Columnist Blames Trump for Culture Behind Alleged Cornell Gang Rape
Left 50%
Center 0%
Right 50%
1 left · 0 center · 1 right
What happened
A woman identified in court records as Jane Doe filed a civil lawsuit alleging that seven men raped her at a fraternity house near Cornell University in 2024, while Joe Biden was president, during an incident involving ketamine and alcohol; she also sued Cornell and the fraternity, claiming the university failed to protect her. District Attorney Matthew Van Houten declined to bring criminal charges, citing insufficient evidence; the accused men denied wrongdoing, with some saying the sex was consensual and others saying they did not participate. Cornell’s president said the university “must do better” on handling sexual-assault allegations, and New York Attorney General Letitia James was assigned to investigate. On ABC News, New York Times columnist Michelle Cottle called the alleged assault “a fundamental disrespect for women” and said that culture “starts” with President Donald Trump, in “a moment in this culture where the glorification of being thuggish and swaggering and mistreating women is kind of making you a cool kid.” Asked about James’s role, Trump called her “a corrupt person” and said people she investigates “won’t get a fair shake.”
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Omitted — what each side leaves out
Unpacked
Left-leaning coverage never tells readers the alleged Cornell assault took place while Joe Biden was president. Right-leaning coverage treats that timing as the fact that breaks the Trump-culture claim. Readers of the Guardian get a campus lawsuit tied to Trump's record with no mention of who occupied the White House when the attack was alleged. Readers of Fox News get the 2024 date first, used to dismiss the pundit argument.
The sides do not even open on the same event. Left-leaning coverage leads with Cornell's alleged failure to protect a student and a prosecutor who brought no charges. Right-leaning coverage leads with online blowback against a New York Times columnist who blamed the president.
Neither side reports whether any accused student had a stated tie to Trump, the manosphere, or the slogans the culture argument invokes.
Bottom line
Read the Guardian and Trump's White House is the climate that produced Cornell; read Fox News and the same allegation is a 2024 Biden-era case that pundits pinned on Trump anyway.
The receipts — 1 fact one side's coverage lacks
- District attorney Matthew Van Houten decided there was not enough evidence to bring criminal charges
The Left View
Robert Reich argues in the Guardian that the case belongs to “a time when men feel some impunity when it comes to attacking women,” and that Trump “has contributed to a lower and more dangerous standard for what men can do to women with impunity.” He points to the civil finding that Trump sexually abused E. Jean Carroll, the Access Hollywood boast that a star can “do anything” and “grab ’em by the pussy,” smear campaigns against women who spoke out, and an administration he calls “the most belligerently misogynistic of any in memory,” aligned with a “manosphere” whose “main events are dominance and submission.” He does not claim to know what occurred at the fraternity house, but says it is “not unreasonable to see it related to a climate of distrust bordering on hate, fostered by Trump and his administration against people who seem weak or feminine.” Cottle’s ABC remarks likewise treated the allegation as evidence of messages about “what women are there for” that she traced to the president.
The Right View
Fox News and conservative commentators treated Cottle’s remarks as a reflexive, unfounded attempt to make a campus allegation about Trump. They emphasized that Biden held the presidency in 2024, with one X user asking, “Did she not know that?” CNN contributor Scott Jennings called it the “Latest edition of ‘Trump turned me into a newt!’”; Tricia McLaughlin said pundits “fall all over themselves trying to make everything and anything about Donald Trump” and called the take “embarrassing and so incredibly lazy.” The Media Research Center posted the clip under the line, “Of course, it’s Trump’s fault.” Coverage presented Trump’s attack on James as a separate political feud, not as an account of the underlying allegation.
Our Take (balanced)
The left’s strongest argument is that a president’s rhetoric can shape norms of male impunity even when a specific assault is not contemporaneous with that presidency: Reich cites the Carroll civil finding, the Access Hollywood tape, and a reported post-election surge in slogans such as “your body, my choice,” while Cottle describes a “glorification of being thuggish and swaggering and mistreating women.” The right’s strongest argument is chronological and evidentiary: the alleged assault occurred in 2024 under Biden, Cottle offered no link between Trump and the seven accused men, and treating the case as his doing is, in McLaughlin’s words, “incredibly lazy.” The central unresolved tension is whether a president’s language and allied “manosphere” culture can be treated as morally relevant to a particular campus sexual-assault claim that took place under a different administration, or whether that move substitutes an unfalsifiable culture-war story for proof about this incident.
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