Intro for September 29, 2026

Dear Gossips,

Trigger warning for sexual assault.

Jane Doe’s lawsuit against Cornell University and the men now known as the Cornell 7, who allegedly drugged and raped her for several hours in a frat house, and were in the group chats bragging about it and encouraging others to participate, was filed a couple of weeks ago and is steadily picking up awareness.

Then, this past weekend, Florence Pugh brought even more attention to it when she posted about Jane Doe’s trauma on Instagram and talked about her experience during a Q&A for East of Eden. Flo is currently promoting the series and she’s made Jane Doe’s story a part of the press tour by relating it to the themes of the show.

“We are dealing with very violent crimes that for some reason we are allowed to move on from, and women have to bear the consequences of that, and if they shout out about it, they’re problematic” ❤️‍🩹 dear florence, you are so loved pic.twitter.com/bbpHHQlAMH

— ele (@iflyflorence) September 28, 2026

There’s also the editorial board at the Cornell Sun who published a scathing piece last Friday, calling out the university for its failure to protect students – or, rather, more specifically, for it’s failure to protect Jane Doe by prioritising the protection of the male students who assaulted her. No one was arrested and properly investigated, only two were expelled, and the others received temporary suspensions and/or were made to write essays to atone for their alleged crimes.

It has been ten years since Emily Doe’s victim impact statement was shared online by Buzzfeed, subsequently going viral in the summer of 2016. Brock Allen Turner is the former Stanford student who raped her while she was unconscious behind a dumpster. Part of his defence was that “party culture” was to blame. And then a judge granted him a lenient sentence because he was worried about the “severe impact” that the crime that he committed against a young woman would have … on him. Two grad students were riding by on bikes and were themselves traumatised by the heinous act that they witnessed and reported. Emily Doe came forward in 2019 revealing her name, Chanel Miller, in her memoir Know My Name.

A decade apart and the takeaway is unsurprisingly and depressingly still the same – a man’s future is more important than a woman’s safety and future. So for me it was that much more impactful in Florence’s post when she wrote that:

“This is really the moment where we need our men to be as horrified and as sickened as us. You need to be leading conversations about how we change the allowance and complicity of this behaviour as much as we are. How can you expect us to trust that it’s “not all men” when in moments like this, many of you stay quiet?”

Men should be much louder in this conversation. And I appreciate that she put the “not all men” bullsh-t on blast. Because if that’s the first reaction, that in and of itself is the f-cking problem. “Not all men” as a response to calling out men for not interrogating their fellow mankind is a prioritisation of the comfort of men, the centering of men and their feelings. Anyone who says it is telling on themselves.

Yours in gossip,

Lainey