DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Cornell brings back #MeToo.
#MeToo is back – thanks, largely, to Cornell University. A former student, identified only as Jane Doe, alleged in a civil suit last month that seven members of the Chi Phi fraternity drugged and gang-raped her in October 2024. Most of the subsequent social media outrage blurs a few distinctions. Prosecutors looked at her initial 2024 police statement and decided not to file charges. Cornell ran its own Title IX process. The county DA says the new civil lawsuit is “dramatically different” from what she told police at the time – as her original statement suggested she consented, and that when she raised concerns, the men stopped. The 2024 statement recounts Doe participating in three ketamine-fueled threesomes with four men, while three others burst into the room and snort ketamine off her naked body. The DA has since reopened the case and sent it to a grand jury, which could bring charges.
You would not know much about what Doe told the police initially from the social media clamor around the story – which centers on some vulgar but not incriminating Snapchat messages between the fraternity members, and how few of them were solely disciplined by having to write essays. After news of the civil suit broke, the Cornell Daily Sun newspaper decided to name the seven men it accused. Since then, Instagram, TikTok and X have been awash with outrage. People are being encouraged to call Cornell University and complain. At least one of the seven has been fired from his job at a North Carolina bank. A man unfortunate enough to share a name with another of the seven has been harassed online. On TikTok, mothers are filming themselves hectoring their male children about sexual assault, to broadcast that they’re not raising rapists. “Remove their heads in a public setting, it’s the only answer,” declares one Instagram post featuring the fraternity brothers’ faces, that has 200,000 likes.
Yet the events of the days that followed the night of the October 19, 2024 party merit consideration. The New York Times has more than 1,000 pages from Cornell’s internal investigation, which tell a broader story than the civil lawsuit or viral rage would suggest.
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Paglia's point is that women have been raised in a way that makes them naïve. They believe that the suburban, middle-class setting is the default condition of the world, and that the rights they have go with them anywhere, even to a foreign country or a bedroom during a drunken… https://t.co/YwzZWC2SWN pic.twitter.com/ZapI9RXklM
— Laocoon of Troy (@LaocoonofTroy) October 3, 2026