ITHACA, NEW YORK, OR WHEREVER THESE SEVEN DIRTBAG LIVE NOW (The Daily Whatever Press) — I have now been lapped by this unfolding Cornell story three times. I write a piece, the news moves, I write another piece, and the news moves again. I’m a middle-aged woman with a Substack, two kids, and a day job, and I’m doing my best to keep up but SHEESH. The pace of this news is staggering — and I’m so here for all of it.
So if this is your first read, welcome! Now go catch up:
So here’s where we are:
On September 14, Jane Doe filed a lawsuit against Cornell.
On September 21, Cornell issued a statement hiding behind federal privacy law.
On September 27, Florence Pugh told the world to “Be angry for us,” and AOC stood up at a town hall in Ithaca and ripped Cornell for letting the accused write essays in private.
On September 28, the DA reopened the criminal case (YES!!!), and the mayor of Ithaca moved to freeze student event permits until Cornell does its homework.
And today, a former South Park writer launched a website: TheCornell7.org.
To which we say: Team Toby Morton—fuck yeah!
Toby Morton wrote five episodes of South Park between 2001 and 2003, and he voiced Scott Tenorman, the red-headed kid on the receiving end of Cartman’s revenge in the most infamous revenge episode the show ever made. Now 25 years later, he’s finally on the other side of the revenge plot, and this time it’s aimed exactly where it belongs.
The goal is a permanent public record of the case, with the seven men’s names, photos, and employers attached. So it follows them wherever they go, forever.
He says he’s already received names, photographs, documents, and messages. He’s promised billboards “around the country,” and he’s coming for the Cornell administrators he says “failed miserably.” When people reminded him he’s a satirist, not a journalist, he wrote that this makes him “more dangerous,” with “no limits, no boundaries, nobody to tell me I’ve gone too far.”
Good. Fucking good.
Cornell had limits. Cornell had boundaries. Cornell had privacy statutes, twelve hearings, an Office of Civil Rights, a task force, a police department, and a legal team, and it used every one of those boundaries to build a wall around what happened in that house. The DA had limits too, and he used them to call the case “insufficient” and go home. Two years of people with all the boundaries in the world produced an essay as punishment for most of those men. So forgive me if I’m not clutching my pearls because a satirist with a web domain finally showed up to do what the grown-ups wouldn’t.
Morton is the invoice for Cornell’s silence, and Cornell ran up that bill all by itself.
My one ask of Toby is the thing he’s already promised, which is to get every face right, because one wrong photo makes a brand-new victim and could cast doubt on Jane Doe’s case. Beyond that, go, my dude! Build the billboards. Make the website so big it shows up in every background check for the rest of these guys’ lives.
Now let’s talk about all the other men in the Chi Phi house.
According to the lawsuit, at 1:42 a.m. that night, a fraternity member posted a message to the chapter’s Snapchat group chat, called “Chi Phi Actives.” The message advertised “free pussy” upstairs. She was offered up to a group chat like leftover pizza.
Later that night, one of the brothers wrote back: “Shop still open?”
Shop. Still. Open.
A whole group chat full of “actives” saw that message. But they sure were passive. Not one man in that chat did a goddamn thing. No one called 911. Nobody called campus police, an RA, or her friend. Nobody walked upstairs and said get the fuck out of that room. The most engaged response the lawsuit describes is a guy checking on availability.
Every single man who saw that message and did nothing is culpable.
You don’t get to be the good guy because you read the message and opted not to um, visit the shop. The only viable option here was to speak out and take action, to take steps to stop the atrocity being committed inside your home
And the DA? Van Houten called the messages “disgusting, vulgar,” then said they “had nothing to do with the issue of consent.” Sir. A group chat advertising an incapacitated woman as free is the most on-the-nose piece of consent evidence imaginable. It’s practically a signed confession, a direct indication of how those men dehumanized and violated her.
Better still, the DA told ABC his office never got the Snapchat screenshot. Cornell now says its police department handed a screenshot to the DA back in 2024. One of those two institutions is wrong about the single most important piece of evidence in this case, and both of them are asking us to trust them with the next one.
So subpoena every phone in that chat. Put every “active” in front of that grand jury and make each one of them explain, under oath, what he saw at 1:42am. and why he went back to sleep.
So is this finally it?
In 2016, Brock Turner got six months for sexually assaulting an unconscious woman and served three. Chanel Miller’s victim impact statement tore the country open, California changed its sentencing law, and voters recalled the judge. It mattered. And ten years later, an Ivy League school allegedly handed out essay assignments as punishment instead.
That’s the fear under all of this. The internet gets furious, the news cycle crests, and everybody goes home.
But this time, nobody’s going home. The DA is back in the case. A city is choking off the party permits. A lawsuit is going after Cornell’s money. And a guy who has nothing to lose and a whole lot of billboard space is making sure seven names can’t disappear into a transfer application.
So is this finally the story that changes things? It is if we refuse to let it go. Keep posting. Keep calling. Keep sending Toby Morton everything he needs to get it right.
And to the men of Chi Phi Actives, from all of us: the shop is fucking closed.
Hi, I’m Dana. And I Write Out Loud.
I Write Out Loud is my primary home for cultural memoir, personal essays, and live conversations about the strange, brave process of becoming yourself in midlife. If you like essays with a point of view and a pulse, you’ll find plenty to read there.
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Every frat boy who got the text saying "free pussy", who didn't report a gang rape is complicit and indictable.
Burn it all down!
Maybe he’ll add in the guy who doxxed her today. He deserves hell on Earth.