What does it say about men when no man came forward?

There is one part of the Cornell gang-rape and sexual assault case that I have found particularly difficult to shake off. It is not the most graphic allegation in the lawsuit, nor the details of what allegedly happened inside the Chi Phi fraternity house. It is that Jane Doe went there to meet a friend. Someone she trusted.

According to the civil complaint, Doe, then 20, went to the fraternity house in October 2024 to see a friend. The lawsuit alleges that she was later sexually assaulted by seven Chi Phi members and that messages were being exchanged in a fraternity Snapchat group during the night, including an invitation for others to join upstairs. One message allegedly asked, "Shop still open?" and another replied, "Yeah."

The allegations are now the subject of a civil lawsuit, and investigators have reopened the criminal investigation against seven men, named Matthew Ingalls, Johnathan Newell, Winston Lee, Gillio Lopes, Diego Sarabia, Scott Norris, and Scott Kretzschmar. 

Two of the alleged perpetrators were subsequently expelled after an internal investigation by Cornell – while the other five were allowed to resume their studies at the Ivy League institution after writing an essay, attending a workshop, or serving a short suspension.

None were ever arrested or charged, and outrage over the treatment of 

the alleged offenders grew when the woman's lawsuit was made public.

But there is another question among all these that I cannot stop thinking about: if the allegations are to be proven in court, what does it say about the men around the situation? All 57 of them who were in that group chat?

The lawsuit describes a group chat in which people were allegedly communicating about what was happening. Even if we leave aside what each individual knew or did not know, it is difficult not to wonder whether anyone saw enough to understand that something was seriously wrong and decided that it was not their responsibility to intervene.

Social psychology has a name for part of this: the bystander effect. When responsibility is dispersed among a group, individuals can become less likely to intervene because each person assumes someone else will do it. Research on sexual-assault bystander behaviour among university men has also found that peer norms can influence whether men intervene at all.

But I do not think the bystander effect is enough to explain what makes the Cornell allegations so disturbing. These were not strangers standing at a distance. They were fraternity brothers. 

Research on fraternity culture has examined how masculinity, sexual entitlement, secrecy, and ideas of brotherhood can interact with sexual violence. 

One study based on interviews with fraternity members found that the language of brotherhood could make sexual violence less visible and help protect perpetrators from accountability. Other research has found links between traditional masculine norms, peer culture, and men's willingness to intervene in situations involving sexual aggression.

So perhaps the question is not simply why one man failed to intervene. It is what kind of masculinity makes intervention feel like betrayal while silence feels like loyalty.

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There is a difference between being loyal to a friend and protecting a friend from accountability. If you know someone well enough to call him your brother, you should also know him well enough to tell him when he is crossing a line. 

I think this is also why the Cornell case has affected me in a way I did not expect.

When you are a little girl, and someone assaults you (happens more often than one would think), you may not even understand what has happened. You grow up with that one memory lodged somewhere inside you, a memory that can still frighten you years later. You tell yourself whatever you can to make it bearable: "you did not know him"; "you were a child, how could you have known?"; "something like this could have happened to anyone".

Then there are the other incidents you learn to compartmentalise. The man who touches your breasts in a crowd and disappears. The man on the bus because of whom you stop taking public transport. You tell yourself that "not everyone on the street is a good person", that "there are bad people in the world", that "these things happen".

You find ways to place those people outside your understanding of yourself and your life. But there is no such easy explanation when the person who harms you is a friend.

I know this because I have been assaulted by a friend myself. That friend was someone I trusted, someone with whom I had shared parts of my childhood and things I would not have told just anyone. He knew my secrets. He knew my weaknesses. He was someone I had already placed inside my idea of safety.

That is the part of Jane Doe's account that stayed with me. She did not walk into a strange place expecting to be assaulted by strangers. She went to a fraternity house to see her friend.

There is a particular kind of confusion that comes with being harmed by someone you already consider safe. You do not simply have to process what the person did to you. You have to rethink your understanding of the person you thought you knew. The betrayal becomes inseparable from the harm itself.

That is why I have little patience for the way sexual violence is so often discussed as though it is primarily a problem of women failing to protect themselves. 

Be careful. Do not drink too much. Do not go there. Do not trust people too easily.

But Jane Doe's decision to trust a friend is not what caused the alleged assault. If her allegations are proved, the responsibility belongs to the people who harmed her. And men have a responsibility here that goes beyond simply not becoming perpetrators themselves.

We have spent years telling women how to avoid sexual violence while treating men's behaviour as though it only becomes a concern once a crime has already happened. There is far less attention paid to the moment before that: the joke that should have been challenged, the conversation that should have been stopped, the friend whose behaviour has become disturbing, the situation in which somebody should have been vocal. 

Research into bystander intervention makes clear that men can influence one another in both directions. Peer groups can discourage intervention, but they can also create communities in which challenging sexual violence becomes an expectation rather than an act of disloyalty.

That is what makes the idea of fraternity brotherhood worth examining. Brotherhood is supposed to mean that you look after one another. But if loyalty to the group becomes more important than the safety of someone being harmed, then the word starts to mean something very different.

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And this is where the phrase "the best and brightest" begins to bother me.

Cornell is one of the most prestigious universities in the United States. Its students have spent years being told that they are exceptionally capable and that they are on their way to becoming lawyers, doctors, academics, business leaders, and policymakers. They have achieved something difficult simply by getting there.

Not to mention, Jane Doe also achieved the exact same thing, but was treated differently by the institution that was supposed to ensure her safety, her peers, and society itself than those men (as it always does). 

But academic achievement tells us very little about what a person does when nobody is grading them.

A person can be academically brilliant and still have a profoundly inadequate understanding of another person's humanity. A university can produce extraordinarily successful graduates without necessarily teaching them how to recognise entitlement, coercion or abuse within their own social circles.

Perhaps we have been too willing to confuse achievement with character. That is also why Cornell's response matters.

According to Doe's lawyer, she wanted to take time away from the university after the alleged assault but was refused a tuition refund. Her lawyer has said that she consequently remained on campus while her rapists were also there.

Thomas Giuffra, Doe's attorney, detailed the financial and emotional toll on Doe following the incident, claiming Cornell University refused to refund her tuition when she sought to leave campus.

"She felt like she wasn't heard and there was no accountability," Giuffra told CNN. "She wanted to leave the university and go home and heal. And her parents, who had paid thousands and thousands of dollars for her to attend Cornell, tried to get their money back."

The refusal forced Doe to remain enrolled for an additional term, according to Giuffra.

"Cornell said, 'No, you have to stay in school,'" Giuffra said. "So she spent an entire semester on the campus where she saw these guys on a fairly regular basis."

He added that the ordeal derailed her future.

"Her life has been destroyed," Giuffra said. "She's a woman who comes from a small town; she was not somebody who was a legacy, or somebody from a wealthy family. This was her dream, and it was taken away from her at a young age in just a horrific fashion."

Cornell disputes aspects of the account of its disciplinary process. The university says it conducted a Title IX investigation, held hearings, and imposed sanctions that included expulsions and suspensions. It has specifically rejected the claim that essay-writing was the sole consequence imposed on the students.

But if a student says she cannot continue studying at a university after reporting sexual violence, why should leaving become another financial burden for her?

Universities have obligations to follow due process and protect the rights of accused students. They also have an obligation to ensure students' safety and security and that students who report sexual violence are not effectively punished for reporting it. Those two responsibilities should not have to cancel each other out.

Doe has since left Cornell. One of the men named in the lawsuit, Diego Sarabia, graduated in 2025 and later worked at Wells Fargo; current reporting says the bank terminated his employment after the case was reopened.

Meanwhile, former South Park writer Toby Morton has launched TheCornell7.org, saying that he intends to create a public record of the case and investigate the people and institutions involved. The website says it is collecting documents, verifying identities and photographs, and plans to keep the case in public view, and rightfully so. When the entire system is incompetent, someone has to do the work.

The intensity of the public reaction tells us something about institutional trust. People are not simply angry about what allegedly happened in one fraternity house. They are angry about what they believe happened afterwards: the reporting process, the university's response, the absence of criminal charges at the time, and the possibility that the lives of the accused men could continue with relatively little disruption while the woman at the centre of the case was left carrying the consequences.

That reminds me, in a different context, of Emma Sulkowicz at Columbia University.

Sulkowicz became known around the world in 2015 for carrying a mattress around campus as part of her performance, "Carry That Weight", after she said she had been raped by another student. 

Columbia's disciplinary process ultimately found the accused student, Paul Nungesser, not responsible, and he denied the allegation. The case remains controversial, but what stayed with me was the image of a student physically carrying something that had become impossible for the institution's procedures to make disappear.

The Cornell case is not the same, and I do not think the two should be treated as equivalent. But both raise a question about what happens to the person who says she has been harmed after the formal machinery of a university begins moving. 

And that is why I keep returning to the men.

What should a man do when his friend is crossing a line? What should he do when speaking up could cost him the approval of the people around him? At what point does loyalty to a friend become complicity in his behaviour?

These are not questions that belong only to Cornell, or to fraternities. They belong to every group of men in which friendship, status and belonging can become more important than doing the right thing.

We use words like honour, responsibility and good character very easily. But character is not particularly difficult to display when there is nothing at stake. The harder test comes when the person doing something wrong is someone you know and care about, someone whose approval matters to you, someone you have every social incentive to protect.

That is when saying something costs you something.

Maybe that is what bothers me most about the phrase "the best and brightest". We use it to describe grades, admissions, scholarships, and careers, as though academic excellence tells us something complete about a person. It doesn't.

Academic ability is one kind of achievement. It tells us very little about what someone will do when nobody is grading them, when the person in front of them is vulnerable, and when the person who needs to be challenged is their friend.

If we want to teach young men how to build impressive lives, perhaps we also need to teach them something less impressive-sounding and much more important: how to recognise harm, how to challenge the people they love, and how to understand that protecting a friend does not mean protecting him from accountability.

Because sometimes the most important thing a man can do for another man is to tell him that he is wrong. And sometimes the most important thing he can do for the person being harmed is simply to refuse to look away.