What Do College Students Really Think About Jane Doe and the Cornell 7? | GW Students React

What happened in 2024 at Cornell University between an unnamed Jane Doe and seven Chi Phi fraternity brothers, now dubbed the Cornell 7, is morally wrong and disgusting every way you look at it. But is choosing to drink, consenting to sex, and regretting it afterwards enough to win in a court of law?

The internet’s jury sure seems to think so. Social media influencers have rushed to condemn the Cornell 7, doxx them on social media, and effectively ruin their lives.

I had to see for myself if college students would wholeheartedly defend Cornell’s Jane Doe. So, naturally, we went to fraternity row at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

And there’s a lot to take away from the conversations I had with students.

One, students told me this was an open-and-shut case as if they had read Jane Doe’s entire testimony. Their knowledge surrounding the Chi Phi fraternity brothers, the recently filed civil case by Jane Doe, the rape allegations, etc. was almost like they had been at Cornell themselves.

 ”Basically, Jane Doe went to this fraternity, for, like, a party that night, and one of her friends, they, like, started to engage in, like, what in the beginning seemed to be, like a romantic interaction, and then it kind of turned into lots of drugs being involved, and then a bunch of friends kind of coming in. Yeah. And it turning into, like, a gang rape essentially,” one student told me.

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But then I asked them about Jane Doe’s conflicting testimony. Why did she originally reassure one fraternity brother that none “of the sexual stuff was illegal” and that she “really liked” the initial threesome? Or, why was Jane Doe frustrated when she was disinvited from Chi Phi’s Halloween party three weeks later?

I asked one student the obvious question–why would Jane Doe want to return to the house she was raped in?

 ”Right now she’s claiming that that was because that was her trauma response,” the student told me. “So then as a community of women, we need to believe her and, like, her story. And obviously, like, you’re guilty until proven innocent.”

Guilty until proven innocent. That sounds about right.

As we headed back to the Metro subway after a couple hours of interviews, a question kept popping up in the back of my head–why were no students concerned about the moral questions in this case? What led to this debauchery at one of America’s prestigious Ivy League universities?

Well, thanks to the sexual revolution and feminist “icons” like Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan, women are told sexual promiscuity is the only way to truly be free. Viewing sexual relationships within the traditional, Western confines of marriage is, according to them, oppressive and harmful.

What feminists don’t tell women about are the other consequences of sexual freedom—regret, shame, and the creation of new life that is often viewed as a nuisance.

Are women happier after the sexual revolution? In the case of Jane Doe, it seems not.

Unfortunately, she seems to have experienced the shame and regret that feminism didn’t warn her about.

We really shouldn’t be surprised this is the culture that the sexual revolution created. In the case of the Cornell 7 and Jane Doe, we should hope for justice, however that plays out.

But we should also hope our culture looks realistically at the pros and cons of feminism and reconsiders the freedom it claims to offer.