Dear Reader,

On the evening of October 19, 2024, Matthew Ingalls, Jonathan Newell, Winston Lee, Gillio Lopes, Diego Sarabia, Scott Norris, and Scott Kretzschmar assaulted and raped a 20-year-old student until six a.m. the next day. Two weeks ago, she filed a lawsuit against Cornell University, specific university leaders, the Chi Phi fraternity, the Tri Delta sorority, and the seven assaulters. Jane Doe is now 22: two years older, two years into a life as a survivor, two years fighting to be taken seriously. 

This story has stopped us in our tracks. It has pierced the soul of our student body. Certainly, Princeton is not a campus that is particularly attuned to the news, nor is it a campus that is uniquely attentive to issues of sexual violence. But this could have happened to us, here. 

Many of the facts and reactions to the facts are unsurprising. Cornell’s Title IX office, administration, and police failed Jane Doe. Higher education institutions that preserve a culture of protecting students who have inflicted harm failed Doe. The media, which has sensationalized her assault to the point of naming the rapists as a football team might be named—the “Cornell 7”—is actively failing her. The government, which, on the nation’s television, has time and time again performed witch hunts against survivors—think Christine Blasey Ford and Anita Hill—has failed us all. I have known this, and I am not surprised. 

What’s new about this case is that we, Princeton students, are seeing ourselves in this story. The rape played out across Snapchat groupchats, texts with frat boys about cigarettes, and invitations to Halloween functions. Language like “shop still open?” and “like you can walk in and whip it out” uses twists on phrases you could hear your friends say in everyday context, here used to carry out a gang rape. The familiarity of the events is haunting. 

This familiarity, however, is a door to understanding. Slowly, students are beginning to conceptualize the impact of trauma on a survivor because of that familiarity. We are omniscient observers, who see the horror of the “free pussy” chat. We see that Doe has endured a terrible, life-altering assault after being forced to snort ketamine, and after her body was used as a table to snort it. We see that she has become a survivor. However, it took Doe two weeks to request a rape kit. Two weeks to begin to come to terms with what happened to her. 

We, the omniscient observers, want to go back in time and scream through our phones. We want to tell Doe that it was not okay, that we believe her, that we want to hold her hand as she endures the pain and institutional failure that the next two years and counting will bring. 

We cannot go back in time, and we cannot know her or hold her hand through this pain, for her anonymity is the only thing protecting her. Maybe, though, we can honor her through believing her shock, pain, and trauma. When, not if, this happens again, we can honor Doe by believing the next survivor’s response to their own trauma. By believing the nuances of these truths. I want Jane Doe to know, like June Jordan told Anita Hill, that she “is somebody and something beautiful and precious and exquisitely compelling.”