Justice for Cornell s Jane Doe Means Building a Fighting Feminist Movement

Earlier this month, a former student at Cornell University filed a lawsuit with allegations that she was drugged and raped by seven members of a fraternity on campus in 2024. The details of the case have sparked horror and rage across the country.

At the Chi Phi fraternity house on Cornell’s campus in Ithaca, the men pressured her into taking drugs that left her incapacitated and then invited their friends to join in assaulting her, referring to her as “free pussy.”

The survivor, who is identified as Jane Doe in the lawsuit, reported the assault to her school a few weeks afterwards, but at the time, the DA decided not to pursue a criminal case. Cornell conducted an internal investigation as required by Title IX, a 1972 law that is ostensibly meant to make schools safer by outlawing sexual harassment and discrimination. The investigation led to the expulsion of only two of the men while the others were suspended and received insultingly mild forms of discipline, including writing an essay about what they had done wrong. As it turns out, this deplorable Title IX outcome is part of a pattern at Cornell: between 2018 and 2024, over 1,200 gender-based violence reports were made to Cornell’s Title IX office. Of those, only 162 led to charges, and only seven ended in expulsion.

The survivor dropped out of Cornell after the incident.

The news has drawn national attention and reignited widespread anger and disgust at institutional protection for those who commit sexual assault, which is more apparent than ever since the revelations of the Epstein files. On social media, people are rightfully seething about Cornell’s unbelievably lenient response when the survivor first reported the crime.

Earlier this week, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spoke at an event in Ithaca: “I want to be clear that the culture of rape, sexual assault, and pedophilia is protected in elite institutions across the U.S., and including Cornell University in this instance. It has got to stop.” She also talked about attending parties in Boston in her first days of college, which she described as “factories of sexual assault.”

Amid the fallout, the Tompkins County District Attorney has announced that his office will reopen the possibility of bringing criminal charges in the case.

The survivor’s decision to bring a lawsuit against Cornell and the seven men involved is incredibly important. In choosing to come forward, she has exposed the crimes of the men involved and the unforgivable handling of the assault by her institution. The case also reveals the contrast between punishment dealt to pro-Palestine protestors, who were barred from Cornell’s campus for years in October 2024, and alleged rapists, who were allowed to return to normal classes after a few weeks.

In the face of this news of cisgender men again being the perpetrators of extreme harm against a woman, it’s also absurd that the Far Right continues to fear-monger about trans women and kids. In fact, the Right’s backlash against queer people, women, and their movements now includes the narrative that men are oppressed. For instance, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission under Trump is suing Harvard on the grounds that it discriminated against white, straight men in its hiring practices.

In other words, deep crises are on display that are affecting women and trans people all over the world. We have to fight for justice for her and all survivors of sexual violence.

How did we reach a point at which this story is as common and familiar as it is horrifying? Indeed, sexual assault on college campuses, and leniency for the men who are guilty of it, is a frequent example of the entrenchment of rape culture and institutional protection for rapists. In 2015, Brock Turner, a student at Stanford University, sexually assaulted a woman while she was unconscious and was sentenced to six months in prison — a light sentence that the judge said he opted for out of consideration for Turner’s life and future. Turner served three months of his sentence before being released on good behavior. The disgraceful sentencing destroyed the judge’s reputation, and amidst the energy of the #MeToo movement a few years later, when women were beginning to widely question neoliberal lies about gender equality under capitalism, he lost his seat in a recall election.

And yet, almost ten years later, the case of the woman who was raped by Cornell fraternity members comes in the context of the still-incomplete exposure of the Epstein files and attacks on women’s and trans people’s rights by the Right – alongside the continued complicity of the Democrats.

It’s obvious that patriarchy is alive and well. Title IX, which was insufficient to begin with, has been further weakened by the Department of Education under Trump: as of this week, it has officially removed language about LGBTQ+ people from the policy, which had been added as a largely surface-level reform by the Biden administration.

The institutions and voices of liberal, capitalist “feminism” that have been prevalent throughout neoliberalism, from Title IX to Cornell University, from Sheryl Sandberg to Kamala Harris, have proven themselves utterly incapable of defending women, girls, trans people, and queer people from sexual and gender-based violence. Indeed, many women, including Hilary Clinton, who is married to a known friend of Jeffrey Epstein, have helped to protect and uphold this system.

In the face of these betrayals, it’s clear that capitalist versions of “feminism” are incapable of liberating women or ending sexual assault. But the effort to defend women and trans people against patriarchal violence couldn’t be more urgent.

As we on the left, in our workplaces, schools, and communities, take on this struggle, we have to face the fact that since #MeToo, and especially since the Epstein files, the most fundamental and heartfelt aspirations of the feminist movement — the fight for the physical safety of women and queer people, for bodily autonomy , and equal rights — are completely incompatible with the capitalist parties of the United States.

#MeToo started online and grew into a massive outpouring of solidarity and anger among women who faced sexual abuse or harassment in their workplaces. The movement demanded accountability for the bosses who carried out or covered up the violence. And yet it was co-opted and controlled by the liberal machinery of the Democratic Party, which ensured it never questioned the centuries-old, pessimistic drudgery of capitalism.

The limits of the movement were clear a few years later, when the Supreme Court, including the despised and fiercely protested Brett Kavanaugh, overturned Roe v. Wade, allowing states to impose debilitating restrictions on abortion access.

Under capitalism, sexual violence is normalized and manufactured for profit while being covered up and excused by governments and institutions. In this sense, it will take more than trainings and essay-writing to deal with the fact that capitalist society requires that oppression and violence are normalized and carried out systematically against entire groups of people.

The seven men in the Cornell case deserve to rot. At the same time, the problem of gender-based violence has always been deeper and more systematic than any one man or group of men. We can see this in the fact that while seven men participated in the horrific sexual assault, 50 others knew what was happening because of the group chat and did nothing, as if there was nothing wrong with what was happening.

We can see this in the Cornell administration, which shook hands and handed diplomas to five of those men while the survivor dropped out to carry her trauma alone. This same administration, in the same month when the assault happened, suspended and banned students from campus for years for pro-Palestine activism. Students who exercised their right to protest and showed solidarity with Palestinians experiencing genocide were punished quickly and publicly, while rapists received mild discipline after a hushed, months-long process.

In Palestine itself, the Democrats and Republicans continue to support Israel as mothers lose their children or go through C-sections without anesthesia.

We see it in Texas, where Tierra Walker died after doctors brushed off her pregnancy-related health concerns in a state with an abortion ban that has no exceptions for health risks.

We can see it in Apollo Management CEO Leon Black, a close associate of Jeffrey Epstein and accused rapist before the files even came out, who walks free every day of his life.

This shows a failure of the #MeToo movement, which wasn’t able to deliver justice to women who faced gender-based violence and harassment. Brett Kavanaugh is still on the Supreme Court, Johnny Depp won the abuse lawsuit Amber Heard brought against him, and countless women who have endured these experiences are still the ones who have to carry the burden of shame and trauma.

Misogynistic violence runs through the veins of the capitalist system. If we want a shot at ending it, we have to go for the jugular.

What does the fight look like today for a world in which no form of sexual violence or oppression is wielded against women, trans people, queer people, or anyone ever again? This intersects with the fight against all forms of oppression, which especially affect students and working class people who are Black, brown, immigrants, Indigenous, and/or poor.

In a moment when we have yet to build a feminist movement that fights for all oppressed people across sectors, and when neoliberal feminism is an unpopular farce, there is also dangerous space and energy for the Far Right. People of many political backgrounds are disgusted with the Epstein elite, and figures like JD Vance or Pete Hegseth can use this for a twisted, right-wing populist narrative of needing to “protect” women by pushing them into patriarchal norms of unemployed, isolated marriage and motherhood.

We have to reject patronizing attacks carried out under the cover of “safety.” And since the Democrats live to protect and defend the status quo, which is what paved the way for the rise of the Right in the first place, the fight for justice belongs in the hands of the working class and oppressed people of the world, who always face the brunt of these attacks and power struggles by the ruling class, and our own movements, which must be independent of that ruling class.

Turning away from the pessimism of the Democrats, we must fight in the spirit of the feminist movements of history and around the world in which women have refused to be quiet and led fierce class struggle. We want to continue the legacy of La Marea Verde, the mass movement in Argentina that won the right to legal, free abortions in 2020 in a movement that importantly centered the right to bodily autonomy. We also look to Ni Una Menos, a movement across Latin America that has been mobilizing protests to rage against femicide and violence against women. In India this week, students are leading protests against sexual violence after a wave of rape cases in close succession has come out. The extremely important feminist struggle for safety, justice, and dignity is being led by women all over the world.

Much like the working class of the U.S. after the Epstein files, students who are distressed and enraged by the oppression of trans and queer people and women must seek an avenue of struggle that doesn’t lead back to demoralization and continued cycles of rights being rolled back.

Seeds of this struggle began to grow with the Palestine movement in 2023-24, when students on university campuses not only in the U.S. but all over the world showed the student movement rearing its head with a ferocity that sparked memories of the anti-war movement of the ’60s.

They offered the world a shining reminder that students are not just passive vessels waiting for institutions to implant a pre-made set of values and beliefs into their heads. They expressed rage against imperialist violence of the U.S. and Israel, and solidarity with the oppressed people of the world.

This was an important departure from the framework of neoliberal educational institutions, which teach us to take imperialism for granted, and to allow the working class — who makes all of society run — to be divided across borders, race, gender, and other sectors.

Students have also stood up against the rape culture that poisons higher education institutions, which carries over into our workplaces and throughout our lives. In 2014, Emma Sulkowicz began a movement at Columbia University with a performance art piece in which she carried the dorm mattress on which she was raped everywhere she went. Throughout the piece, students helped her carry the mattress and staged additional protests against rape culture and the Columbia administration’s shameful perpetuation of it.

When we rise up in defense of women, queer people, and students like the survivor who came forward at Cornell, we should consciously reject the divisions imposed on us by decades of neoliberal capitalism — the ones that would have us believe that “feminism” is when one woman sits at the top of a Fortune 500 company while the system that exploits and oppresses billions of people worldwide continues undisturbed, or when the politician imposing sanctions and extreme exploitation on countries in the Middle East or South America is a woman instead of a man.

Really fighting for women’s and LGBTQ+ rights means building a movement of the working class — one that has already been showing signs of strengthening, from the historic Black Lives Matter uprisings and Generation U after the pandemic, to the movement for Palestine and the anti-ICE protests in the Twin Cities earlier this year.

We must demand justice for the survivor who brought the lawsuit at Cornell. We must fight for justice, safety, and liberation for everyone who has faced sexual violence and gender-based oppression. And to win, we urgently need a revived socialist feminist movement which erases the artificial divide between working class and socialist issues.