If You Still Trust The Administration

There cannot be a “free” market in general, yet not in drugs, or prostitution, or pornography, or unrestricted alcohol, or unrestricted gambling. That is an important part of why there must not be a “free” market in general, which is a political choice, not a law of nature. Enacting and enforcing laws against drugs, prostitution and pornography, and regulating alcohol, tobacco and gambling, are clear examples of State intervention in, and regulation of, the economy. Radical change would be impossible if the workers, the youth and the poor were in a state of stupefaction. Contrived in the past, that baleful situation is being contrived again today.

For example, pornography is now being legalised in Ukraine to pay for the war. It had been legally prohibited and practically unknown in the Soviet Union, but post-Soviet Russia was flooded with it, to placate the young male population during the larceny of their country by means of the economic “shock therapy” that created today’s oligarchs. “Sex work” of various kinds has always been encouraged when the young men have needed to be stupefied, and it still is. The corporate capitalist pornogrification of our own society is no accident. In welcoming the endorsement of Bonnie Blue, Reform UK has picked its side, the same side as the Green Party on this as on the war. Both in Britain and in Ukraine, the terrible fate of the United States beckons. Please read what follows in the light of all of that.

The first mention on this site of Harriet Harman, Patricia Hewitt and the Paedophile Information Exchange was 20 years ago this month, and this site first mentioned the close connection between Peter Mandelson and Jeffrey Epstein on 16 August 2019. So it is as a very accomplished rat-smeller that I hope that the Sunday People will look into the present state of the man known variously as Mark Standish, Alex Standish and Alex Cavendish, and who was once prolific on Twitter as @PrisonUK. The media should also check in on Ben Fellows. When Esther Rantzen supposedly discovered that at least one of her homes had been used at least once for the sexual abuse of at least one child, a girl of five, then her only concern was for her house.

Nor is my record of rat-smelling restricted to the detection of guilt. See Cardinal Pell, Julian Assange, Alex Salmond, Ched Evans, and the victims of Freya Heath, whose conviction was merely set aside on a procedural technicality. This has nothing to do with liking anyone. The beatification will presumably be the occasion of a Papal Visit to Australia, but if possible I shall be in Rome for the canonisation of Cardinal Pell. To keep Assange’s work going, I would have died in his stead. While I am opposed to the marrow of my bones to the political cause to which Salmond devoted his life, I expect that he and I would have got on. But Evans and I would find little to talk about, while Heath’s victims and I would have a very heated discussion indeed.

I am sure that would be able to stand no more than a few seconds in the company of Andrew Tate, and with two brothers I can scarcely find the words to describe the idea of any of the three of us as a fanboy of either of the others in the manner of Tristan Tate. But I cannot imagine that the United States would allow a white liberal American citizen to be treated as the Tates are being, and I would not be at all surprised if little or nothing came of this. Moreover, since no charge or even arrest has followed the alleged allegation against Bishop Robert Byrne CO, then it is fair to assume that there has never been a Police investigation into His Lordship. He should now sue every media outlet that had suggested that there was one. An Oratorian does not take a vow of poverty, and the English Oratories have friends who could afford any lawyer in London. I alone have publicly defended Bishop Byrne. I have done so from the very start, and I shall do so to my last breath. And Nikos Mohammadi writes:

In recent days, news of the “Cornell Seven” and the alleged “Cornell gang rape” has prompted a flurry of condemnation online, along with criticism of the supposedly “complicit” men and institutions on college campuses and across the internet. A recent essay in New York by Harvard undergraduate Zoe Yu, declares that “the post–Me Too generation gets its Me Too moment”. Three Cornell graduates and trauma psychologists write in HuffPost that they are “shocked, but not surprised by what’s happening at [their] alma mater”. And more than 1,000 Cornell alumni, in a co-signed letter to the editor in The Cornell Daily Sun, the campus’s principal student paper, speak of “decades of Jane Does” and demand that the university “turn inward to seek out the roots of sexual violence within its halls”. Anyone spending time on Instagram will also see the now-ubiquitous rallying cry, “I am Jane Doe.”

However, the facts of the case, which have been reported extensively in UnHerd, reveal a far more complicated story than what social media posting, many politicians, and the discourse in general would have one believe. An unnamed “Jane Doe” in her suit last month claims she was gang-raped by seven men on the evening of 19 October and the morning of 20 October, 2024 at a campus fraternity house when she was 20. She was voluntarily drinking alcohol, but is still suing her sorority (for allowing her to drink), a bar in downtown Ithaca (also for allowing her to drink), the university (for failing to adequately deal with the “rape”), and the fraternity and the men (for the ketamine-fuelled, hours-long orgy in question).

The wave of outrage began, at first slowly and gradually, on 21 September, with the student-run Cornell Daily Sun publishing this editorial: “We refuse for this victim to be reduced to just another story. Cornell has failed to protect its students. Cornell has failed to address the growing issue of sexual assault on campus with its pathetic task force.” It also released the names of the seven men who had allegedly raped the woman, bringing forth the allegations. (Cornell had disciplined the students, expelling two of them, while the Tompkins County District Attorney had declined to press charges.) A Cornell student who spoke to UnHerd on the condition of anonymity noted that one of his professors had begun class by sharing Cornell’s anti-sexual-assault resources, with the caveat “if you still trust the administration.” Protests and walkouts, he said, are slated to happen on 5 October and 13 October, organised by groups otherwise mostly involved in pro-Palestinian activism.

By last Monday, the case had become widely publicised. I saw students at my own university — Columbia — relentlessly post on Instagram, highlighting stories from various other “rape” victims. One viral Instagram post detailed how, in 2014 and 2015, then-Columbia student Emma Sulkowicz had carried the mattress she was allegedly raped on around Columbia, from class to class, as a form of protest. (Allegedly because no legal or university disciplinary process substantiated her allegation.)

Meanwhile, a pro-Israel, Orthodox Jewish influencer who graduated from Columbia, and has over 85,000 followers on Instagram, posted, “I did not go to Cornell. I went to a different Ivy in New York. Title IX betrayed me there too.” (Title IX is the US law prohibiting sex-based discrimination in federally-funded educational institutions.) That also went viral, and even received likes from pro-Palestine students, and at least one activist. There was another: “Repost if you are against Rape! I can see if u.”

The posting frenzy has continued since, with Columbia fraternities condemning the Cornell case as “sexual violence” that was “deliberately silenced” on Thursday. The next day, an account entitled “Epstein off Columbia,” which frequently meshes together Epstein hystericism and anti-Israel sentiment, announced a rally to “#stopsexualviolence from the frat house to the White House”, scheduled for 8 October outside the university’s main gates on Broadway and 116 Street. On the prevailing sentiment at the Upstate New York Ivy, the student I spoke with repeatedly emphasised: “If you are not speaking out against the administration, that means that you’re complicit.”

While Wendy Kaminer writes:

Nearly a decade after the #MeToo movement exploded on social media, a two-year-old Cornell University rape case has reignited outrage about alleged sexual assaults on campus. This is not a simple ‘he said, she said’ case. There’s no dispute that a group of seven young men had sex with a drunken, drugged young woman, in one long night at a campus frat house. Our understanding of the facts may change as investigations progress, and we don’t know how or whether each of the men accused distinguished himself from his brethren. But so far this case centres less on conflicting narratives than on legal notions of consent and the definition of rape under New York law.

The facts as we now know them are complicated. According to in-depth reports by the New York Times, on the night of her alleged rape, Cornell sophomore Jane Doe started drinking at a sorority house and local bar before visiting a fraternity house to meet up with a friend. There, she later told campus police, she consented to sex with two of the men now accused of rape, noting that she was ‘pretty okay’ with it. She was also pretty drunk: as her civil lawsuit against her alleged rapists states, she was given large amounts of alcohol and pressured into snorting ketamine. In a night that lasted seven hours, seven men had sex with her.

At first, she didn’t consider herself a rape victim. One of the men involved texted her shortly after the alleged attack, apologising ‘for how things went down’, noting that he and his friend were also under the influence and unable to ‘shut it down and kick people out before it got way out of hand’. She responded amiably: ‘at the end of the day non of the sexual stuff was illegal and honestly I really liked being w u and matt’ (sic). Some three weeks later, she reported being raped to campus police. Why the change of heart? The New York Times suggests that in the weeks after the attack she was traumatised and grappling with a sense of shame and humiliation. She ‘wanted it to be consensual’, according to one of her roommates. She was also concerned about her reputation, as rumours spread and she was labelled a ‘slut’; and she was angered by being disinvited to a Halloween party at the fraternity where her alleged attack occurred.

Was she raped? Whether or not you consider her responsible for drinking, using drugs and initially consenting to sex with one or two men, it’s fair to say that she was exploited, abused and objectified. It’s hard not to be repulsed by the spectacle of seven men descending on one woman. But not all repulsive behaviour is or should be criminalised. Under New York law people who become inebriated voluntarily cannot claim they were unable to consent to sex. Jane Doe says she drank and used ketamine under pressure, but you might ask if she was free to leave. Giving in to social pressure is not exactly the equivalent of being coerced. You might also ask if the men who used her should have known that the sex was not consensual, given the alcohol and drugs in which they were all apparently indulging. Should they have recognised that they were raping her when she did not identify the sex as rape until weeks after it occurred?

Local district attorney Matthew Van Houten declined to prosecute this case two years ago, and we would probably not be talking about it today if Jane Doe hadn’t just filed a civil suit against her alleged attackers. Her lawsuit set off a firestorm and led to the appointment of a special prosecutor by New York governor Kathy Hochul, up for re-election next month. The accused men will likely be indicted but perhaps not ultimately convicted. New York law, limiting claims of incapacitation in rape cases and the reasonable doubts raised by Jane Doe’s own equivocations, could fairly result in acquittals. But if convictions are unlikely, law reform expanding the definition of rape seems inevitable.

A bill already pending in the state legislature would support third-degree rape charges when alleged victims are under the influence and out of control, whether or not they drank or used drugs voluntarily. This is a ‘binary issue’, according to Bronx assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz, who introduced the bill. ‘Either you’re on the side of the survivors or you’re on the side of the rapists.’ That is precisely wrong. You can also be on the side of due process and narrowly drafted penal laws. You can sympathise with Jane Doe and condemn the behaviour of the men she accused, while questioning the reflexive urge to prosecute them. She may well have civil remedies against her alleged attackers, but we will all be at risk if we ask the penal law to right every wrong.