Cornell University has no business adjudicating controversial rape allegations

Title IX kangaroo courts are no substitute for a court of law or due process protections inherent in the justice system

If you’ve been paying attention to the news or social media of late, you’ve no doubt been exposed to the MSM’s outrage du jour, the supposed exemplar of “rape culture” and “male privilege” that allegedly permeates college campuses (despite the fact that there’s literally zero evidence to make such bold sociological pronouncements, and, in fact, doing so is harmful to survivors of sexual assault and men alike, since it is a scant 3% of men responsible for 90% of campus rapes). This week’s offender: Cornell University.

To hear it framed in a manner sympathetic to the plaintiff (and political advocacy), here’s what happened:

After declining an offer of a threesome with two fraternity brothers, the student says Ingalls [named defendant] pressured her to snort ketamine while ingesting marijuana and high-proof rum, according to the lawsuit.

The student says Ingalls and Newell then engaged in sexual acts “without her consent,” including oral and vaginal intercourse. According to court documents, the student says Lopes then replaced one frat brother who left the scene and alleges that Newell encouraged others to join via a Snapchat message.

The attack, during which Chi Phi frat brothers are also accused of pouring lines of ketamine onto the woman’s body, continued until she lost consciousness.

And the allegations and trial-by-media have been equally salacious: Texts telling fellow frat brothers that “free pussy” is here and the “house is open,” as well as descriptions of snorting ketamine and blow off her naked body.

Certainly sounds like we have some degenerate criminals, right? One the criminal justice system ignored, and which the civil courts had to bring to heel.

Except we don’t.

What contemporaneous evidence do we actually have? Turns out, nothing that helps the plaintiff’s case whatsoever:

Doe’s initial statement to the police did not accuse the young men of rape or sexual assault.

That’s according to District Attorney Matthew Van Houten, who released a statement elucidating why he had declined to press charges at the time. His statement quotes a document he reviewed: Doe’s sworn statement to Cornell police regarding the events of October 19, 2024. According to Van Houten’s characterization of that document, which he directly quotes repeatedly, Doe unambiguously described what happened to her as entirely consensual, and thus there was no crime to prosecute.

“Jane Doe’s sworn statement in November 2024 did not allege that she was drugged against her will or gang raped,” wrote Van Houten. “On the contrary, Jane Doe’s statement described her participation in drug use and sexual contact as voluntary, conscious and consensual.”

Van Houten quotes Doe at great length: In her own recollection to police days after the encounter, she described a series of sexual encounters with a number of fraternity brothers—including two different threesomes—heavy alcohol use, and the consumption of the drug ketamine. But importantly, by her own initial account, neither the sex nor the alcohol nor the drugs were ever forced on her: Doe herself maintained that she participated willfully. When she said stop, the sexual activity stopped. When they asked to resume it, she allowed it to resume. When she tired out, it ended.

Beware the rush to judgment in the Cornell rape case

As with similar cases at the University of Virginia and Duke Lacrosse, it's important to get the facts first.

Reason Magazine

Even The View’s Sunny Hostin, a notably outspoken liberal feminist voice on the show, has said, based on these facts, under New York law, there was no rape — mutual intoxication alone is not lack of consent unless she was forced to imbibe the liquor or ingest drugs. Peer pressure, which is alleged in the suit, is not enough either for a criminal prosecution. But what would she know? She’s just a lawyer who practiced for years in New York.

Likewise, it apparently doesn’t matter that a grand jury already looked at the evidence here and did not return an indictment. There is an old saw that you can indict a ham sandwich: It is a one-sided process that almost by design gets cases to a jury so that the facts can be decided. Not even the ham sandwich bar was met here, but that doesn’t stop the character assassination underway — even from the halls of Congress. On multiple occasions.

And now, on the basis of bare allegations in a civil lawsuit, almost all of which contradict her testimony to police and prosecutors, the State of New York and Cornell are reopening a case that has been dead for two years. (And, no, I won’t get into the cynicism of this coming about because she is looking for money in a civil suit, with its much lower evidentiary standards).

That takes us to Cornell and what its place ought to be in investigating and punishing serious criminal behavior on campus.

In short, they should have no role in adjudicating guilt or passing down sanctions until and unless that guilt has been established in a criminal court of law by a competent trier of fact, be they judge or a jury. Yet, back in 2024, in the absence of such a verdict, two of the named defendants were expelled by Cornell, and other students were suspended. And even now, Cornell both opens their own parallel investigation, and cheerleads the reopening of a criminal case.

And that is a farce.

I have written about this extensively, most notably in a piece that arose because of similar gang rape allegations at the University of Minnesota. You will need to check that out for an exhaustive understanding of the process, the problems inherent in campus prosecutions, and why they are unconstitutional. But, I will briefly outline those concerns below, and sketch a thumbnail of the piece:

It begins with Administrative agencies signing away constitutional protections with the stroke of pen:

The Office of Civil Rights is the federal agency charged with enforcing federal anti-discrimination statutes. The relevant statute here is Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which expressly forbids discrimination on the basis of sex. This law gives us the funding of women’s athletics. But, it also gives the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) the jurisdiction to oversee compliance with federal laws (Title IX, also Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964) by every college or university nationwide that accepts federal funding.

If your school accepts money from the federal government (which includes most private schools, too) then OCR gets to enforce these laws. When we talk about federal funding, we are also talking about research grants, and federally-backed student loans. Thus if a school fails to comply with OCR directives, bye bye federal funding, which has much the same effect of bye bye school.

In 2011, the OCR issued a “Dear Colleague” letter about sexual assault on campus. In that letter, the Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights set forth new requirements that ALL schools accepting federal money had to meet in order for the schools’ investigation of sexual assaults to be compliant with what the OCR deemed appropriate. As a part of this letter, OCR recommended (read “required”) that the burden of proof go from “clear and convincing evidence” to a “preponderance” standard. That is the most significant change as a practical matter; as legal matter, the letter raises far more serious concerns.

Tribunals restrict other constitutional rights, while using a lower evidentiary standard:

…In this specific setting is that there’s no right of cross-examination, no right to perform an investigation on one’s behalf if accused. Let’s compare this with civil trials. Those also have a “preponderance” standard, but when I’m doing a civil trial, I have the right to cross-examine witnesses, to issue my own subpoenas and compel a witness to attend in person, the right to pre-trial hearings on whether or not certain evidence is to be admitted.

In OCR cases, there’s not only no constitutional protections for the accused, there are not even evidentiary protections in place: The accused can not call witnesses. The accused cannot question or enter into the record evidence of a complainant’s mental state. The accused cannot enter into evidence previous statements of the complainant or previous specific actions which may indicate consent. As a practical matter of fact, there is a bias in the campus process against the accused.

Why is that so bad? If the bar to clear for a finding against the accused is only 50.1%, and there is an inherent bias against the accused from the start, how likely do you think that it is that the accused will get a fair, unbiased hearing?

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And don’t complain about this process being inherently unfair. Due process is non-existent in campus tribunals. Indeed, the entire process seems created to ensure “prosecutions” in these star chambers:

Non-existent due process protections

The constitution provides for two forms of due process, procedural and substantive — and Title IX proceedings violate both to a shameful extent.

Procedural due process is a very easy threshold to meet. To be procedurally fair, all that is required is to give the respondent a notice that a tribunal is being held, and then provide the respondent with a meaningful opportunity to be heard. The “meaningful opportunity to be heard” encompasses substantive due process — that is, what we think of as a fundamentally fair hearing: whether the tribunal followed its own rules, whether constitutional protections are in place, whether there is a chance to have the respondent’s evidence considered, and whether or not the decision of the tribunal can be appealed to a final or higher authority.

But, as we’ve seen above, there is often not a meaningful opportunity to be heard by the tribunal. Constitutional safeguards are not in place, not all relevant evidence is considered, there is not a right to confront the accuser, there is not a right to be represented, there is not a right to have witnesses, there is not a right to even know what the charges are against an accused student, and, worse, in many cases, the mere fact that there is an allegation against the student is used as evidence that the allegation is true.

This is the very definition of a kangaroo court.

In a very real sense, every card in the deck is stacked against a student.

And it was against these seven students, and as shall be done so again.

We all want to see just, fair outcomes. We want to see criminals spend their time behind bars. We don’t want to send our children to colleges where predators roam free to savage our daughters or nieces, us, or other loved ones. But campus “courts” aren’t how you get there. A tribunal established by a political agency, to advance a presidential agenda, can never serve that role, nor can a tribunal that hamstrings the accused, silences them, allows them no representation, and applies the lowest evidentiary standard, should never be wielded even as it potentially ruin lives.

This is all set against the backdrop of underfunded schools, administrators with no experience or legal training, or university mandates to “do something” about crime or an alleged “rape culture” on campus.

Leave the prosecutions to the State; you handle the readin’, writin’ and ‘rithmetic. Title IX was never contemplated to take the place of a court of law, and being horny or boorish still isn’t a crime.

BEST OF RBR ~ Inside the Star Chamber: the unconstitutional farce of Title IX enforcement on college campuses

Universities are fundamentally unfit institutions in which to deprive or enforce constitutional rights.

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