Bonus: What Cornell Says About “Duty Of Care”

0:00Hello, Slate. It is that time every week where we go off the record, meaning Lizzie O 'Leary and I go into our respective studios and talk to you about the stuff we're not talking about the stuff. for whatever reason. This is just for the Slate Plus people. So if you're listening, thank you. You're a Slate Plus member. We love you. Yeah, Lizzie, it's Pledge Week. So I just feel like we got to really give the thanks right now. No, it's been incredible. I am very grateful. Only for our Slate Plus members do I go sit in my closet studio and talk with you. I'm literally sitting in a closet. it and i will say um you can give the gift of slate for like 50 off right now so you'll be like so ahead on your holiday shopping so ahead okay we're not gonna say more because these people have paid for this um usually these segments are kind of goofy and light and i gotta say this week is not going to be that week because the story that we have not been talking about is the very very dark story of what happened at cornell a couple of years back we've had all of these big guests on the big show.

1:10And it means we just haven't had this conversation. I got to say last week, our producer heard it in my voice. I don't know if the listeners did, but I was distracted because I kind of wanted to talk about this with you, Lizzie. Well, because we have been talking about it together in person. Exactly. But it also felt like the wrong time because the New York Times had just gotten like a thousand pages of documents. And so it just felt like we were going to learn more in the next week. Anyway, here we are. Have you been wanting to have this out with me. Yeah. I mean, I think I've been wanting to have this out with you.

1:40Yes. In a lot of different ways, because you and I came up together in journalism and around the same time, we are both parents, but we're parents to very different aged children. You have a college age boy and junior junior high school. Yeah. Junior high, seventh grade girl. Yeah. And I have a six year old boy. And so I feel like my I am getting this constant conversation about Cornell filtered through these different identities, like my 50 year old woman identity, the 10 years after me to identity, and then the sort of like mom of young boys teaching consent identity. Yeah. And then there's the actual story.

2:27Like there are so many different threads here. Yeah, for real. And I got to say, like, just a heads up here at the top. We're obviously going to be talking about sexual assault in this conversation. We have to get into exactly what's alleged here. If that sounds like this is not the conversation for you, feel free to dip. Come back next week. Come back to the show. But that's what we're going to be doing here. And I just I do feel like we need to lay out the facts of what happened as we know them. And we really we know the quote quote unquote facts from a civil suit, which means it's really one person's presentation of what happened.

2:58The reason why this case came out into the spotlight is because Jane Doe, the woman at the center of it, filed a civil suit against men she says were involved in her sexual assault, but also against the fraternity that was involved, her sorority, I believe even a bar. and and in that she is very explicit about what she says happens two years ago so this has been sort of something that's been bubbling on cornell for a while around cornell for a while she says on october 19th 2024 she had a lot well and cornell university we should say they're also part yes yes yes for sure um she says on october 19th 2024 she drank a lot and um went to a frat house and connected with someone that she knew.

3:48She says that that person proposed she have a threesome with someone else. She says that she did that. And then the story sort of spins out from there. Other people get involved. There's a text thread of like dozens of frat members sort of seeing what's happening, hearing about what's happening in these explicit terms, snorting ketamine, allegedly, you know, the whole time. So it's just it's very, very messy. I just wonder when you read about this assault, when you heard about it, how did you hear about it and how did you react? I heard about it, actually, I think on social media. And I heard about it filtered through the electronic communication that went around apparently the fraternity and parts of campus.

4:48That follows because you are the tech person. Right. Right. So there's there's, you know, this group chat snap thread of frat brothers saying, and I'm just going to quote, free pussy. There's a point at which another one says, is the shop still open? Right. So it's a large group of people on this chain. And so I heard about it sort of in these two ways, both the allegations of what happened inside that room, but then also the allegations of like what happened digitally and how people did or did not react or stand up in the digital sphere. yeah yeah um i i can't remember how i heard about this case but it just hit me as the mother of someone who is literally in his first year of college right now yeah and um and has a phone do you know what i mean like i think that you realize very quickly once you have your child in a phone they are involved in all sorts of coded conversations you don't understand and you and can spin out like my kid was in middle school during the pandemic and uh was in these online spaces where people would send each other horrible things not about not like this but i'm saying like horrible stuff violent images like as like you know what i mean like this is i just understand how these chats are a weird place to be and an upsetting place to be.

6:26And we have lots of conversations about it, but it almost feels like the online space is like a soup my kid is swimming in. And like, it's where you do your social business. Do you know what I mean? Like, so it's like, you can't, there's no like exit from the soup exactly. And you can leave certain chats, But like if you're even if you're on Instagram or something, the algorithm will feed you noxious stuff. Do you know what I'm saying? Yeah. And I guess one of my questions there as a parent of a younger child is like, is that soup reality? Is it some like refracted version of reality? Like how much does it hew to truth and how much is it something else?

7:09Because obviously we have seen full grown adults post like ludicrously inflated things just because it's online. That's it for now. And if you want to hear the rest of this episode, the way to do it is to subscribe to Slate Plus. Unlock Slate Plus now by going to slate.com forward slash whatnextplus.