Most of the coverage of the Cornell 7 has, understandably, focused on the seven. Jane Doe’s civil lawsuit, filed last month, alleges that seven members of Cornell’s Chi Phi fraternity drugged her and sexually assaulted her for hours at the frat house in October 2024. The Tompkins County District Attorney has reopened a criminal investigation that his office closed without charges back in 2024, and New York Attorney General Letitia James has since been appointed special prosecutor. The allegations against those men are horrifying, and they deserve every bit of attention they’re getting.
But seven men did not build the system that let this happen, and they didn’t run the Title IX process that is getting so much flack.
Start with the school. According to the complaint, the accused got temporary suspensions and were “afforded the opportunity to mitigate their conduct by submitting essays.” Cornell has pushed back hard, insisting the “minimal consequences” story is false and pointing to a months-long Title IX process, a multi-day hearing, expulsions, and suspensions. Doe’s attorney, Thomas Giuffra, says only two of the seven were expelled. And according to the Cornell Daily Sun, Doe was never told how her own Title IX case came out. So yes, some of the men were expelled or got harsher punishments. But the school is never living down the “you made sexual assaulters write essays” allegations. The Onion has already vowed on Cornell’s behalf that future essays will be much longer. When the most memorable part of your sexual assault response is the homework, the institution has failed.
That failure is the focus of a forthcoming law review article, The Failure to Uphold Title IX: Enabling Abuse on Campus in the Marquette Law Review, by Professor Amos Guiora of the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law; Sophia Gulgulian, a graduate of the S.J. Quinney College of Law who is now an associate at a Utah law firm; and Gianna LaRoche, a first-year law student at Suffolk University Law School in Boston who previously worked on the Bystander Initiative. Their argument is that you cannot have a solution for campus sexual assault when schools don’t uniformly enforce Title IX and, frankly, don’t respect it.
The article describes how that works:
Organizational enablers are those within a structure who have authority to overlook or disregard the actions of individual(s) and permit their actions to persist. By deciding which individual(s) are more important for a cause or goal, organizations use their power to enable the choices perpetrators make. By doing so, they “protect” the organization and its present and future goals.
An essay as a way to “mitigate” what happened in that house is exactly what this looks like in practice. And the authors describe the result:
Perpetrators protected, institutions evading consequences, while hiding behind endless cloaks of self-justification, artful dodging, and careful ducking. Lost in the shuffle is the person to whom they owed the absolute duty of care and obligation.
And wouldn’t you know it, Jane Doe left Cornell.
LaRoche told me the problem isn’t specific to Ithaca. “Absent enforceability and uniformity among Title IX systems, the efficacy of remedies for students are entirely dependent on the competing motivations of these individuals in these Title IX positions, which we have consistently seen to continue the ecosystem of enabling.” That uniformity is moving further away, not closer, now that Title IX has become a partisan football.
Then there are the bystanders. At about 1:42 a.m., according to the lawsuit, a message went out to the fraternity’s Snapchat group chat, “Chi Phi Actives,” announcing that there was “free p*ssy” (texted without the asterisk) upstairs. That chat reportedly reached 57 members. It was, in essence, an invitation to rape Jane Doe. Cornell’s own Title IX panel found that at least one member walked into the room after seeing that message, and it held him responsible for attempted sexual exploitation.
Fifty-seven people got the message, but Jane Doe is the one who paid for it.
This is the problem Guiora’s Bystander Initiative exists to address. Its goals are to hold enablers and bystanders accountable, to work with legislators around the world on criminalizing bystanders and enablers, and to educate widely about the harm they cause. When I sat down with Guiora, LaRoche, and Gulgulian to talk about the Cornell case, Guiora was clear that he isn’t interested in shame as the remedy:
Absent the ecosystem of enabling, perpetrators would not be able to act with impunity and immunity. The accountability which I call for is not through the lens of morality but rather in a court of law, based on legislation focused on the criminal act of enabling. Whether the crime is sexual assault, hostage-taking, or the Holocaust, the critical role of enablers must be understood and recognized.
He also explained how the protection actually flows. “The enabler within a religious institution — or in sports teams or elsewhere — directly protects the institution. They’re indirectly protecting the perpetrator. The perpetrator benefits from the institution being protected. However, the result is the continued vulnerability of the victim.”
And he doesn’t expect anything to change on its own:
It’s a pattern that repeats itself repeatedly. Unfortunately, the enabler is never held accountable. Now, again, I’m a law professor. I’m not a moralist. I’m not an anthropologist. I’m not a psychologist. For me, it’s all about accountability — through the lens of the law. That’s where the Bystander Initiative comes in. The effort is to convince legislators to enact laws that hold enablers criminally accountable. Because otherwise — nothing will change.
Gulgulian made the case that this is a prevention argument, and should not be mistaken for a guilt-by-association one:
We have to get comfortable with the discomfort of holding bystanders accountable. That doesn’t mean associating a bystander with the person who committed the assault. It means recognizing that sexual violence rarely happens in isolation. We focus almost exclusively on the perpetrator, while overlooking the people who knew something, saw something, or had information or authority that could have moved the needle. If we are serious about prevention, accountability cannot begin and end with the perpetrator alone.
She summed it up more directly, “If we only hold the perpetrator accountable, we are talking about punishment. If we are willing to examine the people who could have information, influence, or an opportunity to change the outcome before the harm occurred, we are finally talking about prevention.”
She also described the calculation that leaves a group chat with dozens of members silent:
The idea that someone else will report it, speak up, or intervene needs to disappear. Every time a bystander passes that responsibility to the next person, we create more space for perpetrators to operate and make justice that much harder for victims to reach. Too often, people conduct their own cost-benefit analysis: What will happen to me if I speak up? Will I be ostracized? Will I be labeled a betrayer or whistleblower? Will this affect my career or relationships? But we rarely ask what the cost of our silence will be to the victim.
This case has turned that question into a cultural moment. Parents are now using the case to talk to their sons about what they’d do if that message landed in their own group chat. One of those conversations went viral, from Brian Recker, a former pastor with more than 450,000 Instagram followers, and its central line struck a nerve: “It’s not enough to not rape somebody.” That’s the Bystander Initiative’s whole argument, now coming from parents, and it’s why the initiative’s goals are urgent right now. The law review article closes on the same point:
The time to act is now. Otherwise, perpetrators will continue committing crimes, enablers will endlessly protect institutions, and institutions will hide behind the empty words that are beyond meaningless. Their vapidness speaks for itself. Absent legislators addressing the crime of enabling, tomorrow’s survivors are as inevitable as today’s were before they were attacked.
Bystander accountability was famously played for laughs in the series finale of Seinfeld, which ended with the gang behind bars for cracking jokes while a stranger got carjacked, but perhaps the horrors of this case will finally get society to take bystander and enabler accountability seriously.
Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Bluesky @Kathryn1
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