Carrying That Weight—Again – the Rape of Young Women
Twelve years ago, I interviewed a Columbia University student who went from class to class carrying an extra-long, twin-size mattress on her back. You see, Emma Sulkowicz had been raped on that mattress. And when her attacker went unpunished by Columbia, Sulkowicz decided to carry it as a piece of activist performance art: a constant, undeniable reminder of the crushing weight college administrators had placed on her back.
“Carry that Weight” wasn’t just a way to keep the issue alive and impossible to ignore at Columbia—it was a demonstration of what community support (and abandonment) look like. Any student who wanted to could help Sulkowicz carry the mattress, shouldering the weight with her. Some days, two or three students walked with her across the quad and into campus buildings. Other days, Sulkowicz was alone.
As more details emerge about the 2024 gang rape at Cornell, I’ve found myself thinking about Emma and that mattress a lot—and about the weight this country demands all young women carry.
Only identified as Jane Doe, the woman at the center of the Cornell case filed a civil suit a few weeks ago against her school, her sorority, the Chi Phi fraternity where she was attacked, and the bar that allegedly kept serving her even though they knew she was underage. She’s also suing the seven fraternity members she says raped her: Matthew Ingalls, Johnathan Newell, Winston Lee, Gillio Lopes, Diego Sarabia, Scott Norris, and Scott Kretzschmar.
The 101-page filing paints a horrific picture, one I won’t detail here. What you do need to know is that Doe was pressured into snorting ketamine—a powerful dissociative anesthetic—and then repeatedly assaulted over the course of roughly six hours. At 1:42am, Newell posted in the frat's group chat that there was "free pussy" upstairs. Ingalls promised, “you can walk in and whip it out.”
After Doe went to campus police, Cornell responded by expelling two of the men, and doling out slaps on the wrist to the others—“punishments” like suspensions and prompts to write essays.1 The Tompkins County district attorney declined to prosecute any of them.
“Not one of these guys was arrested,” said Doe’s attorney, Thomas Giuffra. “Not one.”
“Not one of these guys was arrested. Not one.”
Today—after mounting pressure and understandable community outrage—District Attorney Matthew Van Houten announced that his office will reopen the investigation. It’s a development I might feel better about if not for Van Houten’s chilling defense of why he didn’t bring charges in the first place: he says what Doe first described was “consensual.”
In a statement released today, the district attorney writes that Doe “did not allege that she was drugged against her will or gang raped” in 2024.
“On the contrary, Jane Doe’s statement described her participation in drug use and sexual conduct as voluntary, conscious, and consensual.”
I was baffled when I read this sentence. After all, if Doe said what happened to her was consensual, why was she making a report to the police at all? Then I realized Van Houten was doing a disgusting rhetorical dance: Doe never “described her participation…as consensual.” The district attorney just read it that way.
It’s simple, really. After Doe recounted her attack in a statement to campus police, prosecutors—without ever speaking to her—made the legal determination that what happened wasn’t a crime.
But as Giuffra notes, talking to a survivor and developing trust is a process that takes time.
“It is challenging for me to understand how a thorough criminal investigation could have been conducted when she never spoke with anyone other than the officer who took her original complaint.”
While I’m glad Van Houten’s office is reopening the case, let’s be clear about something: he is all but calling this young woman a liar. In his release today, he writes that her suit “provides a different narrative and set of facts of the events” than her statement; he chides Doe and her legal team for not reaching out “to suggest her sworn statement was inaccurate”; and says he’s reached out to them to “understand the discrepancy between the original statement and the lawsuit’s allegations.”
The “discrepancies,” however, are more about characterization than fact. Van Houten writes that there’s no evidence Doe “clearly expressed” that she didn’t consent. Yet the statement includes Doe “hiding under the covers” when more men began to enter the room, slapping a man’s hands away from her genitals, and backing away from someone who grabbed her face to force a kiss anyway. And while the DA claims there’s no evidence that Doe was “rendered incapable” by drugs, the statement also notes that she “had difficulty remembering parts of what happened.”
It was when I saw Van Houten’s interview with ABC News, however, that I realized this wasn’t just a legal disagreement—but good old-fashioned victim-blaming:
“She never says that she was drugged without her knowledge. She admits to taking drugs and alcohol voluntarily and with knowledge.”
First of all, the suit paints a much more complicated and coercive picture of the drug use. Secondly, who cares if she drank and did drugs? Even if Doe was willingly wasted beyond belief, that doesn’t make it okay for seven men to spend hours raping her.
I understand that this district attorney must be under an enormous amount of scrutiny, and that his instinct is to defend himself. But this is the person we’re supposed to believe will seek justice on behalf of a young, traumatized woman?
This is precisely why more women don’t come forward, and why more rapists aren’t prosecuted. Because mostly-male cops and prosecutors find it more believable that a 20-year-old would want to have sex with a room full of fraternity brothers than accept that she was raped. What ever happened to common fucking sense?
It's Not Just Those Tasked to Protect Young Women Who Fail Them. It's All of Us.
In moments like this, it’s tempting to put all the blame on individual bad actors. But it’s not just those tasked to protect young women who fail them. It’s all of us. Doe told Cornell’s student newspaper that in the aftermath of her rape, she was disappointed by the lack of support she got from the student community.
“What I experienced was already devastating, but that pain was compounded by being criticized and ostracized at a time when I needed compassion, support and care the most.”
It hurts my heart to think about how little has changed. It’s been nearly twenty years since I published Yes Means Yes: how is it possible that we’re still begging for the same scraps of humanity?
When Emma Sulkowicz started carrying her mattress across campus, she said she would continue to do so until the school expelled her rapist or he left of his own accord. Neither happened. When she graduated, Emma carried the mattress across the stage with three of her friends. Instead of shaking her hand, Emma says, the university president turned away from her.
That’s where “Carry That Weight” ended. For Emma, at least. In a turn of phrase that made my stomach drop, Doe told the Cornell Daily Sun that almost two years after her attack, “I still carry the weight of its impact every day and night.”
That heaviness haunts a lot of us, I know. And it’s too much for any of us to carry alone.
1 Incredibly, some of the most common forms of punishments for campus rapists are research papers on rape and writing letters of apology to their victims.
[Jessica Valenti is the author of eight books, including her latest Abortion and the New York Times bestseller Sex Object: A Memoir. Her groundbreaking anthology, Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape, paved the way for legislation of the same name, setting what’s now considered the gold standard for sexual consent.
Jessica has also been credited with sparking feminism’s online wave by founding the trailblazing blog Feministing. She’s been a columnist for The Guardian and The Nation, and her writing has been published everywhere from The New York Times and The Atlantic to Bitch magazine and The Toast. After the demise of Roe, Jessica founded Abortion, Every Day, an urgent synthesis of anything and everything happening with abortion rights in the United States, published on Substack.]