The gang rape at Cornell

We are now, finally, aware of what happened: In 2024, seven male students at Cornell University, all members of the Chi Phi fraternity, raped a woman known now as Jane Doe at a fraternity party. The party at which she was assaulted was soaked in alcohol and drugs.

Jonathan Newell and six other men took advantage of and amplified her intoxicated state. She was taken to a bedroom where she was attacked by these men. A fraternity member disgustingly posted a message to Snapchat (that went to 50 people who did nothing) advertising free access to Doe’s body. The text read, “free pussy in alum pu [pull up]. . . Like you can walk in and whip it out.” Another message read, “Shop still open.” Trapped in the room, Doe was raped for hours.

It is almost too grotesque to fathom yet also horribly common.

Fraternity members scrambled to respond to the accusation of assault. “Just deny, deny, deny” read one message. On social media they asked, “What’s the plan? … I don’t think she would have reported this.” “It’ll blow over in a couple days,” one wrote.

The University reported the accusation to the Tompkins County District Attorney. But as of October 2026, none of the men has been charged with a crime due to a loophole in the law that says that a person who voluntarily ingests intoxicants cannot claim that they did not consent. It has been revealed that Doe was given ketamine against her will. However, regardless of any voluntary intoxication, no one who is impaired can truly consent to sexual activity. Intoxication is not a license to rape.

The university banned the fraternity and expelled two students. This was the extent of their “punishment.”

This failure occurred in spite of Doe’s interview with Cornell police and a Title IX investigator that produced a 120-page transcript. Her claims that she “can say with 100 percent confidence that I was raped” by a “ring of men” in a room from which there “was really no escape” did not, as Corey Robin has reported, make it into the six pages supplied to the District Attorney, who concluded that he did not have enough evidence to file charges against the men.

But this September, Doe filed a civil lawsuit against the University, the Chi Phi fraternity, Delta Delta Delta sorority, and the seven men who assaulted her. This filing and the following outcry prompted New York Gov. Kathy Hochul to order Attorney General Letitia James to open a criminal investigation. The national response has revived public awareness of sexual assault, particularly sexual assault on college campuses. Thousands of students at Cornell and across the country demonstrated powerful support of Doe demanding independent investigations, bans on fraternities, and the resignation of the university president and other administrators who protected these men from the consequences of their actions.

Elite universities, fraternities, and gender violence

Sexual assault occurs, unfortunately, everywhere, but one in five undergraduate students experiences rape or sexual assault over a four-year college career. As much as 80 percent of sexual assaults on campus are not reported. Regardless of enrollment, women between 18 and 24 are most at risk for rape and other sexual violence. College students, according to feminist Rebecca Solnit, are most at risk at fraternities during the “Red Zone” between the start of school and Thanksgiving break.

Ivy League and other elite universities around the world have a vested interest in guarding the institution against scandal and protecting students who either will join the ranks of the ruling class or already come from powerful families. Alumni who belong to fraternities also exert pressure after leaving school. As Cornell graduate student Kaori Quan told Truthout, “wealthy donors are members of these organizations, and that stream of cash incentivizes the university to preserve their reputation over the health and safety of students.”

Robin explains,

So you have a woman student stating she was gang raped. You have a police officer and an administrator [a Title IX investigator] beholden to an institution that wants, more than anything, to cultivate a reputation for itself as a hallowed place of learning and study rather than as a playground for rapists. It doesn’t take much to see how the representative of those institutions could massage and produce, out of 120 pages of blood-curdling testimony of a terrified and confused woman, a bland statement that a not terribly energetic or inquisitive district attorney could tuck away and think, I’ve done my job for the day.

Thus, when students commit crimes, these schools rarely expel them. Fraternities, while not protected by law, often employ cultural and social mechanisms—discouraging and under- reporting, blaming single individuals for such conduct, and enforcing codes of silence, destruction of evidence, and denying blame for crimes committed at “unofficial” events like parties—to protect members and discredit victims. The code “Bros will be Bros” influences perception of sexual assault responsibility: When a perpetrator is a member of a fraternity,1Rita C. Seabrook and L. Monique Ward, “Bros Will Be Bros? The Effect of Fraternity Membership on Perceived Culpability for Sexual Assault, Violence Against Women 25, no. 12 (2019): 1471-1490.

males rated perpetrators as less guilty and victims as more culpable when the perpetrator was a fraternity member, suggesting that sexual violence may be reinforced among fraternity members as they are both more likely to perpetrate sexual assault and less likely to be blamed.

Relative to campuses in general and society at large, fraternities are associated with higher risks of sexual assault, although exact numbers are hard to find due to underreporting and institutional silence.

The progressive Century Foundation and Gallup News report that, despite making up only about two percent of the total U.S. population, fraternity members dominate traditional positions of power: half of the CEOs of Fortune 500 Companies, the Century Foundation reports that 76 percent of U.S. legislators, 85 percent of  Supreme Court Justices (since 1910), 63 percent of U.S. Presidential Cabinet members, and almost every President and Vice President of the United States (since 1825). (Three of the six women on the Supreme Court were members of sororities.)

73 percent of fraternity members are white; 60 percent come from private high schools, and 30 percent were legacy admissions.

So, when it comes to sexual assault and other violations, universities protect themselves, fraternities protect themselves, and both protect students who either are or will be in the ruling class.

In doing so, these institutions are grievously failing survivors like Jane Doe and abetting gender violence in the service of broader systemic power.

Capitalism and gender violence

Solnit describes our society as a “rape-prone” culture marked by

entitlement and the desire to abuse and dehumanize women, which is in part about definitions of both masculinity and femininity: masculinity in that domination, violation and degradation are seen as status-enhancing, femininity in the perception that women’s bodies are for men to use, women’s voices and rights to be ignored.

Solnit’s emphasis is on masculine supremacy as the root of rape culture. However, it is also important to consider that gender violence is tied to the general structural violence—from sexual assault to police violence to colonialism and war to racist brutality and more—of the capitalist system. Why and how does capitalism produce a “rape-prone” culture?

Capitalist society depends upon people to occupy normative (prescribed, “appropriate”) gender identities and roles as part of the ideology of family values. This is because capitalism relies upon the private family to reproduce—biologically and socially—the population of workers, all at no cost to corporations or the state. The ideology of the family depends on a feminine identity whose primary role in society is to keep house and raise children. Gender violence is a form of gender discipline that, in conjunction with other ideological and social forces, sustains the installation of women as responsible for every reproductive task, from birth to education, housing, health care, transportation, and socialization (which itself reproduces normative gender roles).

We can find cultural expression of this gendered family imperative in the (actually declining) “tradwife” movement exhorting women to abandon education and careers in favor of devoting themselves to home and family. We see its political expression in the policy announced by Vice President J.D. Vance that would reallocate federal childcare funds to pay families with married, stay-at-home parents.

Rebecca Hall has argued that the usually feminized paid and unpaid labor often performed by women means that the family and other domestic spaces are sites of both extreme and persistent gender violence and creative resistance to capitalism as a system.2Rebecca Hall, “A Social Reproduction Theory of Gender Violence,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 48, no. 2 (20223): 321-345. She explains gender violence as occupying the intersection between the structural violence of capitalism and the embodied violence of gendered spaces.

The irony is that capitalism is a direct threat to the well-being of the private family and yet requires it to sustain profitability. Gender violence fills the gap in that contradiction by blaming women, and particularly women active in careers and pursuits outside the home, for transgressing the role that capitalism needs them to play so badly. Domestic assault and sexual assault happen in domains considered to be “private,” sites of profound gender regulation un- or loosely overseen by the state. Hall notes that social reproduction happens expansively not only in the household but also in communities, public and private institutions, and workplaces—and so, therefore, does gender violence.

Above and beyond the networking and nepotism of fraternities, the social reproduction of ruling class men into their prescribed roles generate habits of command and sexual entitlement, which carries forward into fraternity life and their roles as future bosses and political elites.

A brief note is necessary about trans and gender nonbinary identities and bodies as they intersect this discussion. Transwomen and other genderqueer people, in refusing to occupy conventionally gendered social positions, are especially targeted by gender violence and the carceral system. Sarah Lamble says that trans people, figured as dangers to society, experience fear, surveillance, discipline, policing, and punishment.3Sarah Lamble, Unsafe: The Carceral Roots of the Anti-Trans Backlash (Haymarket Books, 2026).

Fighting back against gender violence

Women and their allies resist gender violence in both interpersonal and public ways. Some may call for greater criminalization of gender violence and intervention by the police and other agencies of the state. It is tempting to hope for the criminal prosecution and conviction of the seven rapists in the Cornell case as a positive end goal. But the police are not our defenders.

Indeed, police are disproportionately represented among those who commit rape and other sexual assaults, including against children, and they are more likely than others to commit violence against their family members. Ms Magazine reported recently that police sexual violence is the second-most common form of civilian complaint against law enforcement. As with fraternities there is a (blue) wall of silence that protects police accused of these and other crimes (like the murder of Black people and abuse of immigrants by ICE).

More broadly, as brian bean argues in their end is our beginning, the modern police were created and evolved in capitalism and serve its violent order.4brian bean, Their End Is Our Beginning (Haymarket 2026). They exist to protect corporations and society at large from threats to property and elites. They crack down on immigrants, protesters, labor unions, and women and the gender queer as a function of their mission to serve capitalism. In short, the police are not our friends, and the courts are not friendly to victims of gender violence, either.

Not only is sexual assault underreported, but is one of the most dismissed crimes in U.S. law. Character assassination, legal loopholes, and retaliation make successful prosecution difficult and damaging to survivors.5R. Michael Cassidy, “Character, Credibility, and Rape Shield Rules,” Georgetown Review of Law and Public Policy 19 (2021): 145-176. If looking to the law is not a productive response to gender violence, including rape, where do we find effective resistance for the survival and flourishing of women and genderqueer people?

Historically, it has been mass movements for women’s liberation that have affected public awareness and incidence of rape and other gender crimes. It was in the late 1970s, during the women’s liberation movement and on the heels of its militancy that rape rates began a decades-long decline.

Take Back the Night protests took shape during this time, and the viral #MeToo movement, founded in 2006 by Tarana Burke, was revived in 2017. It led to legal, cultural, institutional, and economic change, including state-level prohibition of non-disclosure agreements, the passage of state-level anti-harassment laws, an increase in the reporting of gender violence to the police and increased numbers of prosecutions, and some corporate workplace reforms (and the ejection of perpetrators from seats of power). In culture, new awareness about the need for affirmative consent and discussion about gender and power in the media arose.

Women’s rage has fueled resistance to gender violence. Today, there is a massive viral solidarity movement with the slogan “I am Jane Doe,” with 40 nationwide protests and campus walkouts, sit-ins, and demonstrations at Cornell and other universities. The Cornell faculty introduced a no-confidence resolution against the university administration.

On October 5, thousands of Cornell University students representing more than 20 organizations protested on the campus, holding signs reading “We are Jane Doe,” “Stop Protecting Rapists,” and “We Want Sentences, not Essays.” Shireen Akram-Boshar reported that the students are demanding the replacement of Cornell’s internal judicial system with an independent system, an external investigation of Cornell’s administration mandatory sexual assault prevention trainings for students, and compliance with the New York state law, “Enough is Enough.” In addition, they are demanding the resignation of Cornell University President Michael Kotlikoff and other administrators. Some are demanding that fraternities be banned from campus.

They have also called for the expulsion of all of the students. Akram-Boshar learned that, of 1200 reported incidents of sexual violence on campus from 2018 to 2024, only seven resulted in expulsion.

We stand with Jane Doe and all of the students demonstrating against sexual assault and administrative inaction.

In addition, we must build a broader movement that connects the fight against gender violence to the abolition of the police and the struggle for socialism from below. We on the socialist Left must make gender violence a focus in our political discussion and action. Ciswomen, transwomen, transmen, and genderqueer people must stand in solidarity with each other and with the struggle against the capitalist system,  which is the horrifying well from which this violence against us springs.

#MeToo

#IamJaneDoe

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Featured Image credit: Rotograph Co; modified by Tempest.