Bernadette Greene-Placentia would like you to know the story of her rape is not an “October Surprise.”
She did not conspire with the media to publish the graphic details of her sexual assault on the same day early voting ballots were sent out to voters in Arizona. Her harrowing account of being bludgeoned and violated by two men in the middle of the night in a suburban parking lot is not a “hoax” she concocted to win over voters’ sympathies. Her fragmented memories of the attack, and her initial reluctance to go to authorities, are not evidence of an elaborate lie, nor of a nefarious Democratic plot to wrest control of Congress, as some right-wing influencers have suggested. It was hard enough coming forward to say she was raped, she told TPM. Now she has to contend with all these men, with millions of followers online, loudly asserting that maybe she wasn’t. She can’t help but remember that these men publicly trying to poke holes in her story have mothers. “Is this really how you were raised?” she wants to ask them.
Content warning: This story references incidents of sexual assault.
Bernadette Greene-Placentia, a Democratic candidate for Congress in Arizona, shared publicly for the first time that she was raped while fixing campaign signs over the summer.
Greene-Placentia told her story to the local outlet Phoenix New Times, which published the account on Wednesday.
She said an attacker knocked her out around 2 a.m. on August 14, a date confirmed by the campaign to ABC News, while she was out fixing her campaign signs to avoid the daytime heat and traffic. When Greene-Placentia came to, she said a man was pulling his penis out of her. She said that another man came over and began touching her, but that he backed off after she fought back.
Somehow, she made it home. “I just wanted to forget it,” Greene-Placentia told Phoenix New Times.
Redistricting had impacted the home Greene-Placentia shared with her husband, so she found another place to stay within Arizona’s 8th Congressional District. Her husband and campaign manager told Phoenix New Times that she disappeared for two days after the alleged assault. The only person who saw her those two days was her landlord.
She initially didn’t want to report: “I’d always considered myself a strong person, and so I was embarrassed,” she told a local ABC affiliate in a video interview. But two weeks later she called the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office and told them what happened.
Rape is chronically underreported. Survivors may not report their assault to law enforcement for any number of reasons, including a fear of retaliation, not believing the police would help and not believing the crime was important enough. Of the rapes that were reported, data from the FBI shows fewer than 1 in 3 rape cases have been cleared since September 2021.
Greene-Placentia is speaking out now, she said, because “I need to let women know that it’s okay to talk about it.”
On Wednesday, a campaign spokesperson told The Guardian: “She chose to share her story because she knows many survivors struggle in silence, and she hopes that by speaking about her experience, others will know they are not alone.”
“She hopes the focus remains on supporting survivors and making sure people who have experienced sexual violence know they are seen, heard and supported.”
The investigation is ongoing. Greene-Placentia said she has struggled to remember details; scientists have shown how severe trauma can impact memory.
There isn’t any confirmation of whether Greene-Placentia’s attackers knew who she was or if the violence was tied to the House race. She was wearing a campaign shirt when she was attacked and was repairing campaign signs, but Greene-Placentia told the local ABC News affiliate that there was no way to know, and that it could have been a crime of opportunity.
Politics isn’t her first foray into a field where women are underrepresented. Greene-Placentia is a long-haul trucker and runs her own business. Her campaign platform includes strengthening and fully funding SNAP, supporting abortion rights and expanding paid family leave. She also talks about affordability and increasing border security.
Greene-Placentia is challenging the Republican incumbent Abe Hamadeh. Winning is a long shot; the Cook Political Report rates the district as “Solid Republican.”
Hamadeh’s campaign provided the following statement to ABC News: “I have read the disturbing story and call upon authorities to investigate these serious allegations thoroughly, including finding all possible camera footage of the time and place in order to prosecute the crime to the fullest extent of the law. No American should become a victim of a crime in their own community.”
If you or a loved one have experienced sexual assault and are in crisis, please call RAINN (the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network) hotline at 1-800-656-4673 or reach out to the 24-hour chat service at rainn.org. LGBTQ+ people experiencing any type of violence can call the Anti-Violence Project’s hotline at 212-714-1141 Monday through Thursday 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Eastern or Friday 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Eastern.
In the wake of a national story of an alleged gang rape at the Chi Phi fraternity house at Cornell University in October 2024, both students and faculty are turning their ire on the Ivy League school’s administration. On Monday, thousands of students and faculty members marched on the office of Michael Kotlikoff, who became the university’s president a few months before the alleged rape, with chants of “Resign!” The night before, graffiti appeared on his office building reading, “At Cornell, rapists are protected, protesters are expelled,” a reference to students who were suspended for protesting Israel’s war on Gaza. The university’s faculty senate is preparing a vote of no confidence on the administration’s leadership over claims that the school mishandled the rape allegations after the alleged victim, called Jane Doe, made a report to the campus police.
The whole debacle has refreshed interest in the previous big controversy of Kotikoff’s brief but eventful presidential tenure: Cornell’s $60 million settlement with Donald Trump’s administration, which was announced in November 2025. The agreement was widely lambasted as a capitulation to the White House’s all-out war on diversity, equity and inclusion programs. Not only did the university implicitly concede that programs meant to help women and minorities are discriminatory against white men, they agreed to hand over data on race in admissions to the Trump administration and impose anti-DEI materials, provided by the White House, on faculty and staff.
After the settlement was announced, the American Association of University Professors said in a statement that the agreement would “threaten some of the most vulnerable students on campus and invite ongoing federal government supervision to reduce the diversity of Cornell’s student body.” In July, the organization published an extensive report comparing the administration’s war on DEI to the Red Scare of the 1950s and called on university leadership to resist the Trump administration’s efforts to destroy racial diversity and gender equity efforts on campus.
As the AAUP report shows, Cornell was far from the only university to cave to Trump; the norm for colleges and universities was rapid compliance. Diversity offices were shut down. Progressive student protesters were bullied and punished. Title IX protections, including rules protecting students from sexual harassment and abuse, were scaled back. Anecdotes have spread from faculty and students about a new chill descending over college campuses — a fear of retaliation for acknowledging the ongoing realities of racism, sexism and homophobia on campuses and in larger society.
The fallout from the Cornell assault accusations, however, suggests that it may have been more than fear that was compelling this swift bending of the knee by many universities to Trump. There is also a degree of complicity. Progressive reforms to make campuses more welcoming to women and minority students are often a hassle for university administrators, even those ideologically who are aligned with the left. It means conflicts with board members, donors and alumni with more conservative leanings. It means having to handle student complaints of harassment, discrimination and even sexual abuse that would be easier to sweep under the rug. It means having to confront institutions — like fraternities — that reinscribe racism and sexism but are often simultaneously protected by the most elite and wealthy people connected to the universities. Giving into the Trump administration on DEI means being able to revert to older, easier ways of doing things — even if it comes at the expense of student freedom and safety.
It’s worth remembering that Jane Doe filed her complaint before Trump was president. Her case has all the hallmarks of an institution that tried to make her go away. Cornell police excluded relevant language — including the unambiguous phrase “I was raped” — from their report to the district attorney on Doe’s statement. Her lawyer claims that the university made her believe that the authorities were pursuing a criminal investigation, even though her case had already been closed. As Cornell philosophy professor Kate Manne noted in an essay for New York magazine, the university’s student code of conduct has a stricter definition of rape-by-intoxication than New York State’s, which would seem to cover the situation alleged here, where a woman is as high and drunk as Doe admits she was. And yet only five of the seven men accused were expelled from school, even as she was forced to drop out due to the subsequent stress and anxiety.
Kotlikoff has a public record of flirting with “anti-woke” backlash. Last year, he wrote an op-ed for the New York Times that framed “free speech” as a conservative concern and censorship as a leftist phenomenon, bragging about how his school had invited Ann Coulter and other right-wing speakers to campus, despite student protests. But as reader Michael Handelman wisely pointed out in a letter to the editor, “I was troubled by what he didn’t say. Right now, the greatest threat to academic freedom is the Trump administration.” Kotlikoff’s omission was telling, and left the reader with the impression that a few student protesters are a bigger threat to free speech than the heavy boot of the federal government stomping on academic freedom, which the administration was doing by suing Cornell in the first place.
If Cornell is guilty of abandoning Jane Doe, it has no reason to fear consequences from the federal government for failure to enforce Title IX protections against sexual abuse on campus.
Earlier this year, Kotlikoff made news by bumping student protesters with his car, claiming he was the victim of “harassment and intimidation, with the direct motive of silencing speech” — an odd statement, as student protest is a form of protected speech. In this case, the students were asking Kotlikoff about the suspensions of pro-Palestinian protesters, which also put them on the “pro” side of the free speech issue the Cornell president claims to hold so dear. The board of trustees cleared Kotlikoff in its investigation and blamed the students, but the student protesters accused the board of bias.
If Cornell is guilty of abandoning Jane Doe, it has no reason to fear consequences from the federal government for failure to enforce Title IX protections against sexual abuse on campus. As the New York Times reported this week, the Trump administration barely enforced the law during his first term. In his second term, enforcement is basically nonexistent. According to analysis by the Washington Post, Cornell’s track record is already alarming. From 2018 to 2024, there were 1,216 reports of sexual assault, domestic and dating violence, and stalking on campus. Only 51 people were ever found responsible, and of those, fewer than half faced serious consequences.
Jane Doe reported her alleged rape a few days after Trump got elected. With that history in mind, Cornell police and administrators could have had every reason to believe there would be no federal repercussions if they failed to reach a just outcome in her case.
Jane Doe’s lawyer, Thomas Giuffra, told CNN that his client “was not somebody who was a legacy [student], from a wealthy family” and “came from a small town.” Fraternities, in stark contrast, enjoy immense protections from exactly those wealthy people from legacy families. As historian Nick Syrett, author of “The Company He Keeps: A History of White College Fraternities,” told Time, former fraternity members are “a base of alumni that universities don’t want to upset because they’re generous and they’re powerful.” Whatever an administrator’s personal feelings, in a situation like this, it is objectively easier to cut loose an alleged victim rather than take on alleged assailants who are well-connected to powerful elites.
From a purely self-interested point of view, the Trump administration’s demands that schools give up policies and programs to help women and minority students is a win-win for administrators. It allows school leaders to give up a miserable, uphill battle against elite forces, while handing them a way to deflect blame onto the White House for forcing them into it.
We can’t peer into the hearts of administrators and know the exact mix of complicity and fear that drove these capitulations. But the Cornell case is a stark illustration of why the prospect of letting Trump have what he wants has a dark allure.
The reopened criminal investigation into an alleged gang rape at Cornell University has sharpened scrutiny on voluntary intoxication laws, which make it harder to protect assault survivors if they chose to drink alcohol or use drugs at the time of the attack.
A former Cornell student identified as Jane Doe said she arrived intoxicated at the Chi Phi fraternity house in October 2024. In a civil lawsuit filed in September, she said that she was then drugged and sexually assaulted by multiple fraternity members while incapacitated.
But voluntary intoxication laws, which are in place around the country, say that if the person who was assaulted chose to become intoxicated, they are capable of consenting to sex, so sexual assault laws do not apply. The county’s district attorney, who announced Monday his office would reopen an investigation into the alleged assault, cited New York’s laws around intoxication and consent in explaining why he initially did not pursue criminal charges. These laws are in place in states around the country.
Here is how these laws work and how they affect sexual assault prosecutions.
What are voluntary intoxication laws?
Individual states handle sexual assault law differently. Most states say that being intoxicated may prevent someone from being able to consent to sex, but not all of them do. Without that explicit provision, it can be much harder to prosecute sexual assault that occurred when the person assaulted was drinking or using drugs.
According to the Associated Press, 19 states say that an intoxicated person is only considered incapacitated — and therefore unable to consent — if they were given drugs or alcohol without knowing. New York, where Cornell is located, is one of those states.
That means that if someone chose to consume alcohol or drugs and then was sexually assaulted, it can be harder to pursue criminal charges.
“In these states where these laws are still persisting for some reason, they still want to continue to be holden to this notion that somebody who is inebriated deserves to be punished, or has it coming for them, so to speak,” said Dr. Chinmoy Gulrajani, a professor at the University of Minnesota Medical School who has studied these laws.
Which states have these laws?
Connecticut
Delaware
Florida
Hawaii
Indiana
Kentucky
Maine
Mississippi
Missouri
New Hampshire
New York
New Jersey
North Dakota
Oklahoma
Pennsylvania
Tennessee
Utah
West Virginia
Wyoming
How did this come up in the Cornell case? Has it come up in others?
Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten — who had authority to pursue criminal charges — cited New York’s voluntary intoxication law in explaining why he initially did not do so.
“Under New York State Law, ‘mental incapacitation’ occurs when a victim is rendered incapable of controlling her own conduct due to the administration of a drug without her consent,” Van Houten wrote in a statement released Monday. “The facts provided by Jane Doe’s statement do not allege that she was either rendered incapable of controlling her own conduct or that any drug was administered to her without her consent.”
This provision has come up in other cases.
Last year, Texas lawmakers changed their definition of sexual assault to include voluntary intoxication based on the experience of a woman named Summer Willis, who said she was raped at a fraternity party 10 years prior after accepting a drink that she believes was laced.
Prosecutors had said that because she accepted a drink, the incident would not, at the time, have been considered sexual assault.
What do we know about alcohol and sexual assault, including on college campuses?
Research shows that drinking alcohol can impair people’s ability to make decisions about or consent to sex. Studies have repeatedly found that in most sexual assaults, someone — the person who committed the assault or the person assaulted — consumed alcohol. The figure is higher for sexual assaults on college campuses.
One paper, published in 2019 by Johns Hopkins University using data from the American Association of Universities, found that close to 80 percent of men or women who were assaulted said they had been drinking before the incident. About 60 percent of trans, genderqueer or nonbinary respondents said they had been drinking before. In most cases, the person who perpetrated the assault had also been drinking.
People who have been drinking or using drugs can, in some cases, consent to sex. But broadly over the past decade, there has been a societal shift toward understanding that people who are more heavily intoxicated cannot do so, Gulrajani noted.
“With more, better sex education regarding consent, some guidelines have been set down about informed consent, especially when it comes to sexual matters,” he said.
Have there been changes in sexual assault prosecutions?
It’s not clear what consequences that cultural shift regarding consent has had — including whether it has changed how sexual assaults are handled in the justice system.
In fact, a paper published in 2022 in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law noted that when someone was assaulted after being intoxicated, police and prosecutors are less likely to follow up with rape allegations. Conviction rates are lower than when the person assaulted was sober.
“Gendered roles about consensual sex and rape myths, such as that intoxicated women are more sexually available than sober women, may alter a juror’s opinion about voluntary intoxication,” the authors of that paper wrote.
But laws are starting to change. In the past five years, at least three states — Minnesota, Michigan and Texas — have changed their laws so that they do not differentiate based on whether someone had voluntarily become intoxicated. Those changes have largely been the result of public scrutiny after high-profile cases of sexual assault, such as in the Texas case.
Bills have been introduced in other states to make similar changes, Gulrajani said. In New York, legislation has been put forth every year since 2019 to make it easier to prosecute these cases. It has never passed. But the attention on the Cornell case could spur action, he said.
“The court of public opinion is the most consequential for politicians and legislatures,” he said.
It makes perfect sense that Emerald Fennell’s debut film, “Promising Young Woman,” is divisive. In fact, divisive isn’t quite the right word. Since its 2020 release, “Promising Young Woman” has become a lightning rod for heated conversation — quite a far cry from its initially warm reception, which led to five Oscar nominations and one win.
Much of this radioactivity results from Fennell’s proclivity for pushing buttons (a habit I defended earlier this year). But in the case of “Promising Young Woman” — about Cassie (Carey Mulligan), a directionless 30-year-old who spends her free time pursuing cosmic justice for her late best friend Nina, whose death was the byproduct of a brutal sexual assault — the discourse is understandable. Fennell wanted to make audiences uncomfortable right out of the gate. And to create this air of discomfort, Fennell crafted a movie that darts from hopeful to despairingly bleak in the blink of an eye.
Fennell’s acid-tongued rape-revenge film is caustic and cruel; a feel-bad film for, as Salon described it then, “the #MeToo times.” And though Cassie’s extracurricular pursuits echo that cultural reckoning, some distance reveals that “Promising Young Woman” is less about justice than protection. Revisiting the movie through this lens offers plenty of important wisdom that its detractors were quick to shrug off. But what’s tragic is that such a reappraisal has come at the cost of another woman’s safety.
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Over the past two weeks, Cornell University has faced a very public and very courageous rebellion, similar to the one Cassie attempts to mount in “Promising Young Woman.” The unrest is courtesy of four exemplary student journalists at the college’s newspaper, The Cornell Daily Sun, who published the names of seven male students named in a lawsuit against the university by an anonymous Jane Doe. The plaintiff alleges that, during a party at the school’s Chi Phi fraternity in 2024, she was coerced into taking drugs and gang raped by seven fraternity members.
Some distance reveals that “Promising Young Woman” is less about justice than protection. Revisiting the movie through this lens offers plenty of important wisdom that its detractors were quick to shrug off. What’s tragic is that such a reappraisal has come at the cost of another woman’s safety.
Shortly after, Jane Doe reported the incident to Cornell police, leading the school to assemble a sexual assault task force and conduct an internal investigation. Although students were alerted to the allegations, they never received the results of the school’s investigation. On September 16, nearly two years after the initial report, Jane Doe filed her suit against Cornell. The Cornell Daily Sun, having followed the case from the beginning, made the bold decision to publish all seven defendants’ names on the paper’s front page in an editorial titled, “Cornell Won’t, We Will.”
The editorial sparked immediate national attention, putting Cornell and Greek life — long the subject of intense scrutiny for its hypermasculine culture promoting sexual assault — in the public’s crosshairs. With discrepancies abound, a startling lack of clarity about Cornell’s systems (despite the school publishing a tail-between-its-legs FAQ), and the local district attorney revisiting the case, the rigor of Cornell’s Title IX investigation now looks shaky at best. In as little as two weeks, Jane Doe, The Cornell Daily Sun’s intrepid staff, and thousands of angry students and spectators around the country have turned their eyes toward Ithaca, New York, hoping this case might finally bring real change.
This is what protecting each other looks like. Safeguarding isn’t only about what we do for one another before a tragedy, but how we respond in the days, weeks, months and years that follow.
It’s not entirely surprising, then, that “Promising Young Woman” has founditsway back into the conversation surrounding what’s happening at Cornell. Some years before the film takes place, Cassie drops out of med school, consumed by remorse and, later, grief. Reminders of Nina and the assault linger around the campus’ every corner, exacerbated by the school’s dean (Connie Britton) choosing not to pursue an investigation into, or discipline for, Nina’s assault. The film isn’t only about justice; it’s about the people standing in its way. Faculty incompetence directly echoes the Cornell case. But, then again, so does Cassie’s greater endeavor.
More than revenge, Cassie wants to embarrass potential assailants and jolt them, however briefly, out of their repugnant misogyny. She wants to scare them straight, in hopes that they won’t touch another woman without her consent ever again. Cassie understands this is probably futile, especially in the patriarchy’s grand scheme. But it’s something she can do not only for Nina, but for every other vulnerable woman.
Before we go further, though, I should be clear that I don’t disagree with the notion that comparing a real-life rape allegation to Fennell’s film is in poor taste. My intention here is not to say, “Hey, this unspeakable event unfolding in the headlines right now? It’s just like that movie!” My objective is to use the existing comparisons to reexamine “Promising Young Woman,” try to understand Fennell’s intentions, and look at the bleak truths her movie stares straight in the face. If you dislike or even detest this film, I don’t seek to negate your feelings. I only posit that it’s important to understand art — especially contentious art about pertinent crises — on a cellular level to learn what it, and our responses to it, can teach us.
Revisiting the film for the first time in six years this week, I was caught off guard. Reputation is a funny thing — how easily it can subconsciously skew one’s perception, even when we try our best to remain impartial. I remember finding “Promising Young Woman” to be contemplative. Yet the steady post-Oscar blowback and general friction surrounding Fennell made me certain I’d overrated it. But this isn’t exactly a film one jumps at the chance to rewatch just for their edification.
Though I’d say we’ve reached a point where that undertaking is worthwhile. “Promising Young Woman” is not a compare-and-contrast film, where overly didactic morality coaching encourages the viewer to say, “Ah, yes, now I understand rape culture.” Here, Fennell asserts that rape culture is our culture, that patriarchy and misogyny seep through the cracks of every single surface. Having come face to face with its most brutal consequences, Cassie’s rose-colored glasses have been removed, stomped on, ground to a pulp and had their remains burnt to ash. Even when life offers her a grain of solace or happiness, the morsel is already rotting from the inside out. The decay just hasn’t made itself known yet.
Take that dichotomy between the self-importance running like a virus through young men and the prudent actions taken by The Cornell Daily Sun staff. Egotism reigns in our modern world, and only those brave enough to stand up to it can impede its rule.
Between pretending to be wasted at bars to trick predators into taking her home, Cassie learns that one of Nina’s rapists, Al (Chris Lowell) — now a successful doctor — is getting married. Seeing Al prosper while Nina’s memory fades is enough to push Cassie into full vigilanteism, working her way through the parties complicit in Nina’s death. In her quest, Cassie discovers that there is cellphone video footage of Nina being assaulted, reluctantly handed over by her ex-classmate, Madison (Alison Brie). “I don’t know how we could’ve watched that, and all thought it was funny,” Madison admits.
This aspect mirrors a frightening contemporary pattern reflected in the Cornell case, in which an alleged Snapchat thread from the Chi Phi house is presented as evidence. Social media has bolstered the narcissistic machismo already present among many men and ubiquitous in fraternity life. In a recent thread discussing her article on the “burnerverse” — a male social media subculture that seeks to exploit young women — Wired senior writer EJ Dickson explained the connection between social media and abuse.
“Sexual assault has always been a thing; ‘boys will be boys’ has always been a thing,” Dickson writes. “What’s new is the main character syndrome. It’s the complete lack of respect for others in favor of building up a narrative around yourself as a ketamine-blowing, hard-partying Zyn bro that doesn’t give a f*ck about anyone but yourself.”
Take that dichotomy between the self-importance running like a virus through young men and the prudent actions taken by The Cornell Daily Sun staff. Egotism reigns in our modern world, and only those brave enough to stand up to it can impede its rule. Cassie’s methods may be unorthodox, but they’re driven by her ardent desire to remind people that someone is always watching. Her approach is to shame and reveal, but not always to get justice. As Fennell reminds us at the end of the film, justice — if it ever comes — often arrives too late, and at the expense of too many lives.
That ending, which I won’t spoil here, is where the film most often divides. It is certainly alienating and somber. But I’d argue that Fennell intends to galvanize thought and action, not outrage. No conventional idea of justice, be it carceral or social, can reverse the harm that’s already been done. Given the fact that these problems have only worsened in the six years since the film’s release, the conclusion is pragmatically bleak. Anything less would be a fallacy, a dream of a world that we don’t, and might never, live in.
But amid darkness, there is hope, too. The film’s great strength is in remarking on how much tertiary damage sexual assault does. It’s not only the survivors who are left to pick up the pieces, but the people who love and take care of them, too. The aftermath is anything but simple, and that “Promising Young Woman” is so vexing only proves there is no easy way to make sense of the senseless. The most we can offer is our voices, actions and constant vigilance; to refuse ignorance together and demand accountability as a community. That’s Fennell’s challenge: When something is hard, and when the pain is gratuitous, don’t turn the other cheek, don’t let the heart-wrenching horror slip away. Do something, anything. And then do more.
Jane Doe, a former Cornell University student who has filed a civil lawsuit alleging gang rape at the hands of seven Chi Phi fraternity members, has struggled since she first reported the incident to the police in November 2024, a few weeks after night a frat party turned ugly. “Her life has been destroyed,” her attorney Thomas Giuffra told CNN’s Jake Tapper. Unlike most of the alleged assailants, Doe left college after what Giuffra has described as a “horrifying” semester in which she had to attend classes “where she saw these guys on a fairly regular basis.”
She was not from “a wealthy family,” he said. “This was her dream and it was taken away from her at a young age in just a horrific fashion.”
But according to some on the right, Doe has not suffered enough for reporting her alleged assault to the police and then later suing the accused, the university and the fraternity. It’s not enough that she saw no charges filed, or that reportedly only two of the accused were expelled from campus. On top of her existing pain, therefore, many of the MAGA faithful are punishing her further by calling her a liar, implying she’s a slut and even threatening to out her, which would put her personal safety at risk. Whatever their intent, by doing this, they are sending a strong message to any victim of rape who might feel tempted to seek justice: Stay silent, or you’ll be next.
In 2017, the #MeToo movement took the nation by storm. A veritable flood of women, and some men, spoke out about their own experiences with sexual abuse, leading to a slew of firings, lawsuits, arrests and social opprobrium of the accused, especially since so many accusers produced compelling evidence. Despite this, it was barely weeks before the backlash began, with countless articles about how #MeToo had gone “too far,” despite scant evidence that innocent men were getting entangled. That response swelled until it overcame #MeToo, which has largely faded into the background.
Much — if not most — of the time, alleged victims still face far more serious consequences than their accused assailants, and for many people and institutions, it still feels much easier to make the issue go away by suppressing accusations than dealing with these cases which are, admittedly, often complex.
The Cornell case shows, though, that far from going too far, the #MeToo movement didn’t go far enough. Much — if not most — of the time, alleged victims still face far more serious consequences than their accused assailants, and for many people and institutions, it still feels much easier to make the issue go away by suppressing accusations than dealing with these cases which are, admittedly, often complex.
There is no doubt that the Cornell case is messy. By her own account, the victim was initially consenting, though perhaps not enthusiastically, to a threesome with two fraternity members. But the situation apparently took a turn when she took ketamine during the encounter and more fraternity members joined in, even communicating about “free p—y” on Snapchat. She describes hiding and swatting the new men away, but being too incapacitated to fight back.
“I can say with 100% confidence I was raped,” she told police during a November 2024 interview.
It took time for the alleged victim to get to the point where she was ready to file a report, which right-wing pundits have seized on as evidence that she was not really raped. The New York Times, using campus police documents and witness statements, laid out the timeline showing that she initially reacted with confusion and shame. While she didn’t call it “rape,” she was clearly unhappy about what had happened. Over the course of a few weeks, she came around to first texting one of the accused that “90% of what happened that night was not consensual,” and then filing a police report.
“After rape, it’s common that victims don’t realize what happened was rape,” explained Anne DePrince, a psychology professor at the University of Denver and author of “Every 90 Seconds: Our Common Cause Ending Violence Against Women.”
Victims “feel some shame about reporting it,” especially if they initially “liked the boy or they wanted to go to an event,” Sharon Gandarilla-Javier, an assistant professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told me. She noted that it’s also common for someone to initially consent to one activity that then becomes “totally different than what they expected.”
Journalists and feminist writers have been cautious in addressing this case, making it clear that the claims haven’t been tested in court and that New York’s rape laws may not be enough to secure an indictment, much less a conviction. Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten has reopened the case, arguing that this new lawsuit presents evidence he didn’t have when he initially made the decision to not charge the accused. New reporting also shows that Van Houten was given a condensed version of Doe’s report to Cornell police, one that omitted her use of the word “raped.”
But on the right, there appears to be no similar care when lobbing unproven — and unevidenced — accusations that Doe is lying.
“Her account has radically changed,” The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro said on Tuesday’s episode of his podcast, insisting “it turned out that the details of the police report did not amount to anything like rape.”
While he may be proven right if prosecutors can’t secure an indictment, this is not the same thing as saying that all Doe reported was “bad things happening with consent,” as Shapiro claimed. She herself said she was “raped,” and as many have pointed out, the very fact that she filed a police report is relevant. Calling the police suggests that a person believes they are reporting a crime.
Matt Walsh, also of the Daily Wire, accused feminists of “rushing into the next Duke lacrosse/UVA-style hoax” and argued on X that the situation was nothing more than “a disgusting drug and alcohol fueled orgy,” where “the drunk men have just as valid a claim to being raped.” This, of course, ignores the fact that the alleged victim did not get on Snapchat to advertise “free p—y” to strangers, as well as her own testimony that she pushed them away and tried to hide.
The story “gets transformed from a night of regrets that the young woman is ashamed of into a night in which she’s a victim,” former Fox News host Megyn Kelly said on her podcast, where she also threatened to release the accuser’s name.
Feminists and journalists are wise to use words like “alleged” and to be clear that the evidence has not been fully evaluated in a court of law, and it is true that there remains much about this case that is unknown. Still, there are the Snapchats and text messages, including one where the alleged victim uses the word “nonconsensual” and another where the accused wrote “I just wanted to apologize for how things went down the other night.” This alone makes it hard to believe the accusations are a “hoax,” as Walsh suggested, even if there are outstanding legal questions about whether a consensual encounter turned into something illegal.
For people who insist on the principle of “innocent until proven guilty,” many on the right have proven themselves quick to make claims about the alleged victim’s motives. It’s worth remembering that E. Jean Carroll won a defamation civil suit against Donald Trump after he accused her of lying when she claimed he sexually assaulted her in the dressing room of a Manhattan department store in the 1990s. There is a demonstrable psychological and reputational toll on alleged victims when they face public accusations that they are lying, especially when they come from high-profile people who also insinuate that the victim is an immoral person because of their sexual history.
In this case, no one is required to have an opinion about the accuser’s character. They don’t know her history or her life or why she was even at the party, beyond her stated desire to have some fun . . . Shutting up is free.
In this case, no one is required to have an opinion about the accuser’s character. They don’t know her history or her life or why she was even at the party, beyond her stated desire to have some fun. They could, like most decent people, consider the allegations and assume that, even if there is not a crime here, what is described should never happen to anyone. Shutting up is free.
But the past decade of Trumpism has largely been built on stirring up male anger at women’s growing equality. Paranoid and unsupported claims that women have immense power to ruin men with false accusations have been the bread-and-butter of a MAGA media industry designed to exploit men’s resentment for profit. Their audiences yearn to hear that Jane Doe is the real bad guy here, and so attacking her without a single shred of real evidence against her is an opportunity that many right-wing pundits can’t seem to pass up.
Despite the hysterical claims of its critics, #MeToo was never about ruining the lives of innocent men. 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. No one truly disputes the importance of due process to handle accusations of sexual violence. That’s why Jane Doe is going through the court system. It’s also why it’s good that, in light of new information, the district attorney is re-opening the case.
But due process is endangered if victims can’t report allegations without facing public abuse and threats of being falsely accused themselves that it becomes psychologically impossible to live their lives. As its name suggested, that was the whole point of #MeToo: to create enough solidarity between victims and allies to make it safe for victims to speak out without their lives being destroyed. If the right really believes in the value of due process, then they would let it play out, instead of dogpiling and harassing accusers so that future victims are too scared to report crimes.
Through the medium of television Bill Cosby has been intimately influencing American perspectives on race, class, how we think about ourselves and, most crucially, how we feel about him, for more than five decades.
Give that information a moment to sink in, to really scrabble its way inside the inkiest crannies of your gray matter. Only by processing how long the comedian, actor and self-styled moral police commander of the African-American community has been running his game on an entire nation of viewers — several generations’ worth — can we begin to comprehend the significance of Thursday’s verdict.
Cosby’s conviction comes years after the diminishment of his power, long after Hollywood, and much of the populace, declared him persona non grata. As sacrifices go, Cosby is a sizable one but also hobbled, softened and ready for slaughter.
Nevertheless, Thursday’s news that a jury in Norristown, Pennsylvania, found Cosby guilty on three counts of aggravated indecent assault against Andrea Constand, a former Temple University employee, came as a shock.
Constand is one of scores of accusers — 60, by USA Today’s count — who have accused Cosby of sexual assault. Until now, however, these allegations rolled off of Cosby like raw eggs off Teflon. Stories about these rapes and assaults have circulated for decades; Constand first came forward in 2005, a year after her original assault took place. Police dropped her case then for lack of evidence, and with Cosby insisting the sex was consensual, it became a matter of his word against hers.
And who were they to believe: Bill Cosby, TV icon, philanthropist and national father figure, or a lowly office worker at his alma mater?
Constand’s ordeal and the many others resembling it tell a bigger and much more sinister story: that of Cosby malevolently capitalizing on an image carefully cultivated over decades spent in front of TV audiences. Television is a medium that is only effective when its products forge a sense of intimacy, trust and belief for its viewers. People don’t necessarily have to believe the characters we watch on television or even like the people who play them. But we do have to trust the programs and platforms on which they appear enough to invite those characters into our homes time and again.
The fact that Cosby was able to get away with his crimes against Constand for so long — in addition to allegedly assaulting and abusing a vast array of women in his orbit, even friends — speaks to the potency of that idea.
Cosby didn’t merely gamble on the notion that a culture hardwired to question the credibility of sexual assault victims would never support the claims of the women he targeted. He also spent years grooming millions to view him as a man who couldn’t possibly commit such acts. He convinced Americans that he was a safe paternal figure who sold Jell-O pudding to giggling youngsters, who instilled wholesome values in children via Saturday morning cartoons. He wasn’t content to play America’s best dad — he had to make us believe that he himself was an example of the wise and noble paterfamilias.
Such a man is incapable of plying women with drugs before raping them.
In fully accounting for every part of our relationship with Cosby’s many television personas, we only begin to get a sense of how extensively he hoodwinked millions of people. Indeed, the timeline of Cosby’s mass deceit by way of popular culture is almost as long as the modern history of the television medium itself.
In the mid-’60s, around the time Sunni Welles alleges she was raped (according to her statement at a news conference held on March 27, 2015), Cosby was a popular comedian who made television history in becoming the first black actor to star in a weekly drama series, 1965’s “I Spy.” He shared lead billing with Robert Culp, went on to win three Emmys for his performance in the role, and followed that successful run with a sitcom bearing his own name, “The Bill Cosby Show,” which ran from 1969 to 1971.
Cosby went on to become a staple figure of Saturday morning cartoons with “Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids,” voicing the title role in addition to speaking directly to all the kids watching him. Anyone who watched television between 1972 and 1985 can imitate Fat Albert’s “hey, hey, hey!” Even if you didn’t stick around to absorb the important moral lessons Albert, Rudy, Mushmouth and the rest of the gang were learning that day, you couldn’t avoid it.
Those of us who did watch also took in Cosby’s jovial live-action appearances bookending each episode. That goofy grin and friendly voice imprinted on the memory centers of Generation X, Constand’s cohort, from the time they were toddlers and elementary school kids.
Prior to her assault, Constand said she thought of Cosby as a mentor. Many people may have viewed him thusly, even those who never met him. “Fat Albert” is one reason why.
Another accuser who provided testimony in this second trial, Chelan Lasha, says Cosby invited her to his Las Vegas hotel suite in 1986, when she was 17 years old. She alleges that he handed her a blue pill and offered her a double shot of Amaretto to wash it down. The last thing she remembers, according to her account in the now-famous 2015 New York magazine story that features 35 of Cosby’s accusers, was him “humping her leg and grunting.”
By 1986 my mother had signed us up to be a Nielsen family. As part of that task, she believed it was our responsibility to strategically wield whatever infinitesimal power we had to help keep “The Cosby Show” on the air. Whenever it was on, even if the episode was a repeat, our main television had to be tuned in to NBC.
“The Cosby Show” represents massive, transformative success, not only to the sitcom genre itself and NBC’s prime-time fortunes, but in its capacity as a symbol of middle-class possibility. For most of the years between the comedy’s debut in 1984 through its 1992 cancellation, the upwardly mobile Huxtables shaped how white America viewed a specific segment of black America, for good or ill.
To black families like ours it represented progress and pride. Cliff Huxtable, a physician, and his wife Clair, an attorney, promoted an image of the black family that placed education and refinement at the center of its world. They shared similar problems to those of middle-class white America, rarely making race the focus of episodic plots.
They were, to put it bluntly, the right kind of black folks. Model minorities. Neither NBC, nor its viewers, nor the community heartened to see a positive portrayal of black life on a major network in the 1980s would have countenanced the notion that Cosby also was a sexual predator.
Only since Cosby’s divisive and insulting oratory given during a 2004 NAACP award ceremony, his infamous “Pound Cake” speech, did we come to understand the part “The Cosby Show” played in perpetuating its creator’s brand of respectability politics.
Rather than wandering further into the briar patch with that particular acre of his hypocrisy, let’s instead consider that Cosby used it, along with the rest of his work, to construct a heretofore impenetrable bulwark to delay justice for his victims.
The surprise revamp of the series’ third season opening credits in 1986, for example, was quite a thrill. Tweaking the theme song with the debut of each new season became part of the show’s identity, and that version incorporated a Latin jazz flair. I recall my family, along with tens of millions of other households, took delight in his purposely awful Dad Dancing.
I spent a lot of time thinking about that particular credits sequence since Thursday’s news broke, setting its infectious percussion line and sparkling piano riff against my imaginings of Lasha’s trauma.
Lasha says in 1986 she wanted to be a model. Her stepmother sent a letter about her as well as her photo to Cosby, the nicest man in America, a champion of education and symbol of black success, a man who might be able to make her stepdaughter’s dream come true.
It’s very likely that in October 1985 or in some repeat airing of the episode thereafter that Lasha watched the man who would attack her join his character’s wife and kids in a lip-sync of Ray Charles’ “Night Time Is the Right Time.”
Remember tiny, 6-year-old Keshia Knight Pulliam, as Rudy, bringing down the house with her adorably exaggerated mimicry of “Bay-bay! Bayee-bay!…Hold me tight! Make everything alright!”? What you might not remember is the context. This performance was part of an anniversary gift to Cliff’s parents. Rudy’s grandparents.
Lasha said Cosby invited her and her grandmother to his comedy show. He met this teenager’s grandmother. Afterward, she said, Cosby assaulted that woman’s grandchild.
Lasha was in high school, not much older than I was when the incident would have taken place. “You remember, don’t you, Mr. Cosby?” she yelled across the courtroom. These contradictory images now battle and merge as part of our collective memory. They’re another kind of sickening transgression.
In the years following the end of “The Cosby Show,” the performer starred in “Cosby” for CBS, which ran between 1996 and 2000, and one season of “The Cosby Mysteries” on NBC in 1994. He also hosted a revival of “Kids Say the Darndest Things.” By then he’d established himself as America’s Dad.
None of this computes with the perception of, as model and TV personality Janice Dickinson testified, “’America’s Dad’ on top of me, a happily married man with five children, on top of me.”
Dickinson says Cosby assaulted her in 1982, which was around the time Cosby’s “Picture Pages” segments were running as part on CBS’ “Captain Kangaroo” and later on Nickelodeon’s “Pinwheel,” children’s programming starting in the late 1970s. He was teaching millions of kids how to draw and use their imaginations at the time Dickinson says he forced himself on her.
All of these assaults, those recounted in courtroom testimony and the dozens of others reconstructed in allegations made public and ignored for decades, took place behind the heavy curtain of a career that helped sustain and was sustained by important pillars of the entertainment industry. And the lifeblood of that industry is attention, affection and the audience’s belief.
Wrapping our brains around that truth feels stunning, frankly. It explains why the 2017 proceedings ended in a mistrial. Despite all the evidence presented to the jury, including Cosby’s admission that he used to give Quaaludes to women he wanted to have sex with, two jurors simply refused to accept the possibility that Cliff Huxtable, TV’s Greatest Dad, attacked women.
But that mistrial occurred before the shocking revelations about Harvey Weinstein’s years of harassment and misconduct broke in October, before multiple sexual misconduct reports took down Matt Lauer. It came before the end of Louie C.K.’s TV career after he confessed to exposing himself to women and forcing them to watch him masturbate.
As such, this guilty verdict for Cosby is being considered as the first true legal victory of #MeToo. But in the longer, broader view it can and is likely to be seen as more than this. This moment represents many things to many different parties.
Cosby’s actions betray the community he claimed to represent, the one he admonished for being responsible for creating the social and economic woes that have befallen it. And he insisted that community stand by him even so.
Cosby’s reputation for education advocacy and his philanthropy played a role in enabling him to spend most of his life and career as a free man. It is now reasonable to believe he targeted and attacked women over the course of at least 50 of the 80 years he has spent on this Earth.
Let’s be careful before declaring it to be a sign of a beginning of something larger, or an end to women’s collective struggles to be heard, or a sign of lasting change in any respect. In the fullness of time it may prove to be any of those things or none of them. But as of Friday afternoon his works are still easily available to the public: reruns of “The Cosby Show” may have been pulled from Bounce TV, but the show remains available to be streamed via Amazon’s Prime subscription service. Similarly, as of this writing “I Spy” episodes are still streaming on Hulu.
That matters less than knowing one of Cosby’s victims has been seen, heard and believed, and has attained some level of vindication for herself and others.
But it’s going to take a while for the rest of us to fully grasp the heinousness of the duplicity to which we were unwittingly subjected throughout many stages of our lives.
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