Last night Avery asked me, “Have you heard about the seven men who drugged and raped a girl at Cornell?”
Since it’s all over social media—and she’s almost 14—I figured it warranted a discussion.
When I referred to the woman as Jane Doe, Avery said, “I thought Jane Doe meant dead people?”
I explained that Jane Doe can be used for an unidentified deceased woman, but it’s also a legal placeholder when a woman’s identity is unknown or intentionally being protected. In this case, it protects the identity of the woman making the allegations.
Then we got into the much bigger conversation.
I explained that allegations this serious should absolutely be taken seriously.
But an allegation is not a verdict.
And right now, the evidence is complicated. New evidence and additional reporting seem to be emerging almost daily.
The Tompkins County District Attorney initially said the six-page sworn statement Jane Doe signed in 2024 described her participation in drug use and sexual activity as voluntary, conscious and consensual and did not allege that she had been drugged against her will or gang raped. That statement was central to the initial decision not to pursue criminal charges.
But now there is another important piece of evidence.
CBS obtained a transcript of Jane Doe’s original November 2024 interview with Cornell University Police—the interview from which that written statement was produced.
And the two apparently do not say exactly the same thing.
According to CBS’s reporting, during that interview Jane Doe distinguished between different portions of the night. She described some of the initial sexual activity as something she was “pretty OK with,” while also describing herself as extremely intoxicated.
She also told the investigator that she was being physically hit very hard.
Later in that same interview, she explicitly told police that she was certain she had been raped.
Here is where I would start asking a lot of questions.
According to the transcript obtained by CBS, the investigator prepared the written statement from that interview, read her account back to her word for word, gave her an opportunity to clarify or correct it, and she reviewed the revised six-page statement the following day before signing it.
Yet the DA says the explicit rape allegation contained in the interview transcript was not in the sworn statement his office received.
He also says his office was never given the full interview transcript.
Why?
Why didn’t that allegation make it into the sworn statement?
Was something omitted while the interview was being converted into a written statement?
Was she afraid to put certain things into a document she had to sign?
Was she under pressure?
Was she still processing what had happened?
Did she understand or characterize parts of the experience differently at different points?
Or is there another explanation entirely?
We don’t know.
And that is precisely why you investigate instead of filling in the blanks with whichever explanation supports what you already believe.
I also explained to Avery what we call contemporaneous evidence—evidence created at or near the time something happened.
CBS has reported on screenshots that a source says show texts exchanged between Jane Doe and one of the defendants two days after the alleged assault. Her attorney confirms that she exchanged texts with this defendant shortly afterward, but he has not authenticated those particular screenshots. He says she was traumatized, in denial and trying to understand what had happened.
That matters.
But so do the messages.
One does not automatically cancel out the other.
And THAT led us into another incredibly important conversation:
Consent.
Consent to one sexual act is not consent to every sexual act that follows.
Consent to one person is not consent to another.
Consent can be withdrawn.
And intoxication can affect someone’s capacity to consent.
Trauma can also affect the way someone remembers, processes or describes an experience afterward.
We also talked about an unfortunate reality for women: sexual behavior is still judged by an enormous double standard. A man with multiple sexual partners may be praised as a stud. A woman making the exact same consensual choices can be humiliated, labeled or slut-shamed.
It isn’t fair.
But pretending that double standard doesn’t exist doesn’t prepare our daughters for the world they actually live in.
So shame by itself doesn’t tell us what happened either.
Shame can accompany sexual assault and trauma.
Shame can also come from being judged for consensual sexual behavior.
People can misremember. People can have fragmented memories. People can process trauma later. People can change how they understand an experience. People can be afraid. People can be mistaken.
And yes, sometimes people lie.
We do not know which of those things, if any, applies here.
Her state of mind matters.
What did she understand was happening at different points that night? What was her level of impairment, if any? Was she frightened, confused, overwhelmed or trying to process events afterward? Did her understanding of what happened change as she remembered or learned additional information?
Those are legitimate questions.
But we cannot answer them for her.
That is why the chronology matters.
What did she say happened? When did she first report it? What did she tell investigators? What appears in the contemporaneous communications? What do witnesses remember? What physical, medical or toxicological evidence exists, if any? What corroborates the various accounts? What contradicts them?
And if there are meaningful differences between an earlier sworn statement and later allegations, those differences deserve examination.
That does not automatically mean she was dishonest.
Trauma, fear, intoxication, confusion, incomplete memory or information learned afterward can affect an account.
But neither should we automatically assume one of those explanations.
We should ask.
And the same standard should apply to everyone else involved.
What did the other people present actually witness?
What did each person know at the time?
Which statements are firsthand?
Which are secondhand?
Which details can be independently corroborated?
Multiple people repeating the same information isn’t necessarily independent corroboration if that information ultimately came from the same source.
Conversely, an inconsistency does not automatically disprove an allegation.
Evidence has to be examined both for where it fits and where it doesn’t.
But there is another question I keep coming back to.
And in some ways, it troubles me even more.
Where were the men willing to say, “Wait. What?”
The civil complaint alleges that a message was sent to a fraternity Snapchat group suggesting that a woman upstairs was sexually available.
If the evidence establishes that men received and understood such a message, I want to know what happened inside that group.
Did anyone stop and ask what that meant?
Did anyone ask whether she knew what was being said about her?
Whether she had agreed to it?
Whether she was capable of consenting?
Whether she was okay?
And if somebody recognized that something might be wrong, did he say anything?
That question exists independently of determining which men, if any, ultimately bear criminal responsibility.
Because there is something very human happening underneath all of this.
There is a concept in social psychology called the bystander effect. When other people are present, responsibility can become diffused.
Someone else will handle it.
Someone else knows more than I do.
Nobody else seems alarmed.
Maybe I’m overreacting.
If everybody else is going along with it, maybe it’s fine.
Sometimes what a group desperately needs is one person willing to interrupt that consensus.
Wait. What are we doing?
There may be an even older tension underneath the bystander effect: the tension between the atavistic and the altruistic.
Atavistic behavior pulls us backward—toward instinct, dominance, tribal loyalty, self-preservation, conformity and the safety of the group.
Altruism asks something harder of us.
It asks us to recognize another person’s humanity even when doing so is inconvenient, uncomfortable or socially costly.
Groups can amplify the atavistic.
When everyone around us appears comfortable with something, our threshold for questioning it can begin to move. Responsibility diffuses. Behavior becomes normalized.
And the question quietly changes from:
“Is this right?”
to:
“Is anyone else objecting?”
Those are not the same question.
The altruistic person interrupts that process.
He risks being the difficult one.
The humorless one.
The one who ruins the night.
The one whose friends tell him to relax.
And he says it anyway:
Wait. What?
At what point does another human being’s vulnerability become more important than belonging to the group?
That question made me think about Kitty Genovese.
Kitty Genovese was murdered in Queens in 1964, and her death became one of the most famous stories in American social psychology.
For decades, many of us were taught some version of the same horrifying story: 38 people witnessed a woman being murdered, heard her cries for help and did nothing.
Her murder helped inspire research into what became known as the bystander effect.
But there is another reason Kitty Genovese belongs in this conversation.
The story most of us learned about her wasn’t entirely accurate.
Later examinations substantially challenged the famous account that 38 people simply watched her murder and refused to intervene. Some people could not see what was happening. Some did not understand the severity of what they were witnessing. And there is evidence that people did attempt to intervene or summon help.
That doesn’t make what happened to Kitty Genovese any less horrific.
But think about the irony.
One of the most famous stories we tell about groupthink also became an example of what can happen when a compelling narrative is repeated so often that people stop examining the evidence beneath it.
And THAT is precisely why I am unwilling to do the same thing here.
I thought about another case, too: Rolling Stone’s infamous UVA story, A Rape on Campus.
Not because the cases are the same.
They are not.
And we currently have no basis to conclude that Jane Doe fabricated her allegations.
I thought about UVA because it demonstrated the consequences of abandoning verification when an allegation is so disturbing that people become afraid to question it. Rolling Stone’s story ultimately collapsed under scrutiny and was retracted after serious failures in reporting and fact-checking.
The damage went in more than one direction.
People who were accused or implicated suffered consequences.
And legitimate survivors suffered too, because a spectacularly failed story gave people another reason to be skeptical the next time a woman came forward.
But the opposite mistake can be devastating as well.
A truthful victim can be dismissed because her account isn’t perfectly linear, because her behavior afterward doesn’t conform to somebody else’s expectations, because she initially consented to something else, or because trauma affected the way she understood or reported what happened.
That is why we examine the facts.
Not because we automatically distrust women.
Not because we automatically trust men.
Because the consequences of getting it wrong—in either direction—are enormous.
There may ultimately be evidence establishing that crimes occurred here. If criminal guilt is proven beyond a reasonable doubt, those responsible should be held accountable under the law for every crime proved.
There may also be evidence that changes our understanding of some or all of the allegations.
We don’t know yet.
And saying we don’t know has somehow become confused with refusing to believe victims.
It isn’t.
It means recognizing the difference between compassion and conclusion.
And I explained something else to Avery that matters enormously:
Due process belongs to all of us.
An accusation deserves serious investigation.
Evidence deserves serious scrutiny.
And in a criminal prosecution, the accused are presumed innocent unless guilt is proven beyond a reasonable doubt.
We don’t get to begin with a conclusion and work backward.
That is why we investigate.
That is why contemporaneous evidence matters.
That is why discrepancies matter.
That is why corroboration matters.
That is why the accused are allowed to answer allegations against them.
And that is why an allegation—even a horrifying one—is not itself proof of guilt.
Taking an alleged victim seriously and withholding judgment are not contradictory positions.
So I am willing to keep reading.
I’m willing to change my understanding when new evidence warrants it.
I’m willing to ask uncomfortable questions of every account—including the ones that support what I might already believe.
What I’m not willing to do is fill gaps in the evidence with certainty simply because uncertainty makes us uncomfortable.
And THAT was really the lesson I wanted Avery to understand.
She doesn’t have to decide what happened because social media already has.
If somebody brings it up at school, she is perfectly capable of saying:
“I don’t know what happened. That’s what the investigation and the law are for.”
Take allegations seriously.
Understand consent.
Examine the evidence.
Respect due process.
Those things are not mutually exclusive.
But I hope there is another lesson here, too—one that has nothing to do with courts, prosecutors or standards of proof.
If you’re ever standing in a room where everyone else seems willing to go along with something that doesn’t feel right, don’t assume their silence means it is right.
Don’t wait for somebody else to object.
Don’t surrender your own moral judgment to the group.
Be willing to be uncomfortable.
Be willing to be unpopular.
Be willing to be the person who says:
Wait. Does she know about this?
Did she agree to this?
Is she okay?
What are we doing?
Because civilization isn’t demonstrated by having no primitive impulses.
It is demonstrated by what we do when those impulses collide with another person’s humanity.
Sometimes doing the right thing begins long before anyone knows whether a crime has occurred.
Sometimes altruism isn’t heroic at all.
Sometimes it’s simply one human being refusing to go along.