Cornell case: an ‘institutional betrayal’ of victims in the post #MeToo era

Ten years ago, Brock Turner, a student-athlete at Stanford University in California, was convicted of three felonies for sexual assault against an unconscious woman whom he attacked, in front of witnesses, behind a trash container after a fraternity party on campus.

His six-month sentence, of which he served only three months before being released for “good behavior,” shocked the nation. The judge argued that a stiffer punishment would have had a serious impact on the attacker. Many, including the victim, called the sentence too lenient. The district attorney in charge of the case said at the time: “The punishment does not fit the crime.”

A decade later, a rape allegation filed by a former student of another elite university, Cornell, has again focused national attention on how educational and judicial institutions are failing victims in addressing sexual violence on college campuses, and how they end up protecting the perpetrators.

The 2016 Stanford case fueled the public debate over sexual violence against women a year before the #MeToo movement exploded. Today, although the social context is different, the underlying reality has not changed. According to experts consulted by EL PAÍS, the accusation against Cornell highlights that systematic sexual violence on these campuses and the subsequent “institutional betrayal” remain a persistent problem that can sometimes go unpunished.

For Kenyora Johnson, executive director of End Rape on Campus, a national organization that supports survivors of sexual assault at U.S. universities, one of the most heartbreaking aspects of the Cornell case is how “familiar” it feels, and the parallels with incidents like Stanford.

“These cases capture our attention for a moment, but sexual violence does not only exist when the country is paying attention,” she said in a phone interview.

Data indicate that roughly one in four female college students in the U.S. experiences sexual assault, either completed or attempted. In 2019, the Association of American Universities (AAU) surveyed nearly 182,000 students at 33 universities and found that 26.4% of women had experienced some form of nonconsensual sexual contact, either through physical force or because they were unable to consent.

In a country where fraternities and sororities are a deeply rooted college tradition, women who belong to these organizations are four to six times more likely to suffer sexual violence during their time at university, according to various studies.

The Cornell victim belonged to a sorority and her alleged assailants belonged to a fraternity. She—who has chosen to remain anonymous and use the pseudonym Jane Doe—says seven members of the Chi Phi fraternity sexually assaulted her for nearly seven hours while she was intoxicated and drugged; and that the assault took place at the fraternity house on campus in October 2024, when the victim was 20 years old.

Doe filed a lawsuit in September against Cornell and the seven alleged assailants, citing “negligence” in handling her case. The suit details both the assaults she suffered and the university’s “deliberate or intentional” failure to protect her from them.

The woman had already reported the incident to university authorities in November 2024, less than a month after the assault she described. This week documents emerged showing that Doe told the campus private police at the time: “I can say with 100% confidence I was raped.”

However, in the victim’s statement—which was rewritten by university officers and sent to the relevant prosecutor—that central allegation was not included. The prosecutor’s office then decided not to bring charges against the alleged assailants for lack of evidence.

The revelation of discrepancies between what the victim told campus police and what ultimately reached the prosecutor’s office unleashed a new wave of outrage in a case that had already rocked the country.

As a result, New York Governor Kathy Hochul appointed Letitia James, the state attorney general who brought Donald Trump to trial on financial fraud charges in 2022, as special prosecutor for the case.

“Institutional betrayal”

Experts consulted by this newspaper say that despite the public outrage that immediately follows revelations of cases like Cornell’s, a culture of blaming victims persists at universities. Alcohol is also used as a justification, and educational institutions prioritize protecting their reputations over the well-being of complainants.

All of this translates into “institutional betrayal,” a concept coined by psychologist and researcher Jennifer Joy Freyd. Freyd, a professor of psychology and gender studies, is founder and president of the Center for Institutional Courage, an organization dedicated to advancing understanding of institutional betrayal and how to address it.

Institutional betrayal occurs when organizations entrusted with people’s safety—such as universities—harm those who depend on them, either by committing wrongful acts or by failing to prevent abuse or respond appropriately.

In Cornell’s case, Freyd says in a phone interview, the university appears to have committed institutional betrayal on two fronts. First, it did not do everything in its power to prevent the rape from occurring.

“When we analyze institutional betrayal on campuses, one of the aspects we assess is whether the university creates an environment in which these kinds of incidents are likely to occur,” Freyd explains. Because data show that fraternities and sororities are places where the risk is much higher, allowing them to remain an integral part of campus life is a major failure, the researcher says.

“Some universities have eliminated these organizations, but Cornell and most universities have turned a blind eye,” she adds. Freyd, who has studied these issues for 30 years, admits she once thought “fraternities and sororities could be reformed.” Now, “after witnessing their inability to be reformed for so long,” she believes they should be abolished.

The second front on which Cornell as an institution failed Jane Doe was in handling her initial complaint. It is now known that it did not accurately transmit the victim’s statements to the authorities for consideration of a criminal investigation against the accused, which was ultimately dropped.

That is something Governor Hochul herself highlighted when announcing the appointment of the special prosecutor to conduct a new investigation into what happened. “In what world would the police learn from a victim that she’d been literally gang-raped while intoxicated by ... men in a fraternity house, and not elevate those allegations to the district attorney?” the governor asked at a news conference on Friday, citing “serious questions” about the university’s handling of the case.

The prosecutor then declined to bring charges on the basis of incomplete testimony and never interviewed her, Hochul added.

“When an institution fails victims, especially on such basic matters, it teaches them to be cautious, and that adds another layer of harm,” says Johnson of End Rape on Campus.

According to Johnson, “institutional betrayal matters so much in this debate because institutions not only have a responsibility to create resources; they have a responsibility to ensure those resources actually work for the people who need them.”

Otherwise, survivors are re-victimized when they report assaults and must endure a long and arduous process after taking the step to come forward.

It also has a domino effect on other victims. “Survivors of the past, present and future: we are all watching Cornell, Stanford, all universities,” Johnson says. “Every time one of these cases comes to light, victims ask themselves whether these systems are safe enough to trust.”

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