Cornell and the Age of Impunity

The Opinions

The episode examines the Cornell University rape allegation and subsequent lawsuit against Chi Phi fraternity members, using the case to explore broader cultural shifts from an era of accountability toward what the hosts describe

Key takeaways

• Former Cornell student Jane Doe filed a lawsuit alleging Chi Phi members drugged and raped her in October 2024, with the university expelling only two of seven accused students while the DA initially declined prosecution before reopening the case.
• David French argues that conservative dismissal of President Trump's civil sexual assault liability judgment demonstrates a cultural pivot toward impunity rather than progress since the #MeToo movement.

Main topics

• Cornell University rape investigation and lawsuit
• #MeToo movement and cultural impunity

Notable quotes

"I think there's been regress since Me Too."

Conclusion

The episode underscores a pervasive sense of institutional failure and cultural fatigue regarding sexual violence

Transcript preview

Speaker 5 (0:00) Hey, it's Anna Martin from The New York Times. What if I told you you'll never have to hear this line again? Speaker 3 (0:06) Wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 5 (0:08) Yeah, no, I actually can't tell you that. But you know what I can tell you? A place I think you might want to go. It's the Shows tab in The New York Times app. The place to listen to and now watch full episodes of New York Times shows. The Shows tab. Find it in The New York Times app. Explore The Shows tab and follow a show today. Speaker 6 (0:33) I'm Michelle Cottle. I cover national politics for New York Times Opinion. And this week, we are going to talk about the midterms, which, praise Jesus, are now just a month out. But first, I feel like we need to discuss the Cornell rape investigation, which captured national attention this week after a former student filed a lawsuit against the university and seven members of the Chi Phi fraternity. The woman, who is identified as Jane Doe in the filings, says that frat members drugged and raped her in October of 2024. According to the legal filings, after the initial investigation, the university expelled only two of the accused students and the local district attorney declined to prosecute. So, for all this and more, I am joined by my... brilliant colleagues, columnists, Jamel Bowie and David French. Guys, good to see you, as always. Good Speaker 1 (1:35) to see you all as well. Hi, Speaker 6 (1:37) Michelle. Before we get into the details of this horrible case and the legal issues that are at play, I was thinking about why this story struck such a nerve. I mean, obviously, the allegations are terrible. just horrific. And it took place at an elite institution, one that parents are always fighting to get their kids into. But I'm wondering if maybe there's also something to the fact that we are now almost a decade past the Me Too viral movement. And some days it feels as though vanishingly little progress was made. So, Jamel, what struck you about this case and kind of how it fits into our cultural moment? Speaker 1 (2:21) I think that you can't separate the interest and outrage with regards to this case from the fact that at the highest reaches of government, it appears that many key figures are at the very least people who have been accused of sexual assault, accused of mistreating women. And at least one case, namely the president of the United States, has been found at least civilly liable for sexual assault. There not even appears, it is simply the case that this administration is indifferent to concerns around sexual violence against women, that the movement around it. who glorifies a kind of aggressive and predatory and domineering masculinity. You know, last year, an administration figure whose name I cannot recall intervened to help Andrew Tate and his brother out. Andrew Tate being the, quote, Manosphere influencer who is currently, you know, being prosecuted, charged with... basically pimping out women. I mean, a really awful and terrible and degenerate human being, if I'm going to really say how I feel about it. And that's the, like, that's the, not just the cultural context, but the political context in which all this is happening. Simply a powerful political movement, which doesn't just seem to you know, hold the notion that there's pervasive sexual violence and contempt, but in some cases, like, celebrates the people who, you know, abuse women for entertainment and profit. And so then when you have an example like this... Have a case like this where it really does appear, you know at this at this elite university These young men who are you know who may go on into the elite spaces and who may have escaped Any kind of real accountability for engaging in sexual violence it You know people are many people are angry and upset and Do feel as if there hasn't been any meaningful progress since the Me Too movement. And I don't blame them for feeling that way because it feels to me as well that it doesn't really seem like there's been much meaningful progress since Me Too. Speaker 3 (4:58) David? I agree with that. And I think I might even, I may even be more bleak than Jamel, if that's possible. Thank you. Because I actually think it's like. It's not that there's been no progress since Me Too. I think there's been regress since Me Too. And I think the arc of events is kind of like this, that if you go back to when Jody and Megan are remarkable newsroom colleagues broke the Harvey Weinstein story and really launched this Me Too wave. And we began to see story after story that was genuinely appalling. especially in the media world, just genuinely appalling. And many of these stories were very well documented with multiple people coming forward with dates, times, details. And you also had some stories that were too much, that it was too far. There was an excess where people went too far in the height of the Me Too movement. So where you went from a age of accountability, where sometimes accountability went too far. to using the excesses of the age of accountability to justify what we're in now, which is an age of impunity. And it's that age of impunity that, you know, when Jamel talks about Trump and the civil judgment, what's so notable about the way in which the entire sort of right side of the spectrum ignored that civil judgment is that for years, The right had constantly said, we hate sexual assault, we hate sexual abuse, but we also really love due process. And what needs to happen is more due process on campus. And I agreed with that. We cannot skip due process to leap to liability. Well, Trump got due process. He got a jury trial. He got appeals. He got all of the process that could potentially conceivably be due. And he was still found liable. And it didn't matter. It didn't matter. And so, you know, you now begin to see this world in which people glory in their transgression. And I want to just say, by condemning what these guys did, which I think is reprehensible, the way they behaved, that's not reaching a legal conclusion about the criminality. We'll get into that. But I think it's really important that we... at least be able to say, at the very least, that this is not how a human being should have been treated under any circumstances. And that to say that loudly and clearly before we get into the legal situation, which, Michelle and Jamel, is complicated and also betrays, I think, some fundamental problems the way we approach the issue generally. That does not surprise me. The thing that Speaker 6 (7:49) I found unusual about this, and I can remember 100 years ago when I was in college, these types of situations would arise. Way too much drinking, way too many hormones, way too much entitlement among certain corners of the university community. But what is seemed to be new with this is. The part about how in the middle of the alleged assault, these guys sent out like a group message to other people to come get some free sex from this poor woman. And this to me seems to be, you know, like social media on steroids where it extends the circle of. culpability and raises questions about kind of responsibility that, you know, even if they're not legal questions, there are like certainly moral questions. And it just makes this whole thing that much more horrific and complicated. But I guess we should go back and look at like how, like one of the big questions here is how the university responded and how the fraternity responded. David, why don't you walk us through some of the specifics about how it was originally handled? Speaker 3 (9:14) Well, so, and we're still learning a lot. And our newsroom folks did a really excellent job on this. Whenever something like this occurs, there's sort of multiple processes that can unfold simultaneously. So you have really, for lack of a better term, three legal systems that that are potentially involved. One is the criminal justice system. This is the district attorney who investigates. Another one is the civil litigation system. This is where when she ultimately filed a lawsuit seeking damages. And that's the civil justice system is liability in its preponderance of the evidence. And then you have a university system. That is a Title IX system involving sex discrimination investigations, and sex abuse is a form of sex discrimination. And that is much more informal and also has that lower standard of proof, usually proof beyond a reasonable doubt. So you had unfolding pretty soon after the alleged assault, you had unfolding a criminal investigation and a university Title IX investigation. These university investigations tend to happen behind closed doors. The participants are protected by privacy laws, for example. But they resulted in a degree of punishment for the young men involved. The district attorney took a look at the case and at least as of the initial investigation, declined to prosecute. A number of people are questioning that, questioning that decision and questioning whether the district attorney's investigation was comprehensive enough, whether he dotted all the I's, crossed all the T's. It did not appear, for example, that the district attorney had the Snapchat messages, had the free access message, which really doesn't exactly communicate a whole lot of consent to say, you know, essentially free, you know what? So the DA has since reopened the investigation. And also the individual has the way this hit the media is the young woman filed a lawsuit. So civil justice. So all three of the systems have been now activated to some extent. And so there is no such thing here so far as we're able to know or see as anything that looks