Found Responsible for Rape, Back on the Field: LSU Just Said the Quiet Part Out Loud

Trigger warning for everybody that has experienced sexual violence. We talking about sexual violence for educational purposes only, and I need y’all to take care of yourselves while you read this.

The Group Chat Is the Confession

Have y’all heard the news? CBS News New York obtained more messages from the group chat of the seven Cornell men accused of drugging and raping a woman for hours inside the Chi Phi fraternity house, and kinfolks, they are not good. According to the lawsuit, while this young woman was being assaulted, somebody in that chat asked if the “shop” was “still open,” somebody answered yeah with a devil emoji, and somebody else added a yeah of their own, which means that instead of stopping it, grown men with Ivy League student IDs was referring to a human being as a store with its lights on. Just utterly disgusting, awful behavior, and I want to sit in that word for a second, shop, because the language is the evidence, the language tells you exactly how they saw her, not as a classmate, not as somebody’s daughter, not as a person with a future, but as inventory.

Let me give you the receipts, because here at Education Is Elevation it’s Research over MeSearch. The woman, identified as Jane Doe, was 20 years old in October 2024 when she went to the Chi Phi house at Cornell. Her 101 page civil complaint, filed in Manhattan in September 2026, alleges she was pressured into ketamine, marijuana, and alcohol until she was incapacitated, that around 1:42 in the morning one member posted in a Snapchat group called “Chi Phi Actives” that there was free sex upstairs, and that more men came into the room over the next several hours, with the assault ending somewhere around 5:45 that morning. On stream I said seven hours, and the filing actually describes more than four, which don’t make it better, it makes it a timeline.

Crazy how the punishment was the part that went viral. The complaint says Cornell suspended the men, then let some of them “mitigate their conduct” by writing essays, and her lawyer says only two of the seven were expelled. Essays. Somebody’s daughter left that campus and never came back, and some of the men accused of breaking her got a writing assignment. One of the men named in the suit reportedly went on to work at a Wells Fargo branch in Charlotte and was let go only after Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten announced on September 28, 2026, that he was reopening the case and taking it to a grand jury. Think about that. If he got a degree from Cornell, he was not out here struggling, he was able to go live his best life for two whole years while she carried it, and the bank didn’t flinch until the cameras did.

Now I want to be precise, because precision is power. No criminal charges have been filed against any of these men, at least two of them deny the allegations through their lawyers, and the civil claims have not been tested in court. Two things can be true. Every man named in that suit is entitled to his day in court, and the institution that let “essays” stand in for accountability is entitled to none of our benefit of the doubt, because the institution already had its day, and it spent it protecting itself.

Born From the Movement, Raised by the General Counsel

To understand how we got here, we gotta go back. Title IX was a major federal civil rights law passed in 1972, signed by Richard Nixon on June 23 of that year, written into being by Representative Patsy Mink of Hawaii, the first woman of color ever elected to Congress, alongside Representative Edith Green, with Senator Birch Bayh carrying it in the Senate. It was modeled after Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which means this law is the direct progeny of the civil rights movement and the women’s liberation movement, it is the grandchild of the lunch counter and the consciousness raising circle at the same time.

Most of y’all don’t know the Black women’s history sitting underneath that. On September 3, 1944, Recy Taylor, a 24 year old Black mother, was walking home from church in Abbeville, Alabama, when six white men kidnapped her at gunpoint and raped her. The NAACP sent its best investigator to Abbeville, a young woman named Rosa Parks, and Parks helped build a national campaign around Recy Taylor more than a decade before anybody knew her name from a bus. Two separate all white, all male grand juries refused to indict. Historian Danielle McGuire’s At the Dark End of the Street makes the argument plain: the civil rights movement was, in no small part, a movement against the sexual violence Black women survived, and the Montgomery organizing infrastructure was built by women who had been fighting rape long before they ever fought segregated seating. So when people act like campus sexual assault is a “women’s issue” separate from civil rights, they are erasing the very women who made the civil rights movement possible.

Then came the legal ladder. In Alexander v. Yale (1980), Yale students argued for the first time that sexual harassment was sex discrimination under Title IX, with a young Catharine MacKinnon advising. In Franklin v. Gwinnett County Public Schools (1992), the Supreme Court said students could sue for money damages. In Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education (1999), LaShonda Davis, a fifth grader in Georgia, gave us the rule that schools are liable when they are “deliberately indifferent” to harassment they know about. In 1990, after Jeanne Clery was raped and murdered in her Lehigh University dorm in 1986, Congress passed the Clery Act forcing colleges to report campus crime. Then the 2011 Dear Colleague letter pushed schools to act, the 2017 administration rescinded it, the 2020 rule rewrote the whole process around live hearings and cross examination, the 2024 rule tried to widen protections again, and on January 9, 2025, a federal court in Kentucky vacated the 2024 rule entirely, which put the country right back on the 2020 framework that governs today.

So here’s what I know as somebody with a degree in adult and higher education, as somebody that has been faculty and staff at multiple different universities and different entities and elements. In a lot of these institutions, sadly, the Title IX office that was created for gender equity, for making sure women can participate fully in education, functions in practice to make sure the university is not sued. In too many places, the office only exists to protect the institution from the assailant’s liability, not to protect the student from the assailant. Let me say that again for the folks in the back. It protects the institution from the assailant, not the woman from the assailant.

Cornell’s own numbers tell on it. A student who shared her story on campus said that after she was assaulted her freshman year and reported it, she learned someone else had already reported the same man, and later found out they weren’t the only two. Cornell’s own Presidential Task Force on Campus Sexual Assault, launched after this 2024 incident, reported that a 2025 campus survey found 35% of undergraduate women and 8% of undergraduate men experienced sexual assault during their time at Cornell. An earlier survey cited in The Cornell Daily Sun found only 38% of respondents even knew how to file an official complaint. That is a communication breakdown at best, and at worst it’s a design feature, because what you can’t find, you can’t file, and what you can’t file, can’t be counted against you.

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Purple and Gold Probation

Let me get around here real quick, because this is the part that really pissed me off, and I’m only saying it in a humorous way to keep from saying it in a violent way. At LSU, the university’s own Title IX process found a football player responsible for sexual assault and forcible rape. Let me repeat that slowly, the university found him resp…