Cornell University

I’ve had hexes put on me by a university professor, had online vigilantes send packages of dogshit to my childhood home in New Jersey and been hounded by the trauma-informed journalists of the New York Times. CNN, Reuters, Agence France-Presse and other estimable sources have credited me with starting a dark new anti-#MeToo movement. Along the way, I have received tens of thousands of rabidly embittered phone calls, emails and texts. “Hope you get held down and raped for seven hours and wake up with a blistered fucking asshole,” is a fairly standard example of the unremitting torrent of vitriol. Naively, I had thought it would be a straightforward journalistic endeavor to seek out, corroborate and publish the identity of “Jane Doe.

I entered college as Barack Obama began his second term. Within a year, two close friends at separate colleges, in separate fraternities, had been accused of sexual assault. They were promptly suspended and expelled. I wasn’t there those nights, and I don’t know the facts of the cases. More importantly, I question whether the colleges did either – I suspect they never cared to find out in the first place. My experience has become all too common for American men under 35, especially those who have joined fraternities. The solution to the purported rape epidemic on college campuses is for men to act more like women: introspective, vulnerable, compassionate.

#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.