Rape, Sexual Assault, and Drug Use in Greek Life (the "Cornell 7" specifically, but also generally)

What, if anything, did they do when they eventually saw the message? This ventures into moral, not legal, territory - but it’s a legitimate question.

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Many adults, let alone kids, don’t want to be that ‘uncool’ one to tattle or do things against others wishes.

Doesn’t give them an out but there is a ton of peer pressure and especially in a social scene like that, I’m sure it has impact on decision making.

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“Why does every woman know another woman who was raped, but no man knows a rapist?” is a quote all over social media right now. Fitting for this conversation.

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My H, who was president of his fraternity, said that he can’t imagine anything like that happening at his fraternity house - and if it did, those participating would be out immediately. He also said that he would leave the fraternity if his brothers were okay with what happened. Did any of the brothers say goodbye to the group after this? I’m really curious.

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If someone were an assaulter, they’re not going to advertise it. Nor would they advertise if they were a robber, a hit and run person, or drug offender.

I’m guessing every woman doesn’t know a rapist.

And the assumption is Jane Doe was raped, and we don’t know that either.

But all the conversation here, outside, and in my opinion, based on the state’s action - allude to the same - that she was raped, because no one would ever lie about that (Tawanna Brawley, Duke Lacrosse), etc.

There’s a lot of assumption on this thread - from people who also like to accuse others as done deaf - or worse.

All we know is this person has “civilly” sued others. I don’t know if her hope was for a criminal case too or not.

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Assaulter’s advertise it ALL THE TIME. Literally all the time.

Witness the politicians, media or corporate figure, or whatever who got caught up in MeToo. Much of the “defense” centered on “I know she wanted it as much as I did”, OR explained away the “hearsay” evidence when someone testified that they’d bragged about the assault - sometimes multiple times as “saying I forced her is just a figure of speech”.

Telling your bros, cronies, drinking buddies, etc. about your exploits is a figure of speech when you are standing in a court of law. Apparently.

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I didn’t say every woman knows a rapist. As a woman, I know many woman who have been sexually assaulted.

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And let’s be frank about it, a lot of what is actually assault but doesn’t reach the point of rape never gets reported because women know it wouldn’t be taken seriously. There was a discussion earlier about the presidents “grab em by…” remarks which I think were described as something like, just words and disturbing but not illegal by a poster. But that lands very differently when it has happened to you. How many women are going to bother to go to the police because they were groped without consent? That’s going nowhere when even cases of physical harm get dismissed.

A gay friend of mine said to me the other day: just put these straight men in a gay bar, and they will start understanding consent very quickly.

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“About 85 to 90 percent of sexual assaults reported by college women are perpetrated by someone known to the victim; about half occur on a date”.- Archived | Most Victims Know Their Attacker | National Institute of Justice
(And yes this is an older article and I’ve seen similar stats for today but not from as unbiased of a source that I can easily track down).

I know who raped my friend. And so did his friends, whether they wanted to admit it or not.

A study found that less than 10% of rape charges are fabricated: https://www.nsvrc.org/resource/false-allegations-sexual-assault-analysis-ten-years-reported-cases/

(Note) the actual study is paywalled but here is the abstract:

“One of the most controversial disputes affecting the discourse related to violence against women is the dispute about the frequency of false allegations of sexual assault. In an effort to add clarity to the discourse, published research on false allegations is critiqued, and the results of a new study described. All cases (N = 136) of sexual assault reported to a major Northeastern university over a 10-year period are analyzed to determine the percentage of false allegations. Of the 136 cases of sexual assault reported over the 10-year period, 8 (5.9%) are coded as false allegations. These results, taken in the context of an examination of previous research, indicate that the prevalence of false allegations is between 2% and 10%.”

And with the way women are treated when reporting rape, which as noted many times in this thread is WAY underreported, I’m going to start out by giving the victim the benefit of the doubt, rather than her aggressors, until proven otherwise.

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I know you didn’t - you stated a quote all over the internet.

I recognized that.

I’ll ask my wife - we’ve never talked about does every woman know?

I could also see but don’t know as I don’t know every woman - but that someone wouldn’t share it with another out of embarrassment or personal shame, thinking it was their own fault, no different than a man who was assaulted or bullied would share that. And yes, I realize some of that comes from people questioning them - could they have avoided it?

But that’s part of the issue right - the shame.

And that’s sad, that people have to live with that their entire lives.

The first campus rape study from 1957, summarized by researchers recently: [1]

Their results called early attention to the problem as they found that more than half (55.7%) surveyed experienced offensive attempts at sexual or erotic intimacy and 21% had an occurrence of attempted/forced sexual intercourse. They also found that 6% of the women experienced aggressive forceful attempts in which the perpetrator utilized physical pain or threats in attempts to gain compliance.

Those same researchers noted from the 1990’s that:

…sexual assault on college campuses with most studies returning prevalence rates between 10% to approximately 30%.

ABC citing a study from 2025 at Cornell: [2]

35% of undergraduate women at the Ithaca, New York, school reported experiencing nonconsensual sexual contact involving force or incapacitation since entering Cornell.

Nothing has changed in 70 years, suggesting an evolutionary psychology issue that will be impossible for anyone alive to change in the arc of time we will be on earth.

Always interesting to hear women say “men just need to stop raping.” Those instincts of a rapist were largely created by women. Women are significantly more selective with whom they procreate with, and women play an outsized role in raising and educating kids. The social characteristic of humanity was created by women, despite claims that “this is a man’s world.” But I don’t pretend that women have done this knowingly. It is very complex, and probably impossible to change on a population level.

So how do we reduce campus rape when the biology and sociology of the issue is so inertial? The ugly tendencies of some to rape must be suppressed, and doing so is easy and efforts to do such have been immensely successful.

Alcohol has been mentioned strongly and prominently in the thread, but IMO, it has actually been under emphasized.

Researchers evaluated campus policies that included policies on alcoholic and concluded that dry campuses and those without Greek life (I can’t access the study to see how truly independent these are) are the biggest factors in campus rape. [3] Alcohol-free campuses work, which is not surprising considering that some studies cite alcohol as a factor in campus rape in as many as 70% of cases. Don’t drink. Ever. Health evidence, in general, is strong that there is no level of alcohol consumption that is safe. The alcohol industry created the “responsible drinking” myth.

And it’s not only rape rates that will be dramatically lowered, half of frat boys are alcoholics by the time they’re 35. [4] Alcoholics Anonymous says, “So far as can be determined, no one who has become an alcoholic has ever ceased to be an alcoholic.” [5] Fraternities are factories for producing permanent disability.

Any efforts that don’t directly address alcohol consumption are misguided and useless. Lawyers will get rich massaging laws and university policies into an unintelligible mishmash of guidelines that simply guarantee more lawsuits and income while doing nothing to improve / solve the problem. Rearranging the furniture on the Titanic, kicking the can down the road for our kids and grandkids to deal with 70 years from now.

The ideal outcome would permanently ban Jane Doe and probably most of the frat members from campus, whether it is for sexual misconduct, or simply because they acted like animals. It’s disgusting that these kids have an opportunity most people would die for, and they —- it up with this foolishness. Kids that appreciate the opportunity deserve those spots.


  1. https://digitalcommons.murraystate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1118&context=crsw ↩︎

  2. 35% of Cornell undergraduate women reported having been sexually assaulted: Survey - ABC News ↩︎

  3. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/soin.12284 ↩︎

  4. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov ↩︎

  5. Can an alcoholic ever drink "normally" again? | Alcoholics Anonymous ↩︎

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Take it back further into adolescence. How many teenage girls were pressured or even forced to go to second or third base when they didn’t want to? How many teenage girls has had her hand grabbed by a boy and moved to his crotch? How many teenage girls have had their heads pushed down. Et cetera.

None or few of these instances is considered SA or reported as such. But as a society, we have to do more to examine where the sexual violence begins, and stop it there. As mentioned before, there is a fine line between sexual liberation and reckless behavior, just as there is a fine line between ardent passion and coercion.

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I believe one of them took a photo of the message and shared it with her, which is why there was an investigation and why we are able to talk about this today.

I don’t blame the ones who were asleep. The ones that saw this while it happened are a completely different story.

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Interesting- rugby team responded at the time once they determined (it is not mentioned how) their team members who were involved:

Two of the Chi Phi brothers named in the suit were kicked out of their rugby club after the allegations came to light, a former teammate told NBC News.

“We kicked [them] off the team immediately before the school expelled them,” said the teammate, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.

The teammate said he has participated in discussions among a group of current and former rugby players about responding publicly to Doe’s lawsuit.

“As a team, it was important for us to support this victim,” he said. “We are extremely, extremely distraught.”

Cornell Rugby said in a statement that it was “deeply disturbed” by the allegations and that its thoughts were with Doe.

“Players who were known to be connected with the alleged events were permanently removed from the team and alumni network as soon as their affiliation with the incident was established,” it said.

No current members of the team have been affiliated with Chi Phi, the statement said.

As news of the allegations spread, some discussions were supportive of Doe, but others shamed her in conversations, a former member of Doe’s sorority, Delta Delta Delta, told NBC News.

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Explain why nuns get raped. Explain why women- decades beyond their procreating years- get raped. Explain why men get raped by other men. Explain why minor children- who can neither procreate nor raise and educate kids- get raped. Explain why there are men who work in assisted living facilities, nursing homes, and advanced rehab centers- who have been caught ON TAPE raping comatose patients.

I call hogwash on your theory. And I don’t believe in the “instincts of a rapist” theory either. Rape is highly correlated with many other forms of violence and coercive behavior, having nothing to do with procreation. There are violent men who inflict their lack of impulse control and tendency towards anti-social and disgusting behavior on people who they perceive to be either weaker physically (young kids and elderly people in a coma, the disabled) or weaker with less social capital.

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Alcohol is not allowed in sorority houses. At all. If she was drinking there, it was not in an open area, not in front of the officers or the house mother. How exactly was she ‘allowed to leave’? She got to walk out the front door as if she was going to a class or movie or on a date? Yes, anyone can leave at any time. Even in the 1950s when they had curfews, anyone could leave at any time, but they may have been expelled from the sorority (or dorm, or other housing).

Is she going to sue the two bars she was in that ‘let her leave’?

So women just need to stop being picky about who they sleep with and rape will go away? Yeah, right.

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People sue. It doesn’t mean she’ll win. I wasn’t there but previous posters said she was drinking in the sorority and one poster said the house mother witnessed.

But being sued doesn’t mean anyone did something wrong.

So who she is suing and why, I don’t know and whether shell be successful, only a jury can decide.

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I was only addressing the 50-70% of campus rapes where alcohol is a factor, meaning 30-50% of the rapes I have no solution for. There are some bad dudes out there, including the scenarios that you mention. And every adult with kids is old enough to have been a victim, or know a victim. I know how hard this hits for many.

In related news, there’s this at U of A–> 6 University of Arizona fraternities suspended immediately amid misconduct probe.

to quote from the article…

"The University of Arizona has hit pause on all fraternity activities, citing a wave of misconduct investigations — including physical assault, hazing, drugs and alcohol — in nearly half of its chapters.

In an internal memo obtained by Arizona’s Family, Chrissy Lieberman, the university’s dean of students, said her office is investigating multiple reports of misconduct involving nearly half of the 21 fraternities on campus.

The violations range from physical assault, drugs and alcohol, hazing and creating unsafe environments for students, according to Lieberman.

Effective immediately, all fraternity chapters have been placed on interim activities suspension until all chapter advisors have met with the Dean.

Six fraternities, including Zeta Beta Tau, Sigma Phi Epsilon, Phi Delta Theta, Sigma Chi, Theta Xi and Phi Gamma Delta, are suspended immediately.

An activities suspension prohibits the fraternities from hosting, attending, sponsoring and participating in any organizational activities. Only business meetings are allowed during the suspension.

Once a chapter advisor has attended one of the three mandatory meetings, chapters that were in good standing will resume as normal.

Meetings are scheduled for the following dates:

  • Tuesday, Oct. 6 at 6 p.m. at Bear Down Gym, room 104
  • Wednesday. Oct. 7 at 8 a.m. at Bear Down Gym, room 104
  • Monday, Oct. 12 at 12 p.m. at Nugent 100

Chapters with upcoming events must ensure that their advisor attends a mandatory meeting. The chapter must return to good standing before any event can be hosted.

Advisor meetings will continue quarterly, and advisors must attend each meeting. If an advisor doesn’t attend, the chapter will be removed from good standing, putting it in jeopardy of continuing.

President met with fraternities

University President Suresh Garimella met with all fraternity presidents on Aug. 27, where he said that the university would not “tolerate further violations that put our students in harm’s way.”

University leadership told fraternity leadership to “step up and be accountable for the men in their chapters” and stop behaviors that violated the school’s code of conduct.

“It was made clear that if the chapters did not meet this expectation, the university would be forced to act,” Lieberman wrote in the memo, dated Monday.

Lieberman said that reports are continuing to pour in about concerns within the fraternities, including from parents, students and the community.

The Dean of Students Office is at capacity for the number of cases its staff can investigate at once, and every case involved a fraternity chapter, according to Lieberman.

“As you know, the value of the Greek experience is under scrutiny nationwide. It is time for the University of Arizona Greek community to step up and set an example for good. It is time to have difficult conversations with each other and the members of the community,” a portion of the memo stated.

The Dean of Students Office will investigate the allegations alongside the University of Arizona Police Department.

Several chapters were deemed responsible for code of conduct violations this spring and remain on disciplinary status, according to the Dean of Students Office. Some chapters are on active suspension, while others are banned from working with its new member classes.

Some severe cases are under criminal investigation, according to officials.

Last month, Sigma Tau Gamma was placed on activities suspension after being accused of forcing members to drink large amounts of alcohol and swallowing live goldfish.

Arizona’s Family sister station, KOLD News 13, previously reported in April that six fraternities were under investigation by the school. Three of them, Sigma Alpha Mu, Sigma Chi, and Phi Delta Theta, faced serious allegations.

The allegations against Sigma Alpha Mu include burns from hot liquids, forced alcohol consumption, alcohol poisoning, blackouts and hospitalizations. Sigma Chi allegedly hosted a party that was alcohol-free, but alcohol was consumed, drugs were knowingly and unknowingly given to members, and multiple people were hospitalized.

Phi Delta Theta was placed on suspension for hazing, where members were allegedly subjected to forced alcohol consumption, degradation, humiliation, and other threatening and endangering behaviors.

Another fraternity, Sigma Phi Epsilon, was placed on probation until May 31, 2027, and must pay a fine of nearly $4,000. The accusations against the fraternity included sleep deprivation, forced alcohol consumption, kidnapping, and forced calisthenics. Members were also accused of illegal drug use.

The last time the university cut ties with a fraternity was in 2024, when Pi Kappa Phi was found guilty of hazing and violating the school’s code of conduct."

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