I held off on reading the Cornell story for as long as I could because I knew how much it would upset me. Somehow still I wasn’t prepared for the all consuming grief I felt when it finally became unavoidable to read.
Two years ago this month, a Cornell student walked alone to the Chi Phi house on Edgemoor Lane. According to the lawsuit she filed on September 16, what followed was roughly six hours of sexual assault by seven named fraternity members. She was pressured to snort ketamine, again and again so she stayed incapable of saying no. Cornell suspended the men but did not expel them. The Ithaca police have been “still investigating” for nearly two years. When Jane Doe needed her classmates most, she says she was criticized and ostracized.
My freshman year of college was destroyed after I was drugged and violently raped. At the hospital they asked if I’d taken ketamine because it was in my blood, but I didn’t knowingly do drugs. At the time, the state of North Carolina wouldn’t do a rape kit unless I pressed charges. My roommates asked me to think about what pressing charges would do to his life, so I collected the prescriptions to prevent me from getting diseased or carrying his child.
I called my dad to get my insurance information because I was a teenager. Later we told my mom. Eventually my sisters found out. A few friends along the way. The years of self-sabotage that followed, years of damage to my mental health, relationships, education and career can never be undone. To say that college assault defined who I was for the better part of a decade is an understatement – I learned the hard way whose futures American society protects, and let me tell you as a young, vulnerable and deeply traumatized woman it wasn’t mine.
This is my origin story, my entry point into Democratic politics, the moment that inspired me to lay bare my life’s experiences in the hope that one less girl would have to wake up confused and groggy to the bruises, the shame, the feeling that someone had been inside you without your consent. And for what? So seven more rapists could lay waste to a young body like mine, with the same drug, two decades later.
I have written before that abuse is not partisan, but the epidemic of campus assault absolutely is. Not because we know the party affiliation of any of these seven reprehensible predators, but because there is only one party in this country that fundamentally devalues girls’ faculties over their own bodies while uplifting generations of boys and men to believe that they are in control, that consent is optional, because everything is theirs for the taking.
According to the lawsuit, one of the Cornell seven sent a message to the “Chi Phi Actives” Snapchat group: “free p—y upstairs.” Ten years ago this month a tape surfaced of the man who now runs this country saying “grab them by the p–-y, you can do anything,” and Republicans made him president twice. They are the party of a president a Manhattan jury found liable for sexual abuse. The Cornell fraternity did not invent that sentence, they inherited it from Trump.
This is not a culture, it is a policy record with names attributed to it.
When Republicans put Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court in 2018 over Christine Blasey Ford’s sworn testimony and Susan Collins explained to the country why she didn’t quite believe her. Every college boy in America got the message, and every girl did too.
Then came the rules. In 2020 Betsy DeVos rewrote Title IX enforcement for campus assault. She narrowed the definition of harassment schools are obligated to act on. She required live hearings where the accused’s advisor gets to cross-examine the victim, a procedure designed by people who have never sat across a table from the man who was inside them. Survivors stopped reporting, which was the whole point.
Biden’s 2024 rule told schools to act proactively and strengthened protections for survivors. Within two weeks of Trump’s second inauguration the Education Department reverted to the DeVos rule. And on September 28 of this year, as the Cornell story was going national, Linda McMahon formally rescinded the 2024 protections and announced the department would “relentlessly champion equal opportunity for all Americans.” The department that is supposed to make Cornell answer for Jane Doe spent that week making sure it never has to.
She cannot tell you, so I will. This never, ever leaves you. It shows up in every corner of your life until one day it is a distant and harrowing account of the girl you used to be, the girl who is never coming back because he stole her innocence and one political party made sure he could.
Read her account. Do not look away. This is Republicans’ America.
About the Author: Emily Suttle-Braun, is a Democratic strategist and CEO of Doodle Mom Strategies.
