets, the more pressure that is put on like frats and sororities to require education about these things and prevent them from happening,” said college freshman Susanna Zaharatos, who earlier explained how her own encounters with on-campus frat life make deep security an obvious necessity.
But the educational system and the government have made their kind of awareness blatantly clear: the sexual exploitation of women is a perfectly respectable practice, and priority protection should instead be given to the boys who didn’t know how to ask for consent.
“I feel badly for whoever she’s looking at, because they won’t get a fair shake,” said Donald Trump, referring to Letitia James taking the lead role in prosecuting this case. Trump himself was found liable for sexually abusing advice columnist E. Jean Carroll in 1996.
Excusing and encouraging this behavior in young men is absolutely disgusting and destroys the kind of knowledge we should be spreading among people at a crucial stage of development.
As girls get older, they eventually meet more and more individuals with their own Jane Doe experiences. As said by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a response to this story, “One in four women have survived sexual assault in this country as we know of.”
Trying to transition into young adulthood is scarier than I could have ever anticipated, with cases of rape on the rise across the country at universities, workplaces, and in the daily lives of women trying to survive in a society that leaves them defenseless. Instead of calmly applying for post-graduation plans, I now have to think twice about what a university might be keeping from the public.
“The more that we don’t talk about these kinds of things, the more it’s going to happen, and the less safe women are going to feel in any place in their life,” senior Lilly Piotrowicz said. “It creates more widespread awareness of events like that, but also a lot of social media has been censoring it. They’re saying it’s a sensitive topic, which it is. But also it’s something we shouldn’t be hiding and that everyone needs to know about.”
