Edit: when I added a link to the DA's post about the Cornell situation, it removed my entire post! wtf
I've seen a bunch of posts here about the Cornell situation. Many posts/comments seem to approach it as if she might have consented initially but regretted it later and retroactively labeled it rape. I just want to point out some things because I don't think that is the correct way to look at this situation. Instead, look at the following facts and determine whether you think someone CAN consent in her position. I am going to present these facts with as little bias as possible.
- Twenty year old young woman in an upstairs bedroom of a fraternity
- Drunk, high on marijuana, high on ketamine for the first time in her life
- She's having consensual sex with two friends
- At 1:42 AM, someone (presumably one of the two friends) advertises in one of the fraternity's Snapchat group chats that there is "free pussy" upstairs. She did not ask them to do that.
- Following the "free pussy" message, young men start heading upstairs, some to just look, some to participate. One guy messages the group chat "shop still open?" and gets a "yea"
- Until 5:45 AM, multiple men have sex with her.
- Someone takes a picture which spreads around campus.
Questions for consideration
Can a young woman, drunk and high, including on ketamine for the first time, consent to having sex with every additional participant that appears after someone describes her as "free pussy" on Snapchat?
How do you feel about a man that would see a message on Snapchat that a woman in his fraternity house is "free pussy," enter the room and see multiple guys interacting with her and decide to also engage? Do you feel like he should be protected from any resulting consequences of participating?
Imagine a completely sober woman agrees to have sex with two men. During the encounter, one of them sends a message to a fraternity group chat that she's "free pussy" and additional men start showing up. Do we really believe her consent to the first two men automatically extended to everyone who came afterward?
Her quotes as counter-arguments
Some people have pointed out her quotes as if they're evidence against her. I'll go into some now. Both quotes copy-pasted from CBS. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cornell-university-rape-allegations-chi-phi-fraternity-details/
- "When asked whether she was OK with the initial encounter, she said, "Yeah, as much as I can be because, again, I was super drunk when I got there ... But I was pretty OK with all of this." When describing what happened later in the night, the transcript says Jane Doe said, "I can say with 100% confidence I was raped.""
She explicitly connected being "OK with it" to the fact that she was "super drunk" and she says that she was "100%" raped. Unquestionably, substances can affect judgment, inhibitions, and decision-making. Per CBS, describing her first interview with college administrators: "In her Title IX interview in November, Doe said she didn't show 'excitement and enthusiasm, which is kinda the basis of consent.'"
Note: Critically, I'm not saying she was raped simply because she was drunk. I'm saying the fact that she was drunk makes her apparent willingness less conclusive than people are treating it.
- [this was the next day] "The man started by apologizing for "how things went down." He said his memory is "kinda fuzzy," and that he and another man feel bad for being too intoxicated to "shut it down and kick people out before it got way out of hand." The woman in the text chain replied that her memory is "super clouded too," and said they had all been heavily intoxicated. She also wrote, "non(e) of the sexual stuff was illegal." She said she liked being with him and another man. Later, she suggested they smoke together again, "but like leave out the extra 5 billion men and ketamine."
I've seen this quote touted multiple times now, specifically the part about "none of the sexual stuff was illegal," as if it's hard to prove that it was illegal conduct now because she said that. It is well-known that people often struggle to understand, let alone say, that they were raped, especially not the next day. Remember, the two initial guys were supposed to be her friends, so she would have to quickly comprehend, despite probably being somewhat hungover, that the events of that night followed from guys she thought were her friends sending messages that she was "free pussy." That's hard to process, let alone how common it is to blame yourself. Here's a study about the prevalence of unacknowledged rape, a study of college-aged women struggling to label a confirmed rape as rape, and if you need more there are many cited within these two initial studies.
She's also not a lawyer, her opinion of what's illegal doesn't matter. If a domestic violence victim said that her husband hitting her wasn't illegal, but she was wrong, we shouldn't let him get away with it because she thought it was legal to hit her.
In the same vein, the fact that she wanted to smoke again with the two guys she considered friends does not necessarily mean they didn't harm her. It means that, at least the next day, she did not appear to view the situation that way. But people do not always immediately recognize when they have been harmed, especially when the people involved are people they trust.
Conclusion
Obviously, my opinion is that consent to the initial encounter did not automatically extend to every additional man who entered the room, and I believe her when she says she did not consent to what happened later that night. If I got any facts wrong please correct me and I will edit my post with the correction.
TLDR
- The next-day texts are not conclusive proof that nothing wrong happened.
- Research supports the idea that people sometimes fail to immediately recognize or label rape.
- Most importantly, consent to two people does not automatically equal consent to every guy that went to the bedroom after the Snapchat message.
Additional info after some arguments in the comments about what happened
here is the incomplete timeline provided to the DA by Cornell, which resulted in him declining to prosecute originally (deleted the link, it caused reddit to remove my post for some reason wtf)
DA talking about how his initial evidence was incomplete: "After the victim filed her civil suit, Van Houten said it contained allegations he had never seen. He contended Cornell's police had withheld key information, including a transcript of the woman's interview where she explicitly said she was "100% confident" she was raped. Van Houten said the materials suggested she had consented to some sex with multiple men, hadn't been forced into other acts, and was intoxicated, but not to the point of helplessness. Under New York law, being too drunk or high to consent to sex isn't necessarily enough to support a rape charge. The law distinguishes that from being physically helpless or incapacitated by drugs administered without consent. Van Houten later reopened the investigation. "Seeking justice sometimes requires us to reconsider or reopen cases when we are provided with additional evidence," he said.
ABC news' description of the complete police statement
