‘Cornell 7’ drama proves the campus-rape panic is a farce — and college women know it

“Believe survivors,” the campus activists and leftist politicians admonish us. 

But which “survivor” statements are we supposed to believe?

In the weeks following her alleged gang rape at a Cornell University frat house in 2024, “Jane Doe” was unequivocal: She had not been raped. 

A day after the incident, she texted one of her sex partners, saying “non (sic) of the sexual stuff was illegal and honestly I really liked being with u” — and she suggested another get-together. 

The next day she texted him again, including an affectionate note: “I luv you king.”

She angled herself an invitation to the annual Halloween party at the frat where she was allegedly raped. 

Up to that point, Doe’s statements and her behavior had been consistent: She considered herself a voluntary participant in group sex, after she’d deliberately downed 10 shots of alcohol.

After the alleged assault she solicited further contact with her rapists, considered them her friends and sought to revisit the crime scene for more partying. 

For an actual rape victim, such behavior is inconceivable.  

But the rumor mill was circulating: Jane Doe’s sorority mentor told her that people were shaming her as a “slut.”

The frat’s president disinvited her from the party “for her own good.” 

Doe was furious. 

That’s when she played the assault card, nearly a month after the incident. 

Yet the campus rape industry cannot tolerate Doe’s earlier honest self-evaluation.

If females take full responsibility for their own behavior, the lucrative, bureaucracy-bloated grift will come crashing down. 

So the college assault complex has a surefire method for erasing such moments of clarity: Don’t believe those “survivor” statements. 

Females are only credible as purported victims. 

As NPR put it last week, a victim’s initial statements “often cannot be taken at face value” because they are the product of her “trauma.”

That means the only statements from a “survivor” that can be believed are statements claiming that she has been raped.  

College rape allegations, in other words, are unfalsifiable: Heads the campus rape complex wins, tails the truth loses. 

In fact, the seminal surveys of campus rape that jump-started the assault complex depended on this double standard.

Go back to the 1987 study that produced the fantastical statistic that up to one in four co-eds will be sexually assaulted in college.

Here’s the latest on the ‘Cornell 7’ frat probe:

• ‘Cornell 7’ frat bro claimed accuser ‘sodomized’ him and that school didn’t care he was sex-assault ‘survivor:’ report
• String of sex assaults in first week of school puts elite West Coast college on high alert: ‘Disgusting behavior’
• Bar accused of selling booze to Jane Doe in ‘Cornell 7’ alleged-gang-rape case fires back at lawsuit
• ‘Cornell 7’ frat brother apologizes to Jane Doe about ‘backlash’ in newly obtained phone call

To generate that finding, academic rape researchers did not ask “survivors” outright if they had been raped — because doing so yielded disappointing results. 

Rather, the researchers decided whether or not an alleged victim had been raped, based on her description of her (overwhelmingly consensual) sexual encounters.

When asked directly, 73% of the survey respondents whom the academics classified as victims said they had not been raped at all. 

The academics chose not to believe them. 

Even more damningly for the reliability of this research, 42% of the college women whom the researchers classified as sexual-assault victims went back for more sex with their putative assailants. 

Again, inconceivable behavior after being subjected to the second worst crime, after murder, a female can experience.

Subsequent feminist rape studies have repeated this same discrepancy between the researchers’ results and the subjects’ own views. 

If college campuses were the hotbeds of sadistic sexual crime that Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, the mainstream media and the progressive left allege, one would expect female students to be taking some precautions. 

At the very least, they would avoid the frat-house parties that we are told are filled with sexual predators. 

They might demand more single-sex schools, where they could study in safety.

But no: Female enrollment at elite co-ed colleges continues to rise — going from under 50% at Cornell in 2005, for example, to nearly 54% in 2025.  

And astonishingly, college women continue trooping voluntarily every weekend to the Greek houses where predation allegedly awaits. 

If females are too cognitively challenged to take such simple protective measures in the face of clear danger, they do not belong in college. 

Alternatively, the campus rape crisis does not exist — and women, at some level, know it. 

The only good news to come out of this sordid affair is that the stigma against promiscuity still exists among college students. 

Jane Doe’s peers viewed her as a “slut,” a word that one would have thought had disappeared from campuses decades ago. 

Cornell president Michael Kotlikoff promised on Saturday that the university will roll out yet more redundant sexual-assault programs, undoubtedly accompanied by more bureaucracy. 

They will accomplish nothing. 

The only thing that will halt the campus bacchanal is the restoration of sexual restraint, female modesty and male chivalry — everything the hypocritical feminist movement has battled to erase.  

Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the author of “When Race Trumps Merit.”