Statement from the S3C Foundation on the Cornell Case
Content note: This statement discusses sexual violence, coercion, and institutional betrayal. Please take care of yourselves and your systems as you read. Feel free to pause or come back to it later, or to skip it all together if it feels like too much right now.
Today we are holding the survivor at the center of the Cornell case, and every survivor who is reading this news and feeling it land in their body.
This week the Tompkins County District Attorney reopened an investigation into allegations that a Cornell student was gang raped at a fraternity house in October 2024. The reopening came after she filed a civil lawsuit this month describing being pressured into using drugs and alcohol before the assault (“Prosecutor Reopens Probe,” 2026). No criminal charges were ever filed. The district attorney has said his original decision rested on New York law, which generally treats an intoxicated person as mentally incapacitated only when the intoxication happened without their consent (Lauer & Lieb, 2026).
Our work has taught us something simple: a person who cannot say no cannot say yes.
That’s it.
That’s all there is to consent.
We must be able to freely and safely say no for us to be able to say yes.
How any survivor arrived in their situation does not change what was done to her.
New York is one of 19 states whose laws draw this line (Lauer & Lieb, 2026). Survivors pay for that line with silence, with cases that are never brought, and with the message that their own bodies count as evidence against them. This is unacceptable, and an example of institutional betrayal.
Pressure is a tactic. When someone is pushed, urged, or worn down into a state where they can no longer protect themselves, that pressure is part of the harm. Many survivors in our community know this pattern intimately through coercive control, where domination is built slowly through isolation, surveillance, and the steady erosion of a person’s freedom to choose (Stark, 2007). Many also know the cycle of violence, where rising tension, harm, apology, and calm repeat until a person learns to doubt their own perceptions and to blame themselves for what was done to them (Walker, 1979). Survivors shaped by these patterns often struggle to name coercion as the abuse that it is, especially when they were told, or came to believe, that they chose it or were gaslit into believing they were responsibile for it.
Research on coercive control continues to show that control itself, even apart from physical violence, predicts later harm, including sexual assault, and that its deepest injury is to a person’s liberty and autonomy (Stark & Hester, 2019). Coercion does not require a fist. It can look like pressure presented as fun, a room that makes leaving feel impossible, a group that closes ranks, and a culture that teaches everyone present to treat compliance as consent.
When a group shares a sense of entitlement, coercion can be spread across many people so that no single person feels responsible for what all of them did.
But all of them are complicit.
As a community that lives and works with dissociation, we also know something about how survivors tell what happened. Trauma affects the brain’s capacity for language. In neuroimaging research, people with posttraumatic stress who were exposed to reminders of their trauma showed decreased activity in Broca’s area, a region involved in producing speech (Rauch et al., 1996). Survivors often describe this as having no words, or having words that feel far away, flat, or wrong. Overwhelm also fragments memory. Many survivors describe their experience from a distance, notice what other people were doing more clearly than what was happening inside their own bodies, and minimize their own state because minimizing is how they got through the violence.
Dissociating from how traumatic something was is one of the most common ways people survive it. A survivor may speak about an assault calmly, clinically, or even casually, and may not yet know, in a felt and embodied way, how much harm was done. That knowing often arrives slowly. For many survivors it takes safe relationships and therapy over time to come full circle, to gather the fragments into a story that belongs to them, and to describe their own experience in their own words (Herman, 1992).
An early statement given in shock, in fragments, or from a dissociated distance is a trauma response.
It should never be treated as proof that nothing happened, and it should never be the reason a case closes before a survivor has been interviewed by someone trained to hear trauma.
What happened to this survivor did not happen only in one house on one night. Research on campus sexual assault shows how physical spaces, social hierarchies, and alcohol cultures concentrate power in the hands of some students and leave others exposed (Hirsch & Khan, 2020). When an institution a survivor depends on fails to protect her, minimizes her report, or protects its own reputation first, that betrayal is its own harm. Psychologists call this institutional betrayal, and it deepens the effects of the original trauma (Smith & Freyd, 2014). The lawsuit in this case accuses both the university and law enforcement of failing to do enough (“Why Has a Cornell Rape Investigation Been Reopened,” 2026).
Survivors also tell us that what they want from justice is often larger than a verdict. They want acknowledgment, vindication, and a community willing to stand with them and repair what was broken (Herman, 2023). That is the only vindication for the relational harm of intuitional betrayal added to the original assault.
Institutional betrayal deserves more than a passing mention because it sits at the heart of this case. In research with college women, those who experienced institutional betrayal around unwanted sexual experiences reported higher levels of trauma symptoms, including dissociation, than women whose institutions did not betray them (Smith & Freyd, 2013). For survivors, this second injury can cut as deeply as the first, because it teaches them that the places meant to protect them will protect themselves instead. The antidote Jennifer Freyd and her colleagues describe is institutional courage: accountability, transparency, actively seeking the truth, and making repair. Research in workplace settings suggests that institutional courage can buffer the harm of betrayal (Smidt et al., 2023).
We ask Cornell, the Tompkins County District Attorney’s Office, and every institution watching this case to choose courage over reputation.
We also have to name privilege. Elite universities and their fraternity systems were built by and for wealthy white men, and those histories still shape who is presumed credible, whose futures are treated as worth protecting, and whose harm is treated as a regrettable misunderstanding. Race, gender, and class compound one another, and women of color in particular have long faced deeper disbelief and fewer protections when they report violence (Crenshaw, 1991). Survivors who are poor, queer, trans, disabled, or plural know versions of this disbelief too. Cis male privilege, and white cis male privilege especially, shows up in these cases as an expectation of access to other people’s bodies and an expectation that consequences will be negotiable.
Our work is decolonial, and in cases like this one we recognize the logic of conquest. Indigenous scholars have long documented how sexual violence has served as an instrument of colonization, a way of taking bodies as land was taken, and how legal systems built by colonizers have repeatedly failed the women they harmed (Deer, 2015). That logic persists wherever some people are treated as entitled to occupy, use, and discard others, and wherever institutions arrange themselves to protect the people doing the taking.
Naming this as a form of modern colonization honors the Native women who have survived it for centuries, and it asks all of us to see sexual violence as political as well as personal.
Language also shapes who gets held responsible. Last week Dr. Emma Sunshaw co-presented with Jackson Katz in Ashley Judd’s reading group seminar at the Harvard Kennedy School Women and Public Policy Program, where we returned to a point Katz has made for years, building on the work of linguist Julia Penelope, whom we want to acknowledge and credit for this wisdom. When we say “men raped a woman,” the men are the subject of the sentence. When we say “a woman was raped,” the men disappear. When we say “she is a rape victim,” her identity becomes defined by what was done to her, and the people who did it are gone from the sentence entirely (Katz, 2006; Penelope, 1990). Passive language moves attention, scrutiny, and blame onto the person harmed. The questions become what she drank, why she went, why she waited, and why she remembers it the way she does. The questions that belong with the people who chose to cause harm quietly stop being asked. Katz (2006) also argues that violence against women is a men’s issue, and that the silence of men who do not commit violence helps sustain the cultures that allow it.
We ask journalists and editors covering this case, and every case like it, to put the language of abuse back on the people accused of abuse:
Write in the active voice.
Name what is alleged as rape and sexual assault, and set aside softening words like sex, encounter, hookup, or scandal when what is described is an assault.
Keep the focus on the conduct of the accused and on the institutions that responded, and resist making a survivor’s drinking, drug use, social life, or delayed reporting the center of the story.
Protect both her anonymity and her humanity.
Remember that survivors and their systems are reading, and that every headline teaches the public who is responsible.
To the survivor at the center of this case: you deserved to be heard with care from the very beginning.
We support the independent review of Cornell’s response that Governor Hochul has called for (”Cornell Fraternity Rape Case,” 2026). We urge New York lawmakers to close the voluntary intoxication loophole in the coming session, and we urge every state with a similar law to do the same. We ask universities, campus police, and prosecutors to make trauma-informed and dissociation-informed interviewing the standard for every report, and to allow survivors the time that language and memory need.
To survivors, systems, and any insider parts who are reading along: you do not have to follow every headline. News like this can stir old material quickly and all at once. It is okay to step away, to orient to the room you are in, and to reach for the people who help you feel real. If you need support right now, the RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline is available at 800-656-4673 and online at rainn.org. We also hold the partners, friends, roommates, and family members who love survivors and are carrying this news alongside them. You are secondary survivors, your hearts are affected too, and your care and support matter.
Emma Sunshaw, PhD
Host, System Speak Podcast
S3C Foundation Board of Directors