For a fed-up America, the elite impunity of the Cornell rape case is the last straw
A nation’s frustration with rich and powerful men boils over after a stunning rape allegation at an Ivy League college.
It was the kind of smug dude-bro TV football commentary that would have gone mostly unnoticed if this had been an ordinary week in America.
On Amazon Prime’s Thursday Night Football, the controversial-is-an-understatement quarterback Deshaun Watson was leading his Cleveland Browns to an upset victory. And the legendary 81-year-old sportscaster Al Michaels and his sidekick Kirk Herbstreit saw the NFL’s favorite storyline, a redemption arc.
“If you follow football, you know the story — we don’t have to go through the whole Deshaun Watson thing,” Michaels said.
Do you believe in cringe? Yes! The “whole Deshaun Watson thing” that dare not speak its name is the stack of civil-lawsuit assault allegations by more than two dozen women of sexual assault and harassment during message therapy sessions. Although two Texas grand juries declined to indict Watson, he was fined $5 million by the NFL and served lengthy suspensions — not enough to deter the comeback that Michaels and Herbstreit openly celebrated on Thursday.
Michaels saw a pathway for Watson to win back the Cleveland fan base — “Winning is the best deodorant,” he said, quoting the late John Madden — and Herbstreit agreed. “This is an extreme case because of what you laid out with Deshaun Watson,” he said, “but if you convert on third downs, you hit passes, you lead this team to victories, those boos turn into cheers.”
But this time, a seeming sexual-assault apologia on national TV sparked a social-media furor. Because this was no ordinary week in America. “The whole Deshaun Watson thing” resurfaced amid public rage over the botched investigation into a 2024 gang-rape allegation against seven male undergrads at Cornell University.
To be sure, the basic horrifying facts of the case merited a major news story. Two years ago this month, the woman known as “Jane Doe,” a then-Cornell sophomore, visited a fraternity house where she was drugged with ketamine and — according to her recent lawsuit — was incapacitated and incapable of consenting during a series of sex acts that were encouraged in the fraternity’s group Snapchat.
The story simmered on the Ithaca, N.Y. campus for nearly 24 months before it exploded with the lawsuit by the woman — who subsequently left Cornell, which refused to refund her tuition — and some dogged investigative reporting by the female top editors of the student Cornell Daily Sun. That fueled outrage over the lack of criminal charges, a university probe that let several frat brothers off with a seeming wrist-slap, and complaints about numerous similar incidents in the past.
But the bigger reason why this collegiate anguish exploded across the front page of the New York Times, the top of TV newscasts, and the wider national consciousness is because it became the outlet for nearly a decade of pent-up public rage.
Rage that our prestigious and formerly trusted institutions from Cornell to the NFL act with greater concern toward preserving young men’s future ability to convert third downs, or issue IPOs in their looming career on Wall Street, than the tortured lifetime of trauma for the female victims of an assault.
Rage that the promise of 2017’s #MeToo movement that sought to call out, sanction and stigmatize an entrenched culture of sexual harassment and assault was crushed by the patriarchy’s pushback. That peaked with the reelection of an American president who has more sexual misconduct allegations than football’s Watson, and who was found by a civil jury to be liable for abusing a woman in a department-store dressing room.
Rage that most of the accused gang-rapists at an Ivy League university were not knocked off the glide path toward the highest levels of a warped nation no longer governed by liberty and justice for all but by total elite impunity — where the world’s first trillionaire can spew racist filth on his own social-media platform and a president’s family makes billions of dollars by selling the tarnished prestige of the United States …
… and nothing is ever done about it.
“Despite the hysterical claims of its critics, #MeToo was never about ruining the lives of innocent men,” the Philadelphia-based writer Amanda Marcotte wrote for Salon. “In a very real sense, the movement was about leveling the playing field, which is so dramatically tilted against victims that it makes justice nearly impossible to achieve.”
Today, justice feels farther away than ever, and not just at Cornell, and not just on the jagged playing field of sexual politics. Throughout the 21st century, the most powerful social movements tend to come out of nowhere, because they funnel the pent-up frustrations of modern Americans that need to go somewhere.
The nationwide Occupy protests in 2011 arguably weren’t about anything but rather everything in an increasingly unequal and unfair America, with the realization that even a “hope and change” president like Barack Obama lacked the ability to bring either hope or change. Likewise, the massive Black Lives Matter marches of 2020 weren’t just the response to the shock video of a Minneapolis cop murdering George Floyd, but the result of repressed frustration over police brutality and backsliding over efforts to promote racial equality.
Now, the Cornell case is here to remind us that the playing field is no longer merely tilted toward the powerful and the children of the powerful, but it has become a vertical cliff. And it symbolizes the moral rot of a nation where that fish now stinks from the head.
This Wednesday will mark exactly 10 years since the nation learned that then-candidate Trump had openly bragged that he could grab women by their private parts, because “when you’re a star they let you do it.” He was elected anyway. On Oct. 19, 2024, a Cornell fraternity brother hopped on Snapchat to advertise “free [same word that Trump used] upstairs,” because he must have felt that when you’re a future star of the U.S. ruling class they also let you do it.
But again, it’s not just Trump. On Saturday, Cornell’s president, Michael Kotlikoff issued a powerful video statement promising real changes, that “this will not be a moment that passes.” If Kotlikoff’s name sounds vaguely familiar, this is the same college president who backed his car into a pro-Palestinian protester, triggering an investigation that blamed … the students. When you’re an Ivy League president, they let you do it.
No wonder people are fed up.
And no wonder Trump’s only comment on the case is his concern that Cornell’s accused young men “won’t get a fair shake” from New York Attorney General Letitia James — who has relentlessly pursued justice against the president over the years. The Trump regime has worked hard to ensure that its own feelings of injustice — not over the pervasive crime of sexual assault, but its pampered belief that #MeToo went too far — are enshrined in government policy.
At the same time the Cornell case was leading newscasts, Trump’s Education Department was busy rolling back a series of Joe Biden-era reforms to the Title IX rules that govern campus sexual assaults, sharply narrowing the scope of federal mandates. It was just one more reminder that misogyny is not a side effect of the MAGA movement, but its life-force.
That was clear from the army of right-wing keyboard commandos who raced to declare that the outrage over what happened at Cornell was some kind of witch hunt that is unfairly trampling on the rights of the accused, whom they insist are the real victims here. Typical is the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh who called the 2024 events “a disgusting drug and alcohol fueled orgy,” where “the drunk men have just as valid a claim to being raped.”
That doesn’t jibe with the known facts about that night, and it makes a mockery out of a point that both sides of a gender war should agree with — that there needs to be justice, but this requires due process. The investigation by James needs to be thorough and not rushed, establish exactly what happened and the layers of individual culpability, and seek appropriate punishment.
That seems like Justice 101, and yet every level of allegedly grown-up accountability — the Cornell administration and its campus police, the Ithaca cops and the district attorney in Tompkins County — has failed Jane Doe for two years.
Doe’s life sentence has already been meted out. “Her life has been destroyed,” her attorney Thomas Giuffra told CNN, describing how the trauma of seeing her attackers in the classroom forced her to end her pursuit of an Ivy League diploma.
This is the last straw not only for millions of women sick of the patriarchy’s persistence, but for Americans of every stripe who are disgusted with a system that promises lifetime immunity for a privileged few, but no holds barred for women, for immigrants, for Black and brown folks, or the LGBTQ community. But can this righteous rage transform into real change?
This fall, a record number of women — some 590 in all — are running for Congress. The majority are Democrats — especially among the newcomers — and their platforms mostly reflect the public’s anger over an unjust society. Maybe some restraints against America’s abuser-in-chief can teach the next generation of young men that even if you’re an up-and-coming star they don’t let you do it, and that the only right response on Snapchat is, “Stop. This is wrong.”
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