We are very good at being horrified for a few minutes. We read the messages. We shake our heads. We say that something should have been done. Then we close Instagram, go to class, meet our friends, complain about our day, and eventually forget. Someone else does not get to forget on command. And perhaps that is where our responsibility begins. In the friend who refuses to laugh. In the person who speaks when everyone else stays quiet. In the institution that keeps caring after the headlines disappear. In the stranger who chooses compassion over curiosity. In all the moments when protecting someone costs us something, and we decide they are still worth protecting. It is easy to say that survivors are not alone. But it is much harder to make sure they actually are not. Whose future are we protecting?
Some wounds stay open long after everyone else has moved on.
At Cornell University, a former student has described a night of sexual violence that, almost two years later, she still carries with her. For most of us, Jane Doe’s story takes only a few minutes to read. For her, it became part of everything that came after.
In a civil lawsuit filed in September 2026, the woman, identified as Jane Doe, alleges that she was coerced into consuming drugs and sexually assaulted at the Chi Phi fraternity house in October 2024. Her complaint names seven current and former students (Matthew Ingalls, Jonathan Newell, Winston Lee, Gillio Lopes, Diego Sarabia, Scott Norris, Scott Kretzschmar) and accuses the university, among other defendants, of failing her.
“Almost two years later, I still carry the weight of its impact. Every day and night.”
That is what she told The Cornell Daily Sun. Her words are already enough to make her pain felt, enough to remind us that she has had to keep living with what we can simply stop reading about¬— we can easily finish reading an article, close a browser, turn our attention elsewhere. She is telling us that, for her, the experience has continued into the ordinary hours of living. And any discussion of disciplinary measures or second chances should keep returning to those words.
Though the men named in the lawsuit have denied the allegations, on September 28, prosecutors announced that they were reopening the criminal investigation. Individual criminal responsibility remains a matter for the legal process to establish, but ensuring a fair investigation is entirely compatible with taking her account seriously and treating her with care.
Within the various disturbing elements of the case, there are the messages attributed to members of the fraternity: the lawsuit includes a Snapchat exchange describing a woman upstairs as available for sex (“free pussy upstairs”), and additional messages reported by CBS News include the question: “Shop still open?” A shop: somewhere to enter, something available, something open to all. Except that she was not a shop, and her body was never theirs to offer. The cruelty of that language lies in how it completely removes the person being discussed: neither her wishes nor her wellbeing have place in the question. The conversation proceeds through the supposed availability of her body, as though the relevant permission could come from another person. Whatever an investigation establishes about each individual’s actions, that language deserves scrutiny in its own right. It is difficult not to feel grief for the person reduced to an object in those messages: we should be troubled by the ease with which someone’s humanity can disappear from a conversation among peers.
The reported figure of 57 fraternity members does not establish that 57 people read the messages and knowingly chose silence. Indeed, according to Jane Doe’s lawyer, a fraternity member subsequently provided her with evidence from the conversation, and an honest account must preserve that distinction. But naming 7 defendants should not mark the boundary of our moral concern: anyone who knowingly encouraged abuse, enabled it, or chose to protect those responsible deserves scrutiny. We are talking about college students— which are, at least theoretically, to be considered adults— and the stakes are another person’s safety, dignity, autonomy, ability to trust, and the life they must continue living afterwards. Wherever someone understood that a person was being harmed and could intervene or seek help, choosing silence deserves moral condemnation. Hence, the fact that someone did not physically participate cannot, by itself, settle the question of their responsibility. What do we owe to someone whose vulnerability becomes the topic and subject of a group chat? At what point should belonging to a group require the courage to challenge it?
Friendship carries a special responsibility when belonging among men depends on performing a certain kind of masculinity, with sexual boasting, cruelty, performative bravado, or even silence become ways to prove kinship. In those moments, real friends should intervene, question the behavior, seek help, and refuse to turn humiliation into entertainment. The social cost of objecting must not outweigh the possibility that someone needs help: loyalty to a person or a group is never morally defensible when protecting someone’s “comfort” or reputation matters more than another person’s safety. A survivor deserves more than a community in which everyone measures their innocence solely by what they did not personally do.
It should be clear that responsibility does not end with the people standing beside us: it also belongs to the institutions entrusted with our safety, because their decisions about consequences, rehabilitation— and second chances— reveal both what they understand accountability to mean, and what they are willing to accept as evidence that someone has changed. At Cornell, the complaint alleges that the 7 students were offered an opportunity to mitigate their conduct by submitting essays. Kyle Kimball, Cornell’s vice president for university relations, in a statement reported by The Cornell Daily Sun, denied that essay-writing had been the sole consequence, confirming that disciplinary proceeding resulted in different kinds of sanctions, including suspensions and expulsions. Yet, appealing to federal laws on privacy, he did not specify which sanction (or sanctions) each of the 7 received.
Still, what should an institution accept as evidence of remorse? Everyone is at least a bit familiar with the vocabulary of accountability, understand what a university expects to hear, and produce a convincing account of personal growth— or now, with generative AI, even the effort of finding the right words can be outsourced. And that is exactly why none of this, by itself, establishes a change in behavior. A written essay may have educational value, but its worth depends on what follows it: whether the person accepts consequences, respects boundaries, stops making excuses, and behaves differently when there is no authority watching. The ability to describe another person’s suffering thoughtfully cannot be allowed to stand in for the responsibility of having taken that suffering seriously: a survivor’s pain must never become an assignment through which someone else earns the right to describe themselves as a better person. Remorse should involve sustained accountability and acceptance of consequences; the person harmed owes nobody forgiveness, reassurance, or recognition of how much they have supposedly grown. There is something deeply troubling about the possibility that an institution might find a story of redemption more comfortable to hear than an account of continuing harm. Redemption offers a conclusion: it allows a file to be closed, an intervention to be declared successful, a community to congratulate itself on what someone has learned. The person harmed may still be waiting for support long after everyone else has decided that the lesson is over. Any discussion of rehabilitation must, therefore, return to her future too. Can she continue her education safely? Can she access care without having to fight for it? Can she make decisions about her own life without being expected to accommodate somebody else’s return? Can she take the time she needs to heal without being pressured to move on? Can she trust that her safety will remain a priority once the public attention will, unfortunately, fade?
All these questions deserve continuous attention whenever an institution considers consequences and second chances— and they should remain central even when answering them requires more time, money, people, or effort than the institution anticipated. Her education, her ambitions, her passions, her peace of mind, her happiness: each of these matters. And so does the possibility of an ordinary day in which she can concentrate on something other than what happened to her. When we speak about someone’s future being endangered by disciplinary consequences, we should ask whose future we have already allowed to become uncertain. A survivor’s place at university should never depend on their willingness to endure an environment they find unsafe, explain their circumstances repeatedly, change their routines to avoid the person who harmed them, or quietly surrender opportunities that other students take for granted. The right to continue studying should also include the right to decide that continuing immediately is impossible. Sometimes, survivors may need some time away, but they should not be treated as having failed to recover properly; whereas someone who wants to stay should receive the support needed to make staying possible. Neither choice should become a test of courage: indeed, the purpose of care should be to re-establish room for a person’s own decisions, including decisions that do not fit the public’s expectations of what recovery should look like.
Interestingly, the need for that care extends beyond this individual case, as proved by Cornell’s 2025 survey of sexual assault and related misconduct. According to the survey, 35% of undergraduate women respondents reported experiencing nonconsensual sexual contact since entering the university. However, Cornell cautioned that low participation and unanswered questions limited the certainty of the findings. Of course, those limitations matter, and the figure should not be presented as an exact measurement of the experiences of all undergraduate women; nevertheless, the accounts collected demand a serious institutional response, and perceived uncertainty about the prevalence across a population does not make the experiences reported unworthy of attention. Taking those experiences seriously means asking what follows their disclosure: what protection becomes available, what support reaches the people harmed, and what the university is prepared to change. Remarkably, the demand that recognition lead to action has a particular historical resonance at Cornell, dated back in the 1970s. Women connected to this university helped develop a public language for experiences that urgently needed recognition and action. Indeed, Cornell lecturer Lin Farley and fellow organizers helped bring the term “sexual harassment” into public discussion through their work on women’s experiences in the workplace, after the Cornell employee Carmita Wood had left her job following harassment and approached them for help. Their organizing offers a way to think about the responsibility these accounts place on institutions today: finding words for harm should make it possible to seek meaningful change in the conditions that allowed it. Still, returning to that history, specifically at Cornell, carries a particular sadness, since even if the words of those women helped bring into public life and should have made it easier for others to speak and find support, similar patterns continue to repeat themselves. To honor their work, we must care about what happens after someone has told us what happened, after the difficult conversation ends, and they return to a life whose burdens may remain invisible to everyone around them. Being heard should mean that something becomes less lonely: that help arrives, that the next step does not have to be taken alone. That is where this history places its demand on us, in the days that follow the words.
An institution should be judged (at least in part) by how much work it requires from someone who comes to it already in pain: a university’s commitment to its students should be measured by what it is prepared to do when protecting them becomes uncomfortable— no matter the rankings or the tuition fees. A carefully-worded statement may reassure the big public, but the person asking for help needs those words to change something in their life: that requires an institution willing to examine its own failures, hold people accountable, commit resources and time even after public attention has moved elsewhere. What is a promise of safety worth if it weakens whenever a reputation is at stake? The language of compassion should never become a way for a university to congratulate itself while leaving those harmed to carry the consequences alone; its concern must survive beyond the moment when expressing it makes the institution look good. We should expect institutions to reduce the burden of seeking assistance wherever they can… and exhaustion should never become an unofficial condition for receiving it.
However, it would be too easy to leave that responsibility at the university’s door only.
Once a story like Jane’s reaches the rest of us, we should also ask how much of that burden we add ourselves, by deciding how much explaining a person must do before we are willing to care. We can demand better from Cornell and still need to examine our own first questions— what she drank, why she went, whom she trusted, why she did not speak sooner. Usually thought as harmless, those questions become a test of whether someone deserves compassion, and increase the load we say we want the institution to lift. There is little-to-no comfort in being told that support is available if receiving it means first defending every choice that preceded the need for it. Someone can want to go to a party, dance, enjoy another person’s company, flirt, drink, or seek intimacy without giving anyone permission to disregard their boundaries: their right to safety should remain intact and untouched through all of those choices. We should be troubled by any argument that makes protection conditional on having stayed home, stayed sober, having dressed differently, or correctly anticipated another person’s intentions: what kind of freedom are we offering if taking part in ordinary social life means accepting that, should we become victims, our decisions will become the first thing we are asked to defend? Trusting another person should never become a source of shame for the person whose trust was betrayed: a friendship, an invitation, a stranger you vibe with, a familiar face should be allowed to mean the possibility of company or kindness. How can we demand that people recognize every danger in advance and then treat their failure to do so as an explanation that settles our concerns? And when alcohol is involved, that scrutiny becomes harsher and more troubling; in the case of Jane Doe, it can even become an attempt to turn the accusation back on her. Jane’s account deserves to be examined without making her being worthy of compassion another disputed question— there is no need to approve every detail of someone’s evening to recognize their humanity.
A person who comes forward should not have to defend every decision that brought them into a place before anyone is actually willing to listen to what they say happened inside it. Nor should that demand for explanations extend into a claim over the rest of her life. Jane Doe’s anonymity must be a boundary to the public’s respects— also when curiosity makes crossing it tempting. Online commentators are endlessly trying to discover and publish Jane’s identity, and her lawyer also said that other women had been wrongly identified as her. This is what turning anonymity into a public guessing game can mean: behind every name circulated is someone who must live with the consequences of strangers deciding they are entitled to know more. Anyone tempted to join that search must stop and consider what their discovery might cost: a name, a picture, a tag, a social media profile would give strangers greater access to Jane Doe’s life without making her any more deserving of their concern. Privacy should never become the price we demand for taking someone seriously: neither asking for her allegations to be investigated requires making her recognizable to everyone who has followed the story; nor should seeking justice mean accepting that an online audience will decide when, how, and to whom her identity becomes known. Jane has made allegations that require a serious response— she has not made the rest of her life ours to reveal.
For victims who have not yet spoken, watching strangers try to expose Jane Doe may make silence feel safer: before asking why a survivor waited, it must always be considered what they feared would happen once they told someone. RAINN identifies fear of retaliation, blame, rejection, and disbelief among the main reasons people delay disclosing or reporting sexual abuse. It should concern us to think and imagine someone weighing their need for help against the possibility of losing the people they would normally turn to for it. Will their friends stay? Will their family ask them to stay quiet? When we demand to know why they did not speak sooner, we should consider how our responses might have made speaking harder. Indeed, encouraging someone to come forward must mean respecting how they choose to do so: seeking professional help, confiding in a friend, making a formal report, speaking publicly are all different decisions. A survivor’s access to care should neither depend on their willingness to take the path others prefer, nor should the time it takes them to speak become another reason to withhold compassion. We should also resist the expectation that a survivor must report to protect someone else— responsibility for any further violence belongs to the person who commits it. Someone already harmed should not be made to carry that burden too: our responsibility is to make support available and remain present when the next step feels difficult. The courage we ask of survivors should be matched by our willingness to listen, even when what they tell us concerns someone we would rather continue admiring.
“Almost two years later, I still carry the weight of its impact. Every day and night.” I keep returning to those words. To the distance between the time it takes us to read Jane Doe’s story and the time she says the has spent living with its consequences. To how easily we can reach the end of an article, close the page, and forget that behind this case is a young woman, a student, whose life goes on after we turn our attention elsewhere. She deserves more than our sorrow.
Our concern must reach beyond the person whose story brought us here. To every Jane Doe, every John Doe, every person who has read an article with something they have never been able to say. You don’t owe anyone a public account of your pain to deserve tenderness. You deserve someone who will listen, respect your decisions, take care of your words, and still be there when the conversation is over.
“You are not alone” is a promise we must become willing to keep.
Whose future are we protecting? Any answer that leaves a Jane Doe at the margins is an answer we must refuse to accept.
She had a future before she became a case.
She is still entitled to one.
I'm Allegra, a 1st year PPA MSc Student (and a former BIG student!). I am passionate about writing and photography, trying to hold on to what might otherwise slip away, like details, expressions, and fragments of reality that deserve to be truly seen. I am a huge techno fan and activist ... so if you don't find me in class or studying, it's because I'm either dancing or advocating for social justice or human rights!