It didn’t start with Cornell, and it won’t stop with them either

It didn’t start with Cornell, and it won’t stop with them either

featured in The Open Letters | by Rachel Chan

The open Letters

Nov 02, 2026

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From

Rachel Chan

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CW: sexual violence

Like so many women today, I am absolutely disgusted and outraged by the news coming out of Cornell University. Jane Doe was drugged and brutally raped by 7 young men in a frat house. Fifty others received messages in a group chat about the ongoing assault and did nothing to stop it. The university and other institutions failed this young woman, valuing and protecting those men’s futures more than her current reality. I am horrified, infuriated, and, admittedly, I was triggered by parts of the story that are all too familiar to me.

But this epidemic of violence against women isn’t only about Cornell and those involved in this case. It isn’t only about Stanford and Brock Turner. It isn’t about the institutions that continue to fail women over and over again or elected officials who choose to turn a blind eye. It’s about the individuals who get left behind when the headlines disappear.

I have spent most of my life believing that these are stories that I need to keep to myself, that I need to protect everyone’s comfort by maintaining this secret. I worry about what people will think of me once they know, what questions they’ll ask, whether they’ll think I played a role in it, and, most importantly, whether they’ll believe me. But after repeatedly reading another woman’s story this week, it’s become clear to me that something of this magnitude is too heavy to carry alone.

We will never know what support might be given if we never give ourselves the chance to receive it.

I am terrified, but I know that I, too, get to tell my story. Because I have been Jane Doe.

I get to tell my story for the 12-year-old version of me who was not believed, for the 14-year-old version of me who was afraid to speak out, for the 19-year-old version of me who was failed by institutions, and for the 22-year-old version of me who thought her life was over. Putting a number to those experiences makes them feel more real, as if I had kept them separate in my mind all these years. The details vary—different ages, different settings, different people—but when all four get put together, it becomes something much larger. They become part of the same story, and they share one thing in common: all four changed me.

Sexual violence doesn’t stay contained within the minutes or hours in which it occurs. On one of those nights, someone took two hours from me. Two hours in which I was unable to decide what to do with my own body because a man had made that decision for me. But it wasn’t only those two hours that I lost. These experiences have followed me for years, into doctor’s appointments, therapy offices, and workplaces. They changed how I approach relationships and friendships, and the way I interact with the world around me. I remember the weather, the smells, the noise, the environment. I remember the fear.

I think one of the cruelest parts is that everyone else gets to experience those moments as something that happened in the past. For me, they don’t always stay there. The people who hurt me got to leave those rooms and continue living their lives. The people I disclosed to eventually went home. The appointments ended. The paperwork was filed. The conversations stopped. And everyone assumed that I was moving on, that it no longer invaded every area of my life. But I still live in the body those things happened to. I still live at the crime scene.

I have spent hours trying to understand things I will probably never completely understand. I have questioned what I did, what I didn’t do, what I should have noticed, why I trusted someone, why I froze, why I didn’t fight harder, why I didn’t leave sooner, why I didn’t say something differently afterward. I have sat in therapy offices trying to put language to memories I desperately wished I could erase. I have had my body examined and photographed and swabbed by strangers because I was told that preserving evidence was important in case one day I wanted to do something with it.

There is something particularly unfair about having to pay to heal from something someone else did to you. People spend so much time talking about what accountability might cost the person accused. People worry about their education, their career, their reputation, their future, but spend comparatively little time reflecting on what sexual violence has

already

cost the survivor. My time has value too. My education has value too. My career has value too. My money has value too. Most importantly, my future has value too.

And still, my story isn’t unique.

We’ve been here before—countless times, actually. We tell survivors to go to the police and report those who harmed us to the appropriate institutions. We are told to get the rape kit done in case we ever want to do anything with the evidence.

We are told to reach out and ask for help.

Asking someone who has just had their control and autonomy violently stripped away from them to give up control to other individuals or an institution is a tremendous ask. And when survivors do everything that they are told to do after a sexual assault, the responsibility to take that trust and fight for the survivor is in the hands of the institution. It is their responsibility to believe and protect the survivor. Not to worry about the reputations of men who deliberately made a decision to brutalize someone. Not to protect the university’s reputation or avoid a PR nightmare. And CERTAINLY not to dilute the story for the comfort of those who committed the act, because imagine how uncomfortable it feels for those of us who have been on the other side.

Eventually, the individuals who decide get to clock out and go home. Eventually, everybody moves on to the next headline. But the survivor’s experience is drastically different. While everyone else is running to the next thing, we still wake up in the same body, the same reality.

Each of my experiences has objectively ended, but I sit here still not having found closure. Four times I needed protection. Four times the adults and institutions around me have failed to prioritize the person over the politics. And now, I’m left with four wounds that I have been ashamed of for so long. But I also know now that it is not my shame to carry.

I am painfully aware that writing this down won’t give me back the time I lost. I won’t magically stop blaming myself on the bad days. No amount of healing will ever replace those hours I endured, and no amount of accountability will return me to the person I was before all of this. That doesn’t mean that none of this is worth fighting for because we

need

to take action. We keep being outraged when the stories die down and the headlines disappear, because the women behind these stories don’t get to stop remembering just because the rest of the world has moved on. Those lives have been changed forever.

My

life has been changed forever.

Sexual violence is happening every day to people whose names we will never know. This isn’t a university problem or an America problem. It’s a global problem. We cannot become so accustomed to hearing these stories that their frequency makes them feel inevitable. Something being common doesn’t make it normal, and something being widespread doesn’t make it acceptable.

It didn’t start with Cornell, and it certainly won’t stop with them either. So our outrage cannot stop with Cornell either.

I’ve had to start accepting an incredibly painful reality. I cannot go backward and protect every version of myself who needed someone to protect her. I cannot change the decisions other people made or force the systems I encountered to respond differently. I cannot get those hours back. But I can tell the full story of the profound effects it had on me, and I can put down the shame that was never mine to begin with. I can keep caring and speaking out when the headlines have faded.

And if we cannot give survivors back the time that has already been taken from them, then the very least we can do is fight like hell to ensure the women who come after us don’t lose any of theirs.

About the Author:

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Rachel Chan

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