The story out of Cornell has been sitting heavily on my chest all week.
A former student has filed a civil lawsuit saying seven members of the Chi Phi fraternity drugged and raped her for hours, in October 2024. The complaint includes the fraternity's own text messages: one sent to the group chat around 1:42 in the morning announcing there was "free p*ssy" upstairs, and another adding that you could "walk in and whip it out," after which, the suit says, more men came into the room. The lawsuit describes her as completely incapacitated while this was happening. No one was criminally charged back then, and according to the lawsuit some of them got to lessen their consequences by writing essays for the university. Cornell says it expelled some students and suspended others. Now that the internet has caught fire, the district attorney has sent the case to a grand jury.
I've read the messages those men sent to each other that night, and I believe her. When the district attorney was asked about them, he called them disgusting, but he said they didn't tell him anything about whether she consented.
A group chat inviting men upstairs to a woman who was incapacitated has everything to do with consent, and the fact that a prosecutor can look at that and see a separate question is how you can be sure that this system was not built by us or for us. He also explained that his office didn't bring charges in 2024 because her statement didn't say she had been drugged without her knowledge or that she hadn't consented. For a lot of us that lands as a problem, because too many of us can relate to not having the words for what happened to us until much later.
I know that because I am one of them.
I can tell you now, about plenty of times I went along with something to not upset a person, to make a “friend,” to feel accepted as the new kid in town, and it took years of personal work to understand that I was not a willing participant in many of them.
I have done a lot of that deep work and still missed some of the more violent instances, for example, the ones that happened while I was in prison, because I thought they were just part of the prison experience. I never named any of it as sexual abuse until I scrolled past an ad on Instagram for a lawsuit on behalf of women who had been sexually abused while incarcerated. RAINN estimates that about 80,600 people in prisons and jails are sexually abused in a single year. I started reading the list of things those women said had been done to them, and about half of it had been done to me too. It was disguised as procedure, part of a strip search or part of a room search, and I had been told I was property of the state, so it never occurred to me that it was wrong or that there was anything I could do about it.
I don't think of myself as someone who lacks the depth to understand my own life, and that is why it fucked me up so much. When something is normalized around you, it is very unlikely you will see it as unusual or "bad" until someone else shines a light on it. When a person feels threatened, or feels a power imbalance they can't get out from under, what they do next is not consent, and women have been gaslit for generations into believing otherwise. The CDC agrees with us, even if American culture doesn't. It counts sexual coercion as its own category of sexual violence, defined as unwanted sexual penetration that happens after someone is pressured in a nonphysical way.
The Cornell story is being treated as shocking because it is loud, and what should shock us far more is how ordinary the numbers are. RAINN estimates that someone in America is sexually assaulted every 68 seconds. According to the CDC's most recent national survey, 21.0% of women reported a completed or attempted rape in their lifetime and 20.3% reported sexual coercion. In the CDC's 2016/2017 data, almost half of women who had been raped were first raped before they turned 18.
It is seldom the stranger in the alley we were warned about, it is the man with a key to the house. In France, Dominique Pelicot admitted that for nearly a decade, from 2011 to 2020, he drugged his wife of 50 years so that he and men he recruited online, some of them locals, could rape her while she was unconscious. Gisèle Pelicot had no idea. It only came to light because police started investigating him in 2020 after three women reported him trying to film up their skirts in a supermarket. In December 2024, he was sentenced to the maximum of 20 years, and all 50 other men on trial were convicted too. They were ordinary men between 27 and 74 years old, and she chose to make the trial public rather than hide it, putting the shame back on them where it belonged. In Austria, Josef Fritzl locked his daughter Elisabeth in a windowless cellar under the family home for 24 years, repeatedly raping her and fathering seven children with her, while the rest of the family lived upstairs. The prosecutor told the court he had reduced his daughter to total dependence and treated her as something he owned. I heard that same idea about myself in prison, and it is the same idea whether it comes from a father or from the state.
The data says these men aren't outliers. In the CDC's 2016/2017 data, more than half of women who were raped were raped by an acquaintance, more than 1 in 3 by an intimate partner, and 1 in 6 by a family member. Those numbers add up to more than 100% because so many of us were raped by more than one person, and the CDC found that 29% of female rape victims had more than one rape perpetrator in their lifetime. Among women who were raped, 94% reported only male perpetrators, and for sexual coercion it was 93.6%.
On the accountability side, RAINN, using FBI data, estimates that for every 1,000 sexual assaults, 25 perpetrators are sentenced to incarceration, and that an estimated 73% of assaults are never reported to police. When women do tell, it is often years later. The strongest data we have is on abuse that starts in childhood, which matters because so much of it does. In a U.S. study of women who were raped as children, 28% had never told a single person until the researchers asked. A large study of adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse found that only 21.2% told anyone within a month, while 57.5% waited more than five years. Waiting is not a sign that she's lying, it is what surviving looks like.
People say, “innocent until proven guilty” like it settles something, and I understand it matters in a courtroom, because nobody should go to prison without the state proving its case. But as a woman who read those messages, I believe her. I don't need to wait for a verdict to decide who I trust or who I let near the people I love. And we never give the woman that same benefit of the doubt. She's the one who gets questioned about how much she drank and what she had on and why she didn't fight harder, and after watching that happen over and over, we know why so many women just never report it. We know nothing will happen. We know a rapist can become President in this country, and people will cheer him on with the knowledge of it.
The research on false reports puts them between 2% and 10% of reported sexual assaults, and the researcher's own ten-year study landed at about 6%. Yet every time a woman comes forward, the conversation starts with her. What she was wearing, how much she drank, why she went upstairs, why she stayed friends with him afterward, why she waited, why her first statement didn't use the right words. We turn her into the case study in what she should have done differently, and we almost never ask the only question that matters, which is why he thought he could. That is the gaslighting. The slow training that teaches us to audit ourselves first, and teaches men they won’t be audited at all.
We are told from a very young age that men will protect us, and the record says otherwise. We were also told we were fragile and emotional, and that was just projection all along. We weren't even studied properly for most of modern medicine. It wasn't until the NIH Revitalization Act of 1993 that women and minorities were required to be included in NIH-funded research, and before that, male mice were used almost exclusively in lab experiments. Decades later, a 2021 JAMA review of more than 20,000 clinical trials found women were still underrepresented.
Meanwhile, the science on strength keeps saying the quiet part out loud. Researchers publishing in PNAS looked at seven populations living through famines, epidemics, and slavery, and found that women survived better, with lower mortality across almost all ages. Even newborn girls survived extreme conditions better than newborn boys, at an age when behavioral and social differences are minimal or favor males. That is not a story about muscle, it is a story about who endures, and women have been enduring the whole time while being told we were weaker.
That lie is what rape culture runs on: the idea that men are the stronger sex, so whatever they take is just the natural order of things. It is not fucking true. We have to stop normalizing it in the jokes, in the dorms, in the institutions that treat it as procedure, and in ourselves when we shrug off what happened to us as just the way it goes.
This is why I keep coming back to who writes the laws. The people deciding what counts as consent, how long survivors have to come forward, and what happens to rape kits are still mostly men. For the 2026 cycle, women make up 27% of candidacies for the U.S. House and 23.9% for the Senate. More women in power is the solution, and I mean women who stand with survivors, because a woman who trades other women's safety for approval from the men hurting us is not representation, and we are allowed to say so and vote accordingly.
A federal jury found Donald Trump liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll, the appeals court upheld it, and the judge wrote that the evidence showed he raped her as most people understand the word. He is sitting in the White House anyway. It shouldn't have taken the world discovering how deep the abuse of children runs among powerful men for people to get angry, but if that is what finally woke people up, then let's use it.
I'm raising a little boy, and I am not going to raise a man your child needs to be scared of. I am intentionally raising a man who will protect people even when he shouldn't have to. That means he'll know the word consent before he knows why it matters, and he'll understand that walking away from his friends is sometimes the bravest thing he can do. Every mother of a son has that power, and it is one of the few kinds of change we don't need anyone's vote to make.
What you can do with this:
- Vote on November 3, and before you do, look up where your candidates stand on survivor issues like statutes of limitations, rape kit backlogs, and campus sexual assault rules. A woman's name on the ballot is a start, and her record is what matters.
- Learn the word coercion and say it out loud with the women in your life. Some of your friends are carrying something they have never named, and hearing you name yours might be the door.
- If you're raising sons, talk to them early and often about consent, about alcohol and drugs, and about what it means to stop your friends. Silence in a room is a choice.
- If you have been incarcerated and something in this piece sounds familiar, it may not have been "just procedure." Talk to an advocate or a lawyer, because you may have more options than you were told you had.
- When a survivor comes forward years later, don't ask why she waited. Ask what it took for her to finally have the words.
- The next time you hear someone ask what she could have done differently, ask out loud what he should never have done at all.
- If this piece stirred something up for you, RAINN's hotline is 800-656-4673 and online at rainn.org. You don't need a label for what happened to deserve support.
We are not weak and we never were, and the more of us who say that out loud together, the harder it gets for anyone to pretend otherwise.
