Jane Doe reported that in November 2024 at Cornell University, she was raped by seven Chi Phi fraternity members while she was incapacitated. Several of the fraternity members pushed her to consume more drugs while one of them sent a message in their fraternity Snapchat group that said “free p*ssy in alum pu” to advertise that any of them could come assault her freely.
Jane Doe reported what happened at the time to Cornell campus police. She provided screenshots of the Snapchat messages. This should have immediately prompted a full investigation far beyond campus police, and yet the local District Attorney’s office declined to conduct their own investigation or to even have Jane Doe speak with a professional trained to work with survivors of abuse.
After the report in November 2024, Cornell says they expelled two of the fraternity members and shut down the Chi Phi fraternity, but apparently had the other men involved merely write “apology essays.” The university refused to refund Jane Doe’s tuition for that semester. No criminal charges were filed.
Now, Jane Doe’s civil lawsuit has sparked outrage online, forcing the local District Attorney’s office to conduct an actual investigation and bring the case before a grand jury. The rage is palpable. A search for the Cornell 7 on Instagram shows post after post of women detailing their own stories of sexual assault that never saw justice, demanding that Jane Doe’s story end differently. This case, though it is particularly heinous, has struck such a nerve because so many women recognize aspects of their own experiences in it.
Universities Target Protesters Instead Of Abusers
Jane Doe’s case is, horrifically, just one of tens of thousands of assaults that happen on college campuses every year, while in the US overall, an assault takes place roughly every 98 seconds. Some studies have found that more than one in four women report being assaulted or raped while undergraduates. At the same time, a majority of cases in the US go unreported—upwards of 70%. This is in large part because of the complete lack of seriousness with which sexual assault is treated by universities and the authorities. Right now, as many as 400,000 rape kits are sitting, untested, in police evidence rooms across the country, some of them for years.
There has been harsher retribution against students peacefully protesting the genocide in Gaza at most universities than consequences for students who commit heinous acts of sexual violence. In 2024, at the same time as the Cornell administration was arresting and suspending students for protests in solidarity with Gaza, they were offering members of the Cornell 7 a gentle letter-writing exercise for committing actual violent crimes.
There is a well-documented history of US universities neglecting or actively covering up cases of sexual assault. In 2014, Columbia University student Emma Sulkowicz made headlines for carrying the 50-pound mattress she was raped on everywhere she went on campus, demanding accountability for her abuser. This sparked broader student protests against sexual assault on campuses and was part of a wider wave of international struggle against sexist violence. Ultimately Sulkowicz carried the mattress onstage with her at graduation, because her abuser had never been disciplined and remained at the school, and the university president refused to shake her hand onstage.
It is no secret that the majority of fraternities, especially at elite universities, are incubators of a deeply disturbing culture of violence against women. Multiple studies have found that men in fraternities are more than three times as likely to commit rape, and women in sororities are 74% more likely to experience rape than other women in college. At Cornell, a recent student survey even found that 20% of sexual assaults occurred at fraternities, and yet, they continue to operate as university-sanctioned organizations. This is no coincidence. Fraternities often maintain powerful, wealthy alumni networks that contribute significant donations to universities.
Clearly we cannot rely on school administrations or the court system to deliver real justice. It will take the rebuilding of a mass feminist movement in the streets and in our workplaces to win any measures of accountability. This movement should fight hand-in-hand with the movement for Palestinian liberation, demanding that school administrations actually prioritize students’ well-being and education, not billionaire donors and the war industry.
A System Of Sexual Violence
Sexual harassment, abuse, and violence are a day-to-day reality for women under capitalism. Rich and powerful men in particular are protected by the system at almost any cost. Not a single man implicated in the Epstein files has been charged with a crime or faced a day of jail time. In July, P. Diddy was found not guilty of the most serious charges against him, including sex trafficking and coercion.
Harvey Weinstein stands out as one of the only high-profile men in recent years to face more serious consequences for abuse. But Weinstein is in prison not because his actions were substantially worse than any of the other predators and abusers who run rampant, but because of the power of the #MeToo movement, which included workplace walkouts against sexual violence. #MeToo was spurred on by the 2017 Women’s March after Trump’s first inauguration, which was the largest single day of protest in US history at the time.
Confronting abuse—including when abusers are not rich and powerful—requires collective action. With a strong feminist movement in the streets, the capitalist courts and institutions can be forced to act—we’ve seen again and again that they will only go as far as movements force them to.
The mass discussion about Jane Doe’s case is happening in the context of the situation for women having only become more dangerous in recent years. The manosphere has captured a section of young men with reactionary ideas about women as property that exist to serve men. We no longer have the federal right to abortion after Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022 under Biden (and never forget, the Democrats did nothing to stop it). Donald Trump, proud rapist, downplays domestic violence as “a little fight with the wife,” normalizing violence against women while his administration restricts federal domestic violence grants. Title IX, clearly already insufficient, is now being further weakened by the Trump administration.
Rebuild The Movement Against Sexism & Abuse
We need to bring back a mass movement against sexism and abuse. In response to the public outcry over the Cornell 7, the Women’s March, Feminist Generation, and other organizations have called for a national day of action on October 8—we need to build for walkouts on every campus and protests in cities across the country! A strength of the #MeToo movement was actions that took place in workplaces, like the 20,000 strong multi-gender walkout of Google workers. This is the type of struggle that’s needed again today.
In the 2010s, #MeToo and the movement against sexual harassment and abuse inspired millions of women who began to understand their own experiences as part of a wider systemic problem. Many shared their experiences of abuse and harassment for the first time and participated in protests and in some cases school and workplace walkouts. But the movement was limited by the approach of liberal women’s organizations that were only willing to go so far in challenging the system and failed to link the fight to a wider set of demands that could mobilize bigger numbers of working-class women and people of all genders.
As the loss of Roe v. Wade showed, we cannot rely on the traditional NGOs and women’s organizations to lead this fight. They have become completely tied to the Democratic Party, which has no interest in leading serious working-class struggle. We will need to rebuild working-class feminist organizations rooted in our movements, with democratic structures to elect leaders and keep them accountable.
A movement that can actually effectively take on sexist harassment and abuse at school, at work, and in the streets needs to be a socialist feminist struggle. Socialist feminists fight back not just against the symptoms of this rotten system, but we also identify and fight back against the root cause: the capitalist system.
Women’s oppression, sexual violence, and any other form of oppression or exploitation cannot be fully eliminated under capitalism. The abuse and harassment that is so commonplace in capitalist society is not natural—it is learned behavior that is fostered and protected by this system. While we must fight against every instance of abuse, ultimately, we need a movement that fights for a socialist society, where there is no economic incentive for oppression and no billionaire ruling class to pit working people against one another.
Socialist Alternative says:
- Justice for Jane Doe: arrest and convict the Cornell 7!
- No more cover-ups! Independent review boards for sexual assault cases, made up of students and union members, free from university administration influence.
- Ban Chi Phi fraternity on every campus. Stop turning a blind eye to abuse—ban any fraternity with an assault case.
- No more repression, defend the right to protest on campus and everywhere.
- Free, safe, legal, and accessible abortion. End the rape kit backlog and make rape kit testing free at all hospitals.
- Fight racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and all forms of oppression with working-class solidarity and struggle. Build a mass, multiracial, multi-gender movement against systemic oppression and capitalism!