UPDATE, September 28, 2026: I had this piece written, titled, and my finger on the damn publish button when the story changed out from under me. The news is moving so fucking fast I cannot physically keep up. So here’s the latest: Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten is reopening the criminal investigation, and he plans to take the case to a grand jury.
That is GREAT fucking news.
His explanation for the two-year shrug is that the allegations in Jane Doe’s lawsuit are “dramatically different” from her 2024 statement to police, which he says didn’t allege she was drugged without her knowledge or that she didn’t consent. I’m not a prosecutor. I’m a writer, and I know the first draft of the worst night of your life is never the whole story. A grand jury is exactly where that gets sorted out, which is the entire point of the section below called “Insufficient.”
Cornell, meanwhile, now says it “supports” the DA’s decision to let “the victim’s story” be heard by a grand jury. Victim. Look who found a noun. Its new statement also recaps the sanctions as “expulsions and suspensions” and somehow forgets to mention the essays. Weird. Must be a privacy thing.
To every one of you who posted, shared, wrote editorials, and refused to shut the hell up about this: it worked. Keep going. Two weeks of people speaking out did what twelve hearings and a “thorough review” never did. The original piece runs below, because every word of it is still true.
Ithaca, New York (The Daily Whatever Press) — In 1985, Principal Richard Vernon locked five kids in a high school library on a Saturday and made them write an essay about who they think they are. Their crimes included a flare gun in a locker and a cutting class. In 2025, Cornell University looked at seven fraternity brothers accused of drugging and gang-raping a 20-year-old student and reached for the same fucking disciplinary tool.
Cornell. The freaking Ivy League. The one Ezra Cornell founded so “any person can find instruction in any study.” Apparently that includes a whole new study, which is how to turn an alleged gang rape into a homework assignment.
Twelve hearings and a homework assignment
Here’s what the complaint says. Jane Doe alleges that on October 19, 2024, members of Cornell’s Chi Phi chapter pressured her into taking what they called ketamine and then sexually assaulted her over several hours. About three weeks later, she reported it to Cornell police. The university temporarily suspended the chapter and the seven men and opened a Title IX investigation. That investigation produced at least twelve hearings.
Twelve hearings. According to the lawsuit and her attorney, two of the seven men were expelled. The rest got suspensions, workshops, and, in the lawsuit’s own words, the opportunity to “mitigate their conduct by submitting essays.”
Mitigate their conduct. With prose. I have been writing essays for most of my adult life, and I want to tell you what that word means, since Cornell apparently forgot. It comes from the French essayer, which means to try. Montaigne invented the form to put his whole unvarnished self on the page. An essay is where you go when something is too big for a sentence and too true to leave unsaid. It’s the hardest honest thing I know how to do, and women in particular have used it for centuries to drag the truth out of the dark and into daylight.
Cornell took that form and handed it out like a coupon. Knock some time off your sanction, champ. Show your work. Somewhere in Day Hall, a grown adult with a salary and a lanyard presumably read those essays. Did they grade them? Did they circle a comma splice? Did anybody write “good insight!” in the margin of a document submitted to mitigate an alleged gang rape? I don’t know, and Cornell won’t tell me, which brings us to the part that made me put down my coffee and say a word my mother would ground me for.
Only those who perpetrate
On November 26, 2024, Cornell put out a statement about these very allegations. It included this sentence: “Only those who perpetrate sexual violence benefit from its concealment.”
That’s a great sentence. It has a thesis, it has moral clarity, and I would have loved to write it myself.
On September 21, 2026, responding to the lawsuit, Cornell said that “federal privacy law prohibits Cornell from disclosing specific information regarding individual students.” Then it added that it takes sexual violence “extremely seriously.”
So in 2024, concealment was the thing perpetrators benefit from. By 2026, concealment is federal compliance. Same university, same case, twenty-two months apart. Follow your own thesis to its conclusion, Cornell, because I’m a writer and I just did. Who benefits now?
And the Presidential Task Force on Campus Sexual Assault? Cornell launched it in spring 2025, and it issued its report in March 2026, after the hearings that ended in essays. That’s the fire department showing up with a clipboard and a strategic plan for the smoking hole where the house used to be.
“Insufficient evidence”
Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten’s office says it “conducted a thorough review of the police investigation” and found “insufficient evidence to support criminal charges.” Doe’s attorney, Thomas Giuffra, put the result more simply: “Not one of these guys was arrested. Not one.”
Insufficient. That’s the word your bank uses when you try to buy groceries on the twenty-ninth of the month. It’s a hell of a word to lay over a complaint alleging seven men and one incapacitated woman.
An attorney for one of the seven disputes her account and says the defense has documents, witness statements, and scientific evidence that contradict it. Fine. That’s what a courtroom is for. That's the whole goddamn point, too, because until this week, no criminal courtroom was ever on the table. An allegation of gang rape ran through a police department, a district attorney, and a dozen university hearings, and the most rigorous output any of it produced was a writing prompt. Doe sued in civil court, where the standard is preponderance of the evidence, because for two years that was the only door anybody left open for her.
Meanwhile, Chi Phi national wants you to know its founding principles are “Truth, Honor, and Personal Integrity,” and its mission is “Building Better Men.”
How’s that going, fellas?
Who got shut down
I have two daughters. One just started college, the other is at the age where college brochures start landing in the mailbox, glossy ones with stone buildings and golden leaves and kids laughing on the quad. Jane Doe was 20 and at what her lawyer calls her dream school.
She doesn’t go there anymore. Her lawyer says she’s barely hanging on.
Chi Phi is banned from Cornell’s campus, with the Chi Phi website calling that chapter “currently dormant.”
The chapterhouse got expelled.
The Cornell directory still lists two of the seven men as current students.
But she lost her school. Some of the rapists*, according to her lawsuit, were given a chance to write their way out of it.
So here’s my essay, Cornell. It runs about a thousand words, and I tried, in the old French sense, to tell the truth. Grade it however you want. Unlike some people you’ve read lately, I’m not asking you to mitigate a fucking thing.
One more assignment while you've got the diploma printer warmed up: an honorary degree for Jane Doe. She taught your entire institution a course it clearly needed, and she did it without a task force.
Leave the name line blank. You, of all, people understand privacy.
*Alleged, of course, throughout.
Hi, I’m Dana. And I Write Out Loud.
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Well put. I've been so sick to my stomach with this. And knowing that her and Chanel Miller from Stanford are not the only ones this happens to really makes it hard. As someone else told me, this is how the epstein class continues to keep happening.
Central Park 5 he takes out an AD. And calls for the execution. He demands the they get the death penalty. Cornell crickets. And the Central Park 5 were innocent. Stanford student convicted of rape. He gets a slap on the wrist. Basically a speeding ticket. What privilege. Great piece by you. Wonder what Don will say about this one?