What's In The News? Mini #407

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

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Madigan (1:00)

Hi, I'm Madigan, and you're listening to Your Angry Neighborhood Feminist, a podcast that explores the world through a personal feminist perspective.

Before I get into this week's news episode, I want to give a gigantic trigger warning. As in this episode, I will be covering the Cornell sexual assault case that is being highly publicized in the media right now, but I will be going into more detail of the assault than I typically would on one of these episodes. So I think it is important for any of you listening who have experienced sexual assault yourselves, or if you are close to someone who has experienced such violence, this might not be the episode for you.

But if you want to listen to most of it, I'm going to give another trigger warning before I go into any of those graphic details. But either way, please listen with care. I know for myself even getting this episode prepared was incredibly rough. So let's all take a deep breath and prepare ourselves for just an absolutely horrendous story of assault.

A former student at Cornell University has sued the school, alleging that seven members of the Chi Phi fraternity had drugged and gang raped her at a frat house back in October of 2024

The victim, known only as Jane Doe, is also accusing Cornell of responding inadequately and is also suing her sorority Tri Delta. So what does this lawsuit say happened? Let's start there. According to Jane Doe, who was 20 years old at the time of the alleged assault, I hate that I have to say that because technically, no one has been prosecuted for these crimes. Beginning on October 19th, 2024, was sexually assaulted repeatedly over the course of nearly seven hours. The seven men accused are named Diego Sarabia, Winston Lee, Scott Norris, Matthew Ingalls, Scott Kretschmar, Jonathan Newell, and Guilio Lopez. The lawsuit states that Jane Doe began her night by drinking some vodka at the sorority house, and around 8:30 p.m. took an Uber to a bar where her sorority was hosting an event. Even though the bouncer identified her as being underage, she was still served at least one alcoholic drink at the bar. Then around 10 p.m., she and her sorority sisters walked over to another bar where she stayed for about an hour. Around 11 p.m., Jane Doe decided to walk alone about a mile to the Chi Phi frat house to see a guy who she thought was a friend of hers. Before I even go any further, when I got to this point of the lawsuit, all I could think about was my mom and how often she has told me how unbelievably lucky I was to have the guy friends that I had when I was in high school, and how they also really kind of skewed my idea of men moving forward into my adult life. Because I was always treated with such kindness and gentleness and respect from my male friends, I didn't really experience the scary side of men until I moved away to Los Angeles and went to film school. But getting back to the events of the night, when Jane Doe arrived at the frat house, the man and his frat brothers supplied Jane Doe with beer, weed, and rum. Then they offered her fucking ketamine. The lawsuit states that she was pressured into snorting the drug, which she had never done before.

Once under the influence of ketamine, the assault began.

Now, ketamine, of course, is an incredibly controversial drugs. There are definitely medicinal uses for it that can be very helpful, but those uses should be overlooked by a doctor or medical professional of some sort, and not just done with some frat bros at a frat house. According to the DEA website, ketamine is a dissociative anesthetic that has some hallucinogenic effects. It distorts perceptions of sight and sound, and makes the user feel disconnected and not in control. It is an injectable, short-acting anesthetic for use in humans and animals. It is referred to as a dissociative anesthetic because it makes patients feel detached from their pain and their environments. Ketamine can induce a state of sedation, feeling calm and relaxed, immobility, relief from pain and amnesia, meaning no memory of events while under the influence of the drug. So just right there, that goes to show you how Jane Doe would be physically incapable of consenting to any sort of sexual activity. Not only had she already consumed alcohol, she'd, I would assume, smoked weed or had a gummy of some sort. And so she's probably already feeling not like she could give her consent to something like that. And then when you bring ketamine into the mix, you're really just taking things over the edge. Ketamine is often used as an anesthetic. It is literally there to knock someone the fuck out. There is no way in hell that any human being can consent to any form of sexual activity under the influence of ketamine. It just should not be done. Again, returning to the timeline, I'm now going to be getting into the actual assault. So at this point, if you feel like you need to stop listening, please do so.