Advice & Opinion

Believe Her. Then Fix the Boys.

A Cornell student says institutions looked away for two years. Here is how to stand with survivors and win young men back.

Stock photo. Photo by Dipqi Ghozali on Unsplash

In October 2024, a 20-year-old Cornell student walked into the Chi Phi fraternity house to meet a friend. According to a lawsuit filed this September, she didn't walk out the same person. She alleges members pressured her into taking ketamine, then forced marijuana and more alcohol on her, then sexually assaulted her. Around 1:42 a.m., according to her account, members traded Snapchat messages in the fraternity's group chat that appeared to invite others to join. Seven men are named.

Two days later, a campus doctor told her to seek therapy. And for most of two years, the people whose job was to protect her decided there was nothing to see.

These are allegations. None has been proven in court, and no one has been criminally charged. But here's where any honest conversation has to start: when a woman comes forward, we take her seriously. We investigate like it matters. We believe women enough to do the work.

That didn't happen here. And it's worth asking how young men got to a place where a message like that could go out to a group chat at all.

Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten declined to prosecute in November 2024. He says her sworn statement described her participation as "voluntary, conscious, and consensual." He has also said he never saw the full transcript of her police interview, the one containing her rape accusation.

Take him at his word, and the problem gets worse, not better. Consent isn't a permission slip signed at the door. It has to be ongoing. It covers what happens while a person can still say yes or stop it. If she lost consciousness, nothing after that was covered. Not new acts. Not new men. The assault begins where the consent ends.

And that Snapchat? The invitation went out about her, not from her.

The Numbers Behind the Group Chat

For the better part of a decade, a network of online influencers has been selling young men a story about women. Business is good. Nearly two-thirds of young men in the U.S., U.K. and Australia (63%) regularly engage with "men and masculinity" influencers, according to the Movember Institute. Andrew Tate alone has millions of followers on X.

The results are showing up in the data. A 2026 survey by Ipsos and King's College London, covering about 23,000 people in 29 countries, found that 31% of Gen Z men agree a wife should always obey her husband. Among Baby Boomer men, it was 13%. Read that again. On the question of whether a wife should obey, Grandpa is now the progressive in the family.

In the U.S., 43% of Gen Z men call themselves feminists, compared with 61% of Gen Z women, the widest gender gap of any generation, according to the Survey Center on American Life. And 45% of young American men say men face discrimination, up from under a third in 2019.

To be fair, most young men still reject this stuff. More than two in three Gen Z men in that global survey did not agree that a wife should always obey. But a minority large enough to fill every frat house in America is not a rounding error. It's a crisis.

How the Machine Works

The manosphere doesn't open with hatred. It opens with sympathy.

A young man feels lonely, overlooked and unsure of his place. Then the algorithm serves him someone who says, "That's not your fault. Women did this." In a 2024 study by University College London and the University of Kent, misogynistic videos on TikTok "For You" feeds set up as teenage boys went from 13% to 56% of recommendations in just five days. That's more than four times as many.

The advice that follows isn't all poison. Hit the gym. Make money. Get disciplined. Fine. The poison is the reason. He isn't improving himself to become a better man. He's doing it to win, to dominate, and to stop being "used." The core lie is that women only want the richest, strongest men, so the girl he liked was never going to choose him anyway. That lie takes away his responsibility and turns her into a prize instead of a person.

And once women are prizes, consent becomes a formality.

Researchers studying teenage boys found something else: misogyny works as social currency. Talking about girls this way is how boys earn status with other boys. The real audience isn't the girl. It's the group. Sound familiar?

So here's the bill for all that free content. They come looking for belonging. They leave lonelier and angrier. That anger needs a target, so it lands on a girl whose only offense was saying no. He sits there stewing, podcast after podcast. And when the opportunity comes, he may lash out. Sometimes that means harassment. Sometimes it means assault. Women end up less safe, and the only one who profits is the guy selling the bullshit.

The Institutions Blinked

Police condensed a roughly 120-page interview into a six-page statement for her to sign. Trauma and heavy intoxication scramble memory. Survivors tell their stories out of order, with gaps, and remember more later. A tidy six-page summary becomes the benchmark, and every new detail looks like a changed story.

Then the DA closed the case. It took a lawsuit, a national outcry and Governor Kathy Hochul saying she'd "lost faith" in him before the case landed with Attorney General Letitia James as special prosecutor.

We've seen this playbook. Isolate the victim. Protect the institution. Run out the clock. Abusers do it to silence survivors. And the Cornell case shows how campuses do it to students. A prosecutor's job is to break that cycle by getting the evidence, talking to witnesses and showing every young man watching that this behavior has consequences. That didn't happen here.

How We Fix It

As dark as this is, it isn't hopeless.

Believe women, and back them up. Survivors need trained investigators, real support services and institutions that treat a report as the start of an investigation, not a liability to manage. A woman shouldn't need a lawsuit to be heard.

Mental health support for boys. The manosphere wins because it takes young men's pain seriously. So should we. Loneliness is real, and boys need somewhere to take it besides a podcast: counselors in schools, free therapy on campus, and men's groups that don't feel like punishment.

Better role models. Toughness isn't the problem. How it's expressed is. Coaches, firefighters, dads, teachers and creators can show that strength and decency go together. Boys need to see men who are tough enough to care.

Real consequences. Prosecutors who do the work. Schools that don't settle for no-contact orders. Fraternities that lose their charters. If the only lesson boys learn from Cornell is that nothing happens, the manosphere wins the argument.

Right now, they take a lonely boy and hand him a scapegoat instead of a friend. We can still win him back. But we have to show up before the algorithm does, and we have to stand with the women who've already paid the price.