A campus rape case has captured the attention of the country, and everyone is doing their best to be stupid about it.
Social media is always useless, but it is especially bad when people are discussing crimes about which we don’t yet know all the details. People get a glimpse of it from one angle and assume that they have enough information to pass judgment. Invariably, this leads people to look like morons when it comes out that ACTUALLY the would-be assassin wasn’t working for the KGB; he was just trying to impress Jodie Foster. This is exponentially worse when the crime is about sex.
All the worst impulses people have are multiplied tenfold.
This week, we saw proof of this on the left and right.
Briefly, a Cornell student filed a lawsuit against seven fraternity members, Cornell, the frat, her sorority, and a bar that overserved her. In the lawsuit, she explains the core events of the night in question. She gets trashed at some bar, goes to the frat house to meet a guy; they dance, get drunker, do ketamine, and agree to have a threesome; and then a long night of threesomes in different combinations follows. She has sex with four of the men and three others do lines of ketamine off her body. At no point in the lawsuit does she say she was physically or violently forced against her will. She says that she was “pressured” to do ketamine and “plied” with rum. But the whole thing is described as nonconsensual because she was “intoxicated and incapable of giving consent,” so since she was unable to give consent, everything that happened was sexual assault.
When this started to go around, the left and right jumped to their usual positions. The left said, “I’ve heard enough! They’re guilty! They gangraped her! Just like men have been doing to women for thousands of years,” and the right said, “She probably made all of this up. Women love to lie. Just like when Eve lied to Adam about the apple and her affair with the snake.”
This is people playing their parts. We are used to social media staging this play. It’s normally done by disputing the events as though we were all True Crime podcast hosts and impugning other people’s character and motives. Was she there at that time? Were there witnesses? Is there documentation after the fact? Was it raining? Were his shoes muddy? Did she mention the rain or his shoes? Are you actually this stupid or is someone paying you to say this? Etc…
But that moment is the most dangerous moment in the life of a story to make a confident judgment call. You only have a lawsuit and some minimal reporting. In this case, people knew that three weeks later, she had gone to the police and given them a sworn statement. We also knew that this had not resulted in charges. In addition, we knew that there was a Title IX investigation, which led to two frat members being expelled, the frat itself being banned, and various other undisclosed lesser punishments for other people involved.
Or to put it another way, everyone knew enough to know they didn’t know enough.
