Two things have reverberated after a young woman filed a civil lawsuit last month alleging that seven members of a Cornell University fraternity took part in an hours-long gang rape in October 2024. One is the noise: Many women’s distrust of the institutions and officials meant to protect them runs deep, and they’re making that known in protests from coast to coast. Another is the silence: Many men’s voices have been notably muted — and, in some cases, completely absent — from a reckoning that could very well be Gen Z’s #MeToo moment.
The gender split in how people might have perceived this case tells its own story. And according to a new survey of 1,155 likely voters conducted earlier this month by the progressive-leaning group Data for Progress, what this moment means for women could have ramifications for the midterm elections on November 3. The survey, which was first shared exclusively with The 19th, found that women are 14 percentage points more likely than men to say they think elected officials have done too little to prevent sexual assault.
Women are also 13 percentage points more likely than men to say they think college sororities and fraternities hurt campus culture, and 10 percentage points more likely to say they don’t trust sororities or frats to respond appropriately to claims of sexual assault. Young women tend to vote at higher rates than young men, and the #MeToo movement, which peaked nine years ago, proved to be politically formative for young women coming of age during that time. That means the fervor — and the fury — that has accompanied the news of the “Cornell seven” case could spill over into the election.
Cheyenne Hunt, founder and executive director of Reckoning Action, a nonprofit combating gender bias, said she and her team put together a rally in Washington, D.C., in response to the Cornell lawsuit. With just four days’ notice, hundreds of people turned out. Standing in front of the Washington Monument, she called the names of women who said they’d been victims of sexual assault, including Bernadette Greene-Placentia, an Arizona congressional candidate who came forward this month alleging that she believes she was raped by two men while repairing campaign signs, and Kendall Francis, a student at Louisiana State University who alleged last month that an LSU football player raped her in October 2025.
Women like Hunt have been leading demonstrations from New York to California where they’re also calling on men, politicians and institutions to do more to address the pervasiveness of sexual violence against women. At the University of California, Davis, students at an October rally issued public demands on tackling sexual assault, including that university Chancellor Gary May denounce the actions of the “Cornell seven” (the university is reviewing the demands). In Boston, about 800 people — most of them women — attended a rally at the Boston Common that called on participants to pressure elected officials to improve sexual violence prevention measures.
In Seattle, a march organized after Jane Doe filed her lawsuit ended next to the county prosecutor’s office, which organizers felt had not done enough to press charges in sexual assault cases in the area. Hunt said all of it is in response to what she believes is under the surface: “Misogyny is having a full-scale cultural resurgence in America,” she said. Days after nationwide protests around the “Cornell seven” case, comedian Shane Gillis performed a monologue on “Saturday Night Live” where he joked that he “didn’t know women just dress like whores now” at the gym.
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