Four hours and three minutes in Ithaca
By DAVID FRENCH
Four hours and three minutes.
That’s the total time that elapsed between 1:42 a.m. — the apparent moment when a Cornell University student put the words “free pussy” in a group Snapchat message that could be seen by dozens of members of the Cornell chapter of the Chi Phi fraternity — and 5:45 a.m. on Oct. 20, 2024, roughly the time when Jane Doe says she lost consciousness, bringing her ordeal to an end.
What happened during that time? Multiple men came into the room and — according to a lawsuit filed by Jane Doe last month and various documents disclosed in the case — at least some of the men snorted drugs off her body and had oral and vaginal sex with her, all when she was unquestionably very drunk and very high.
As dreadful as all that is, I’m also interested in what didn’t happen. No one, apparently, acted to end the encounter. Instead — as the group message indicates — men celebrated. “I fucking love chi phi,” one brother wrote. “Like you can walk in and whip it out,” he said later. “Shop still open?” asked another.
I want to be careful here and not draw a straight line from our porn-saturated culture to this dreadful incident. Sexual depravity existed long before pornography was ubiquitous, but this encounter was almost a textbook example of what porn teaches men about sex. It’s not about intimacy. It’s not a manifestation of love, much less care. Instead, sex is an entirely self-regarding and inherently exploitative act.
I’m not writing this column to adjudicate legal guilt. The facts are complicated, and it is almost always difficult to know precisely what happened when copious amounts of drugs and alcohol are involved.
Hovering over the entire case is a New York legal standard that draws a sharp distinction between voluntary and involuntary intoxication. Put simply, if you’re voluntarily intoxicated but not “physically helpless” (passed out, for example), proving incapacitation becomes extremely difficult. But if you’re involuntarily intoxicated, you are considered incapacitated — even when your level of intoxication is the same as that of the voluntarily intoxicated person.
Think of it like this: If the Cornell men forced Jane Doe to drink shots or snort ketamine, then, in the state’s eyes, she’d be incapacitated. But if she voluntarily drank and consumed ketamine to the same level of intoxication, she would not be considered incapacitated.
This makes little sense. Calling intoxication voluntary doesn’t render intoxicated people more aware or capable of making informed decisions. They’re just as vulnerable to predation as they would be if, say, they were unknowingly served spiked fruit punch.
Any man of decency should recognize that the legal distinction (assuming he is aware of it) isn’t a grant of moral permission. And any man with any degree of moral fiber who saw that message should have immediately acted to end the encounter, even if it cost him the “brotherhood” he loves.
It can take an immense amount of courage to actually care enough about another human to intervene — especially if a person you don’t know needs protection from people you do know. This month, just as new details about the Cornell case seemed to be hitting the news every day, we covered the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War in the Law of War class I teach at Lipscomb University in Nashville, Tennessee.
For those who don’t remember, the My Lai massacre was one of the worst episodes in U.S. military history. American soldiers in Vietnam went on a killing spree, murdering hundreds of innocent civilians.
Obviously, the massacre was far more extreme than anything that happened at the Chi Phi house, but I bring it up for a simple reason — to introduce you to a man named Hugh Thompson.
Thompson is an American hero. He was the Army helicopter pilot who saw the massacre from the air, immediately radioed an alarm and landed his aircraft, placing it between his own brothers-in-arms and a small group of innocent civilians they were pursuing. He even ordered his crew to open fire on American soldiers if they tried to kill the people he was protecting.
He cared for innocent people he did not know, and probably would never know, and he cared for them enough to risk his life and the rejection and scorn of his own brotherhood to save their lives. In the process, he also showed care for his brothers-in-arms — he stopped them from continuing to commit the most heinous of crimes.
Think about how much less courage it would have taken to act that night at Cornell. Then consider again that no one intervened. To them, “Free pussy” wasn’t an alarm bell; it was an invitation.
Details of the Cornell case emerged just as we learned more about the criminal case against Andrew Tate, one of the most celebrated influencers in the manosphere. He made his fortune (such as it is) in part through pornography, by reportedly coercing women into becoming cam girls online.
Now he’s facing charges in Britain, including rape, human trafficking and possessing extreme pornography (including images of bestiality). This man was celebrated in parts of right-wing America.
Thompson and Tate sit at opposite ends of the moral spectrum. They represent the angel and devil on the shoulders of young men. One laid down his life for people he did not know. The other offers aggression without virtue, sex without love and money without meaning.
But to put things in language that many young men will understand: Hugh Thompson was strong. Andrew Tate is weak. Tate is a slave to his desires, and all his aggression is directed at those who are more vulnerable than he is.
“Courage,” C.S. Lewis wrote in one of my favorite quotes, “is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality.”
How do we know what courage is? When we see a man risk himself to care for another person, that’s courage. The legal judgment may be uncertain, but the moral verdict is already in. On the most traumatic night in a young woman’s life, a good man could not be found.
