The stark shift in the public reception of alleged rape victims in 2026 is, in some respects, directly attributable to the failure of institutions to lay a responsible groundwork for addressing allegations like Jackie’s more than a decade earlier. Instead of standing on factual probity and prudence, agencies from government to the press created a climate of hysteria and punitive legalism. They did this to advance a preconceived activist narrative into which Jackie’s story fit perfectly. 

Only, Jackie’s claims amounted to an elaborate hoax whose unraveling gravely set back the cause of improving sexual ethics on campus.

Her story first came to public notice thanks to an exposé, by the journalist Sabrina Rubin Erdely, published in Rolling Stone. In Erdely’s telling, Jackie hailed from a rural part of Virginia and worked hard to fit in at a school that had long catered to the Southern elite. Founded by Thomas Jefferson as a bastion of Enlightenment values, UVA had a reputation as a party school — perhaps the nation’s first — where the sons of the Southern planter class once drank and caroused in between taking courses in the liberal arts and sciences and studying for professions like law and medicine. By the 2010s, however, the university had evolved into a highly ranked college, one of a very few top state schools, alongside the likes of UCLA, Berkeley, and Michigan. 

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Jackie at first felt inadequate among her elite peers, so she was delighted when “Drew” — also never identified, but for a different reason, as we will see shortly — took an interest in her. She’d met him while they both worked as lifeguards at the UVA pool, and he soon invited her to a party at his top-tier fraternity, Phi Kappa Psi, home to some of the most affluent boys on campus.

But the invitation was a ruse. Shortly after Jackie arrived at the party, Drew asked her if “she’d like to go somewhere quieter,” ushering her upstairs to a pitch-black bedroom, where gruesome events would transpire. She was pushed into a low table, whose glass top shattered under her weight. “Grab its motherfuckin’ leg,” a voice commanded. For the next several hours, she was raped by multiple young men, seven in all, while Drew watched, “swigging beer” and giving instructions. The ordeal appeared to be part of a fraternity pledging ritual. 

Jackie wasn’t drunk, but she lost consciousness, awaking well after midnight and leaving the frat house wounded and disheveled. She called a friend for help. The friend arrived, along with two other of her closest friends (two boys and a girl). One of them, a boy named “Randall,” urged that she be taken to a hospital. But the other boy in the trio reminded Randall that the two of them hoped to be accepted into fraternities, and the girl added, “She’s gonna be the girl who cried ‘rape,’ and we’ll never be allowed into any frat party again.” So she was returned to her own dorm and sat with her story for two years, keeping it mostly quiet, save for a few confidants, including Nicole Eramo, then a UVA dean and the head of the university’s sexual-misconduct board. 

When Jackie confided her story to Eramo, the latter did nothing. Eramo appeared in Rolling Stone as a “trusted dean” who “discouraged [Jackie] from sharing her story.” 

Jackie thus suffered in silence, fearful that speaking out further would mean social destruction on a Southern campus where loyalties still ran thick. That is, until she decided to go public with it in her third year. The recipient of this soul-shattering tale was Erdely, who ended up placing it on the Dec. 4, 2014, cover of Rolling Stone. 

None of it was true. There was no “Drew” who worked as a lifeguard at the UVA pool. There wasn’t even evidence that Jackie had visited the fraternity house at the time in question. This wasn’t a case of an important magazine story that was accurate in its thrust, even if a few substantive details had been mischaracterized. Rolling Stone — and, soon, many other institutions — fell for a troubled young woman’s narrative concoction.

With precious few exceptions, the prestige press and other elite institutions initially accepted the story at face value and framed it as a moment of reckoning: for Greek life; for universities; for a nation that for too long had neglected women’s safety in the name of protecting reputations, especially those belonging to the rich and powerful — the sons of affluent America, plus deans and other university administrators fearful of rocking the boat.

The Washington Post, which later helped discredit the Rolling Stone piece, initially wondered if the allegations should serve as a “tipping point” on the place of Greek life on campus. A writer for the paper urged that “we should automatically believe rape claims” (the line was later changed to “generally believe”). In response to the doubters, a writer for The New Republic huffed: “It is symptomatic of exactly the patterns of incredulity and easy dismissal of rape accusations that keep many assaulted women and men from ever bringing their stories to authorities or to the public.” Bustle magazine, meanwhile, dismissed all skepticism to conclude: “It’s not just an account of a rape, alleged or otherwise. It’s about rape culture itself. You have to identify a problem before you can solve it, which is exactly what the Rolling Stone piece set out to do.” A Slate contributor accused the skeptics of “denialism.”

When Erdely’s essay appeared, “the initial reaction from everybody [at UVA] was just that of outrage,” a source familiar with the night’s events and their aftermath told UnHerd. “Across the university people were appalled that this could happen. People believed it.” Students rose up in protest. The Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house was vandalized. UVA faculty circulated emails demanding the abolition of the entire Greek system. University President Teresa Sullivan partly complied by suspending Greek life. 

The members of the fraternity were widely demonized. As Stephen Scipione, the then chapter president, reflected at the time: “It’s completely tarnished our reputation. It’s completely destroyed a semester of our lives, specifically mine. It’s put us in the worst position possible in our community here, in front of our peers and in the classroom.” Eramo, to whom Jackie had confided, ended up looking heartless in the Rolling Stone story — and, more to the point, neglectful of basic duties of care toward a victim. 

In reality, Eramo had followed best practices, offering to help Jackie contact law enforcement or launch a campus investigation, but not pushing her to do so, an approach that is considered to be “trauma-informed,” since it allows the victim agency in the decision to press charges or not. Eramo also put Jackie in touch with a campus organization for survivors, headed by UVA’s sexual-assault-leadership council chairwoman, Emily Renda. And Eramo followed up a few weeks after the initial meeting. 

In the end, the fraternity and the school were vindicated. By the following year, the local police department completed its investigation of the allegations and released the results: none of Jackie’s story could be substantiated. As it emerged from testimony and email evidence, it seemed most likely that Jackie had made up the events as an attempt to elicit sympathy from one of the friends who showed up that evening — “Randall,” later identified as undergraduate Ryan Duffin — for whom she had unrequited feelings. Rolling Stone retracted the story and was compelled to pay nearly $1.7 million in damages to the fraternity. A jury likewise awarded $3 million to Eramo after concluding that she had followed all guidelines of care in dealing with Jackie’s claims when she first raised them with her. 

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The Columbia Journalism Review later conducted an investigation and issued a report, published in full by Rolling Stone, which concluded that “A Rape on Campus” amounted to “avoidable failure” at every level of the journalistic process, encompassing “reporting, editing, editorial supervision, and fact-checking.” 

The damage was done. The UVA Jackie case became the second major allegation of gang-rape by elite college students that came apart in as many decades, the other being allegations of a gang rape by the Duke lacrosse team in 2006, which also turned out to have been fabricated. The nation now confronts a third such story, though one that isn’t nearly as fictitious — Jane Doe’s allegations regarding the “Cornell 7” — but the landscape has irreversibly shifted.

The early 2010s were a time of dramatic change and, in some ways, hope when it came to the treatment of sexual assault on campus. Jackie’s story was far from the first of its kind. The public had been outraged by high-profile crimes, such as the gang-rape of an unconscious undergraduate by football players at Vanderbilt in 2013; and by the history of institutions sweeping sexual assault allegations under the rug, as happened in 2012 at Florida State, where an alleged victim’s complaint against a star football player went inadequately investigated  by both police and the university. Female students and the public at large were demanding change.

In this heady moment, the definition of sexual assault was changing as well, both legally and in the eyes of many young women. As the author Vanessa Grigoriadis writes in her 2017 book on the topic, Blurred Lines: Rethinking Sex, Power, and Consent on Campus, a growing number of complainants “made the nation comfortable with a new definition of sexual assault: one that embraced a spectrum of sexual behavior, including previously acceptable areas of consent.” 

Unwanted touching and grabbing, coercive speech, denigration — all were reclassified as assault. Gray-zone sexual encounters were forced into black or white. The emblematic example of this was the case of Emma Sulkowicz, Columbia University’s “Mattress Girl,” who complained that a man had initiated unwanted anal sex in the course of an otherwise consensual encounter, as reported in Grigoriadis’s book. Sulkowicz carried her mattress with her everywhere she went on campus, in protest of the university’s finding the male student “not responsible” and a district attorney’s conclusion that there were insufficient grounds for “reasonable suspicion” of a crime. 

Forming the legal backdrop to this was a directive issued in 2011 by then-President Barack Obama’s Department of Education to colleges that received federal funding. The directive — which came to be known as the “Dear Colleague” letter, after its opening — didn’t make new law. But it radically altered how the relevant law — Title IX, prohibiting sex-based discrimination in higher education — was to be applied.

To wit, the “Dear Colleague” letter treated sexual assault as a serious form of sex-based discrimination that had to be addressed in university-based hearings under Title IX, separate from any other police or justice-system investigation. Far more controversially, the letter banned mediation as a potential outcome to such complaints; discouraged allowing the accused to confront or cross-examine their accusers; and set the evidentiary threshold for a guilty finding to a “preponderance of evidence,” which is quite a ways off from the “beyond-a-reasonable-doubt” threshold applied in criminal cases.

The attitude towards these changes was largely positive, or at least open-minded, at first. The feeling that women had been wronged in the past, and deserved a redress, ran high. Even when Jackie’s story turned out to be a hoax, sexual-assault advocates worried only that Jackie’s lies would damage the credibility of all women — rather than seeing a potential unfairness to men. Bystanders at UVA who were swept up in the scandal were also thinking of the women. “I found myself on an international news stage, talking about a very real, serious issue in the context of a story that had the potential to damage the credibility of a lot of other people who would legitimately need help in similar situations,” one told UnHerd.

But a decade and a half later, it is safe to say that hope has dissipated — a result of the several institutional and activist failures that converged on cases like Jackie’s. 

Start with the Obama administration’s failures. Even before the “Dear Colleague” letter, some universities were using disciplinary hearings to adjudicate claims of sexual assault in ways that were deeply troubling from a due-process standpoint. It wasn’t uncommon, for example, for accused men to be convicted of some of the most heinous charges in human legal history on the basis of little more than a scintilla of evidence in the accuser’s favor. 

In 2006, for example, a Brown student named William McCormick was accused of sexual assault and was almost immediately removed from campus by university authorities — before any adjudication and before any criminal charges (which never came). McCormick sued the Ivy over these due-process defects; the case eventually settled. 

In some cases, accused students were allowed to bring legal counsel to hearings, but the lawyers were barred from speaking or intervening. The right to cross-examine accusers, a bedrock of Anglo-American legal procedure, was sometimes denied to the accused. And charges of rape — which often involve DNA and other complex evidentiary elements — were being adjudicated by school officials, many of whom had scarcely any experience in law enforcement. 

In effect, the Obama administration took these procedures — which were already crying out for reform — and imposed them on the entire college system as mandatory. This primed the mistrust among male students and their parents, but more than that, it put more and more university administrators in the position of law enforcers. And made them deeply fearful of any approaches but the legalistic.

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As we have noted in these pages, such abridgments of due process have already marred the “Cornell 7” case. One accused student, Scott Kretzschmar, was exonerated of rape and sexual exploitation charges at his Title IX hearing — only to be convicted of attempted sexual exploitation, a charge of which he wasn’t notified in advance and therefore had no means to refute. One of the hearing officers, as UnHerd first revealed, could be seen on the Zoom app driving and surfing the internet while Kretzschmar’s future hung in the balance.

The second failure was the dirty trick that was long seen as the activists’ magic bullet: the conflation in the public mind of real violence by men against women with regrettable or misguided encounters in which both parties bear some blame. As Grigoriadis puts it, in order to achieve the huge and dramatic changes that came about, “part of [the activists’] genius was overstating the case, and conflating lesser slights with forcible rapes.” This may have been understandable as a tactic for those focused on victory, but to the extent that it has been picked up by institutions, it has been a corrupting influence. It has generated an intense backlash among the accused, who are being held accountable, both socially and by university tribunals, for behavior coded as “rape” that is, in fact, usually much more ambiguous. 

Witness how this played out in journalism. Erdely chose Jackie’s story, which was difficult to corroborate and, if looked at closely, full of holes, over many other less sensational options available to her. She did so because of her own bias — she trusted Jackie, as she told the later investigation by Columbia journalism scholars. She found her source credible. But it must also have been a story she wanted to believe. It was a good scoop, of course. It also accomplished the convenient effect of using the heightened emotional tenor produced by a brutal rape story to create a kind of umbrella of outrage over all sexual assault. (Erdely, when reached by UnHerd, declined to comment.) 

Only such a motivation on the part of Erdely and Rolling Stone could account for the magazine’s overlooking of the obvious discrepancies. For example, if Jackie’s friends were merely anticipating rushing a fraternity, why was there already a pledge ritual event happening at Phi Kappa Psi? Pledging at UVA happened in the spring — a detail the Rolling Stone fact-checkers missed, and that later came out in the story’s unraveling. 

Jackie was reluctant to provide Drew’s last name and struggled to spell it. Instead of seeking to confirm his existence on her own, Erdely gave up when she couldn’t find such a person having worked at the UVA pool. Still more damningly, Erdely failed to get in touch with any of the friends Jackie supposedly met with that evening. Nor was she troubled by her failure to identify, much less seek comment from, any of the alleged gang-rapists.

We have institutions — functioning, rational ones, painstakingly developed over centuries, that could have prevented any of these problems if those at the helm followed well-established guidelines. The law insists upon due process. Journalism has standards, as the Columbia Journalism Review’s excellent forensic analysis of the Erdely story revealed, if only Rolling Stone had hewn to them. 

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UVA, in fact, seems to be the only institution that did follow its own procedures: it allowed the alleged victim to decide whether or not to bring her case forward. Not only is this approach trauma-informed when it comes to sexual assault, it very well might have a beneficial filtering effect when it comes to false allegations. In a video deposition in 2016, Jackie said that she stood by her story and “I believed it to be true at the time.” And she must have, but perhaps she didn’t believe it quite enough to press charges, or to respond to Eramo’s follow-up. The school was right to let the matter drop. Additionally, Emily Renda, the leader of the sexual-assault-support group who gave Erdely Jackie’s name, later tried to stop the journalist from publishing the fraternity’s name, on the grounds that it would violate due process. Both women, in other words, acted properly and in good faith. 

And yet the school and all the individuals involved paid the price in public shaming. Is it any wonder that other universities have now taken note? The third, ongoing institutional failure stems from this. In an email Nicole Eramo sent through her lawyer to the Columbia Journalism Review team, she wrote, “I do not — and have never — allowed the possibility of a media story to influence the way I have counseled students.” Eramo was defending herself against the perception that she’d tried to keep Jackie quiet, but the opposite challenge now faces many administrators, who face pressure to prove they’ve done enough. And they’re doing it, justice be damned. 

There is a compulsion to legally convict and punish. It is cheered by activist journalism, and it was carved into administrative procedure by the Obama and Biden administrations. It is still the rule at many schools, despite the suspension of the letter by President Trump. All this has foreclosed other forms of justice and reconciliation. As the Cornell case, and many others like it, make clear, the sexual culture on many campuses is deeply broken. Young men and women under the influence frequently engage in sexual activities that don’t amount to rape in the traditional legal sense, but which leave one person, most often the woman, feeling harmed, confused, and shamed. This is precisely the sort of situation that a wise administrator, working from a restorative-justice perspective, can address. But an administrator fearful of losing federal funding, and of being demonized by the press, will opt instead for the purely punitive approach that simply isn’t apt in cases like Jane Doe’s. 

Jackie’s story casts doubt on other women’s testimony, to be sure. But worse, it was the beginning of a movement to use the most inflammatory cases to define the issue. The results have been disastrous.

There’s no happy ending to this tale. Emma Sulkowicz, Columbia’s “Mattress Girl,” has stopped making art, and is an acupuncturist in New York City. The man she accused, Paul Nungesser, later sued Columbia for violating his Title IX rights, and settled out of court. Crystal Gail Mangum, the stripper and false-accuser from the Duke lacrosse case, which predated the events at UVA, later went to jail for murder. 

Sabrina Rubin Erdely left journalism and works in corporate communications for Boston Scientific. Nicole Eramo, who wrote in her email to the Columbia Journalism Review investigation that she had “lived in the Charlottesville community for over 20 years” and had “a deep and profound love for this university and the students who study here,” now resides in Easton, Pa., and serves as the senior adviser to the president of Lafayette College. Eramo does not appear to have continued her work in sexual-assault advocacy. Emily Renda, who now goes by a married name, is listed as a board member on the website of the Take Back the Night Foundation, and is an assistant county counsel in California’s Sierra Mountains. 

The UVA boys appear to have fared well, all things considered: Stephen Scipione, the head of Phi Kappa Psi at the time of the false allegations, is head of operations at a capital management firm in Austin, according to LinkedIn. Ryan Duffin, the “Randall” in the Rolling Stone story, is a software engineer, also according to LinkedIn. It’s likely that a source who spoke to UnHerd speaks for all of them, when saying that the story “follows me around and causes a lot of grief” to no good purpose.

And Jackie, the besotted fabulist who thought that telling a guy she had a crush on that she’d been raped might make him swoop in and protect her? Her false story, perhaps, is yet another example of the disturbed and disturbing dating culture facing American students. When asked where she is now, or even if she finished school, a UVA source says, “I have no idea, I have no details since.” It is to be hoped that she received the help she needed. But clearly, it was not the kind of “help” the Obama administration or the national press provided. And many other young men and women have suffered as a result. 

Kretzschmar’s lawyer, Jeremy Saland, spotted something curious: Savannah Bao, one of the panel members, was in a car, seatbelted, and apparently driving (since the shadows playing over her face were shifting). Saland immediately emailed a flurry of complaints to Lauren Branchini, the university’s Title IX coordinator — who was involved in the case because the allegations implicated the federal antidiscrimination law. Here was a university adjudicator apparently carrying on with her various casual life activities while being presented with evidence in a case that could destroy a young man’s life, branding him a “rapist” forever.

“Shame on Cornell,” Saland fumed in one email. “I certainly hope none of you, from the General Counsel to anyone on that panel, is wrongfully accused of wrongdoing or has a child wrongfully accused, and has an adjudicator so cavalier and flippant towards the rule of law.” Branchini, the Title IX coordinator, coldly acknowledged that Saland’s protests had been entered into the record, and that Cornell would preserve records for a possible appeal. In the end, Kretzschmar was exonerated of rape and sexual exploitation but found guilty of attempted sexual exploitation, a charge Cornell hadn’t notified him of, despite its legal obligation to do so. 

The written record of the day’s hearing, reviewed by UnHerd and first reported here, opens a window onto the shockingly one-sided procedures used by universities to impose after-the-fact accountability on one group and only one — accused young men. This, while young women, and everyone else in the system, refuse to accept responsibility for their role in a broken sexual ethic. 

The case — popularly dubbed the “Cornell 7” after the seven accused men, including Kretzschmar — has gone viral since the accuser filed a civil suit against a host of defendants in mid-September. The young woman, referred to as “Jane Doe” in her complaint, is suing Cornell and several of its officials, three bodies associated with the young men’s fraternity, the sorority to which she belonged at the time, a bar in Ithaca, and the seven young men. 

A manic rush to judgment has followed, one that is all too reminiscent of episodes like the 2006 Duke lacrosse case and the controversy sparked by a 2014 Rolling Stone essay that alleged a heinous, hours-long gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity. Both of those earlier narratives ultimately unraveled under factual scrutiny, but not before upturning the lives of the accused and contributing to an atmosphere of paranoia and accusation on campus. 

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The Cornell case has yet to be fully adjudicated. Yet already, the staff of The Cornell Daily Sun, the university’s main student publication, published an editorial headlined, “Cornell Won’t, We Will,” and doxxed the students. They wrote, “We refuse for this victim to be reduced to just another story. Cornell has failed to protect its students. Cornell has failed to address the growing issue of sexual assault on campus with its pathetic task force. Cornell has failed the student allegedly raped by those seven men at Chi Phi in October 2024. Cornell has failed her. Cornell has failed us.” The accused students’ likenesses have been shared as well on social media, often with instructions to “make their images and names known” or even to “remove their heads in a public setting” (the latter post has received more than 140,000 “likes” on Instagram as of the time of this writing). 

According to Jane Doe’s civil suit, it all went wrong on the evening of Oct. 19, 2024. That’s when the 20-year-old Cornell student headed, alone, to the Chi Phi Xi Chapter fraternity house after a night of drinking that had begun in her sorority house and continued on Ithaca’s downtown strip. There, Doe’s suit claims, she was “drugged and raped by multiple members of Chi Phi National’s fraternal organization.” 

The allegations are appalling: at the Chi Phi Xi Chapter house, two Cornell fraternity brothers, Matthew Ingalls and Johnathan Newell, allegedly pressured Doe into snorting ketamine and engaged her in a threeway sexual encounter without her consent. Another young man, Gillio Lopes, allegedly dropped by and joined in the rape. Then, at 1:42 a.m., Newell sent a message to the fraternity Snapchat advertising “free pussy” and providing the girl’s location — a bedroom at the frat called “alumni room” — thus allegedly encouraging other young men to come and rape Doe. Four more young men — Diego Sarabia, Winston Lee, Scott Norris, and Kretzschmar — are alleged to have entered the room at some point in the evening and had various degrees of contact with Doe. In the most lurid detail, Newell allegedly forced Doe to snort ketamine off of his erect penis; the other young men, including Kretzschmar, are accused of snorting lines of ketamine off her naked body.

Kretzschmar’s side of the story can be gleaned from an administrative appeal he lodged this year, challenging his disciplinary conviction for attempted sexual exploitation on procedural grounds. UnHerd reviewed, for the first time, documents from the appeal, which haven’t been posted to the New York court system’s online docket. He asserts that when he saw the “free pussy” message on the group chat, he stopped by the alumni room to make sure nothing “bad” was afoot. He also insists that, when he stepped in, Doe was in bed but under the covers. Kretzschmar’s legal team apparently also provided the school with the results of a hair-follicle test, which turned up negative for ketamine. (Hair-follicle tests generally detect drugs, including ketamine, up to four months after use.) 

Eventually, most of the young men allegedly departed the scene, and Doe was allegedly removed to another room in the fraternity house, where she claims she was raped until 5:45 a.m. by two remaining young men. 

Several weeks later, Doe says, she went to the Cornell Police Department (a private force) to file a complaint about the incident. The Tompkins County District Attorney’s office, however, declined to prosecute. Cornell instituted Title IX disciplinary proceedings against the seven young men, two of whom were eventually expelled; five others received consequences that included suspension, sexual-assault training, and essay-writing.

Doe herself left the school some time after the incident, which had become widely known on campus, according to a Cornell student who spoke with UnHerd on condition of anonymity. Doe didn’t complete her degree at Cornell.

The sexual activities described in the lawsuit — if they were nonconsensual — are horrifying. Yet the same activities, conducted consensually, amount to a more complicated matter. And evidence, as it has emerged in the days since the story of Doe’s lawsuit broke, has painted a much murkier picture than the one presented in her civil suit. 

A statement provided to The New York Times by Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten summarizes a “six page, single-spaced, typewritten statement,” amended with “more than 20 hand-written notations,” that was originally made by Jane Doe to campus security. Van Houten maintains that, based on the young woman’s statement, there were no legal grounds for criminal proceedings. Doe’s behavior met the legal standards for consent in the state of New York, including voluntary consent to consume alcohol and drugs. Since then, and in response to the media brouhaha, his office has reopened a criminal investigation.

There are also many mitigating factors that cut in favor of the accused in Doe’s original complaint to Cornell police. The statement described “male number 1” — revealed in the later civil suit to be Ingalls — as her friend, with whom she had plans to meet. She rated her level of intoxication as “5 out of 10” upon arrival at the frat; said she agreed to the original threeway; agreed to take ketamine; and consented or declined consent to various sex acts. She snorted the line of ketamine off of the penis of “male number 2” because it was “implied” that he wanted her to; and she verbally consented to having other lines of ketamine snorted off her body. By the end of the evening, she reported, her level of intoxication was “8 out of 10,” and she found herself having sex with male number 1 and one other man, but couldn’t remember “how it started.” 

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The condition of the young men is not the focus of the statement, but the inability of “male number 1” to maintain an erection and need for a “nap” during a threeway, not to mention dry-heaving by “male number 2,” suggest that both of the original men in the scenario were also deeply impaired.

Other hallmarks of consent have also come to light, including a text message from Doe to one of the men in the days following the incident, in which she conceded that “non[e] of the sexual stuff was illegal” and suggested that they get together again, “but like leave out the extra 5 billion men and ketamine.” Doe’s attorney, Thomas Giuffra, confirmed to CBS News that she exchanged texts with a defendant, and suggested that her friendly tone was because she “was trying to find out what happened.” (Giuffra didn’t return UnHerd’s emailed requests for comment by press time.)

What happened to Doe was a tragedy. There is no question about that. The legal situation, however, is fairly clear: barring facts still to come to light, she was not sexually assaulted, not according to the legal definition under state law. Attempts to reopen the case are transparently motivated by the eruption of public outrage. And Doe’s own civil claim makes the weak argument that she was “incapable of consent” due to intoxication, without presenting any of the standards of proof required, which go well beyond the simple fact of intoxication. 

Even so, a young woman was involved in group sexual acts that she subsequently regretted, finding them alienating and degrading. In other words, Doe is mostly a victim of a campus sexual ethic that rests upon bare consent as its sole criterion of right and wrong. Try as they might — and they clearly did in this case, as will be seen, anon. — university and Greek-life officials can’t stop a student like Doe in her determination to drink away her own inhibitions and to place herself in sexually risky circumstances. 

Cornell tried. In 2022, the university established a special office that implements anti-sexual-violence training in fraternities. Four years earlier, it prohibited the consumption of hard alcohol in fraternity and sorority houses entirely.

Doe managed to drink anyway. Even before she left her own sorority for the evening, according to her own suit, she drank Tito’s vodka. This, in blatant violation of both the campus prohibition against hard alcohol in Greek houses and the sorority’s own rules. Then, at the two events that she later attended in Ithaca, the private vendors took measures to identify her as underage, marking X’s on her hands and giving her an under-21 bracelet. 

At one of the events, Doe’s sorority had designated “sober monitors” to surveil “their fellow sorority sisters for signs of excessive intoxication,” according to the civil suit. Once again, Doe continued to drink. We can implement ever stricter measures: this week, Ithaca’s mayor moved to ban Cornell student-event permits altogether. However, in a more or less free society, human beings who want to get intoxicated and have sex will find a way to do so; decades of efforts to prevent this have so far been in vain.

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Which is why the solution is not law, but judgment: among the young men, yes, but also the young women and the wider culture. Our narrow — and libertine — view of sexual morality holds that anything goes as long as there is consent. According to both our cultural values and the law, a young woman can engage in sexual activity with seven frat boys, as long as it’s what she wants. Bonnie Blue, to some, is a feminist icon. As a standard for sexuality, this shows extremely poor judgment, and it’s no wonder both young women and young men make terrible errors.

With the present, thin ethical culture in place, all the system can do is mete out after-the-fact punishment to young men. But the unfairness of these processes only compounds the aggregate injustice.

Savannah Bao, the Cornell adjudicator, was driving for at least 45 minutes, according to Kretzschmar’s appeal of the panel’s decision. This, he charges, was during a crucial portion of the Zoom hearing, in which another of the accused Cornell men, Scott Norris, was offering testimony that Kretzschmar saw as exculpating him. 

Yet her driving was far from the only procedural defect in the hearing. Earlier that day, Saland complained in another email to the Title IX coordinator that Bao’s “glasses clearly reflected a blue box with a white background on her screen as her head and eyes moved back and forth” — that is, she was surfing other windows, rather than focusing on the matter at hand. (Cornell didn’t reply to UnHerd’s emailed queries by press time; likewise, Bao didn’t return a request for comment sent through LinkedIn.)

An even more serious procedural defect was that Cornell struck Kretzschmar with a disciplinary conviction related to a charge he didn’t even know he was facing. The original charges against him, recall, were rape and sexual exploitation. These charges arose from Doe’s allegation that Kretzschmar had seen her naked and sniffed ketamine off her body, both without her consent. 

But Kretzschmar insisted, and the hearing panel implicitly agreed, that he hadn’t taken either step: Doe was fully covered with sheets when Kretzschmar entered the alumni room. And the hair follicle test indicated that Kretzschmar hadn’t taken any ketamine, sniffed from a woman’s body or otherwise. Thus, he was exonerated of both rape and sexual exploitation.

But Cornell wasn’t done. In the end, as noted, the school convicted Kretzschmar of attempted sexual exploitation solely because he had visited the alumni room after seeing the Snapchat messages and because of his own message to the group (“the alumni shit is not a bit. . . .”). Kretzschmar, the panel contended, “understood that a female was likely nude and/or engaged in sexual activity in the alumni room . . . and entered the room on that basis, intending to observe the same.”

Here’s the problem: Kretzschmar wasn’t, beforehand, apprised of the attempted charge, which is its own separate offense category in the university’s policies. Therefore, neither he nor his counsel could have prepared for or attempted to refute it: “attempt,” after all, has different elements than exploitation proper. Under Cornell policies, the attempt charge involves conduct “tending toward completion of the prohibited conduct.” As Saland, his lawyer, argued in the administrative appeal of the panel’s determination, “had Cornell informed [Kretzschmar] that he was being charged with Attempted Sexual Exploitation, … he would have focused his defense, arguments, questions as to witnesses, and review of the investigative file towards” disproving attempt. 

But Cornell denied him such notice, leaving him and his counsel helpless before what amounted to a legal switcheroo. This was, without a doubt, a grave violation of his right to due process and even of Cornell’s own rules — with which, courts in New York have repeatedly held, the university was obligated to comply.

This is not a failure of any one institution, but of all of them. The university kangaroo court trampled on procedure and possibly the truth to achieve an ideological vision of justice. The court of public opinion has done the same. The police and prosecutors held firm at first, but since a new criminal case has been opened, we don’t know what the future holds. Both the young woman and the young men were ill-served by a culture that told them that in some situations, their behavior was desirable. Both have had their college experience and lives derailed.

The American university — and, indeed, US society writ large — desperately need a new sexual ethic. It won’t do to punish only one side of the sexual equation, young men, especially not in procedurally deficient quasi-trials that bring shame to a rule-of-law society. The public is angry for reasons that no criminal process, no lawsuit, and no administrative hearing can fix. 

Nikos Mohammadi contributed reporting to this essay.

That all changed last month, when a series of high-profile stories swept trans issues into the national spotlight, starting with the victory of transgender swimmer Lia Thomas at the NCAA women’s swimming championship. Although Thomas was, for the most part, lauded by the press, the victory was accompanied by protests, complaints from the parents of other competitors, and a string of anonymous tabloid leaks from Thomas’s teammates — at least some of whom seemed opposed to her presence on the team.

The pictures of the broad-shouldered, 6’1” Thomas towering over her competitors, were striking. Long-winded explanations about the role of testosterone in athletic performance aside, it was hard for the average person to conclude she hadn’t had a competitive advantage.

Then, later the same month, Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed the Parental Rights in Education Act into law. The “Don’t Say Gay” bill was vociferously opposed by the White House, much of the media, and major corporations such as Disney and Apple; it prohibits classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity from preschool to third grade — roughly ages four to nine — and requires that parents be notified about any medical or mental-health issues with their children. Prominent liberals were scathing, with Biden denouncing the law as “hateful”, Pete Buttigieg’s husband warning that it will “kill kids”, and the hosts of the Oscars chanting the word “gay” in protest. The Right, meanwhile, has launched itself into a frenzy, accusing Democrats of wanting to “groom” children and insinuating that opponents of the law are pedophiles.

It is no coincidence that both pillars of the current trans controversies relate to education. A leitmotif of the post-pandemic world has been parental rebellion against progressive excesses in schools and instruction on issues such as race and gender. Remote schooling allowed parents to peek into their children’s classrooms, where they saw elementary schoolers being instructed to rank themselves on an intersectional privilege hierarchy and to celebrate the “black communism” of Angela Davis.

Republicans, sensing opportunity, have embraced the parental crusade with anti-CRT bills, curriculum transparency bills, and, in some states, new restrictions on trans athletes and “gender-affirming” medical procedures. They are responding to the fact that the woke extremism popular with professional educators is deeply unpopular with voters. Indeed, wokeness in general is unpopular, and “educators”, as a class, are something like the Salafists of social justice. This is a specific instance of a general problem for the Democrats: its professional and leadership class is fond of social positions that strike a lot of ordinary people as wacky or perverse.

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Democrats, however, have fallen into what Ruy Teixeira calls the “Fox News fallacy” — the idea that if Republicans are complaining about something, it must be made up. On CRT, for instance, they have used the unconvincing defence that CRT is only taught in law schools and dismissed parental concerns as a product of “disinformation.”

Similarly, they have cast the Parental Rights in Education Act as a homophobic attempt to “force kids back into the closet” and prevent gay teachers from discussing their home life in the classroom — when, in fact the main concern of the bill is gender identity. The strategy, as Leor Sapir has argued, has been to make the debate over the law a debate over gay rights — which are supported by the vast majority of Americans — while dodging the much more contentious issue of whether, and how, schools should be teaching about gender.

This is no idle concern. What evidence we do have suggests that paediatric gender dysphoria is rising at a rate that would be almost impossible to explain purely as a result of greater acceptance or diagnostic sophistication. One clinic in Northern California reported an 500% increase in paediatric referrals for gender dysphoria between 2015 and 2018, while in Sweden, gender dysphoria diagnoses among teenage girls rose by over 1,500% between 2008 and 2018.

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Some researchers, such as Brown University’s Lisa Littman, have argued that this rapid increase is consistent with other social contagions such as anorexia or cutting. This suggests that many children are adopting these identities due to peer influences and social media consumption rather than a stable and deeply felt sense of dysphoria. But if these messages are reinforced at school, they may be more likely to stick.  This is a particularly explosive issue given that schools have encouraged children to socially transition without notifying their parents, and some states, such as California, consider failure to affirm a child’s gender identity as grounds for stripping a parent of custody rights.

Although Littman’s work has been denounced as “misinformation”, it has received support from a number of “detransitioners” who have gone public with their stories. Their stories, on the whole, follow a pattern: a girl who is struggling with an unrelated mental health issue such as anxiety or depression falls down an Internet rabbit-hole, where she learns she is unhappy because she was born in the “wrong body”. She visits a psychiatrist who, instead of interrogating her feelings, “affirms” that she is actually a boy and sets them on the road to medical transition.

Only later, sometimes after painful surgeries, do the girls realise that whatever was bothering them was not gender dysphoria but another unresolved psychological issue. They are left wondering why the adults in their lives allowed them to damage their bodies in the name of what they later come to believe was a delusion. Due in part to stories like these — and to the lack of solid evidence in favour of “gender-affirming” care — a number of European countries have begun to discourage medical interventions for youth gender dysphoria in favour of psychotherapy.

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The Biden administration’s great strength so far has been its ability to recognise when the preferences of the Twitter class are deeply out of step with those of the public and then side with the public. Here, it has done the opposite. Last week, in response to the Florida and two recent Arizona laws (one banning biological males from girls’ sports, the other banning medical transitions for minors), the administration announced that it would be expanding its interpretation of Title IX — a federal law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex in education — to include protections for gender identity.

The full implications of the move are unclear, but they could include denying federal education funds to states that bar trans athletes from girls’ sports. Separately, the Justice Department warned states that any attempt to limit access to “gender-affirming” care for children could be in violation of the Constitution and federal civil rights law.

Biden may be miscalculating. Americans are by and large tolerant of differences and tend to take a laissez-faire attitude when it comes to how individuals choose to live their own lives. But they also have a basic sense of fair play and proportion. Majorities oppose laws, such as Arizona’s, prohibiting “gender-transition related medical care for minors”, presumably because they seem to legislate individual medical decisions. But a solid majority believe that trans athletes should compete on teams that match their birth sex, and polling suggests that even a majority of Florida Democrats supports the language of the Parental Rights in Education Act.

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In short, Americans tend to support trans rights when they are analogous to gay rights, meaning when they are seen as a simple matter of accepting those who are different. But they are more sceptical of the maximalist positions pushed by elite progressives — that the Lia Thomases of the world should be permitted to compete as women, or that schools should be allowed to facilitate major medical decisions for children without parental notification or consent.

By picking a national fight over these issues, the Biden administration risks stepping into a trap it has so far avoided: siding with the common sense of college-educated progressives against the common sense of the electorate as a whole. For a GOP attempting to rebrand itself as the party of ordinary people, this could be a blessing in disguise.