On Cornell, the culture of impunity, a solution that worked, and a disaster in the making

“Can he call you?”

Could the man who assaulted me call me?

Would that be acceptable as a way to wrap up the “investigation” into what I’d told his employer he’d done to me? Presumably he’d stammer out some kind of apology. But I’ll never know, because I declined the call.

The man who assaulted me in 2014 was an executive for one of the largest media companies in the country, and I was a TV critic who got mailings from that company all the time; finding my address within the company’s PR database probably would have been a breeze. And HR’s idea of an empathic, judicious response to what I’d told them about that terrible night was to propose giving him my number?

I don’t like dredging this up. Everything about that conversation re-traumatized me, as was the case with each interaction with that company’s HR. As I wrote a decade ago, one of them asked me, “Could anything you did that night have been construed as flirting?” I had to answer that on a speakerphone while my lawyer, a stranger I was paying out of my own pocket, looked on.

When I describe the corrosive clown show I endured in 2015 to people, they are horrified, in part because this wasn’t some bumbling tiny company in the middle of nowhere: It was one of the largest media entities in this nation. The people who are not surprised tend to be survivors of harassment, abuse and other kinds of misconduct, people who attempted to do the right thing, and were put through hell for their trouble.

Many survivors of assault, abuse and misconduct to come to believe that the systems we encounter are designed to make us feel so degraded and so full of regret that we’ll never go near them again. A problem does not exist if nobody ever wants to report that problem. Ergo, problem solved!

These dynamics are so entrenched that a lot of us can’t look away from the coverage of the Cornell rape case. My heart breaks for that young woman, but a lot of us are riveted because so many survivors have been similarly let down, humiliated, and mangled by systems that allegedly exist to help us and prevent further harm.



The sick dread and nausea I felt during the superficial “investigation” of what I endured — all those emotions came back when I read about the handling of the case by the university and other authorities. Two of the Cornell men who were allegedly part of what happened that night were told to “study sexual harassment, social media use and bystander intervention, and to write ‘reflection papers.’”


The man who assaulted me was asked to read the relevant part of the HR manual. I wish I was making that up. There’s more: The HR woman, in sympathetic tones, told me he had been crying in her office. Was he crying from remorse or because he got caught? If the HR woman thought the latter was possible, she never let on.

One survivor of campus rape, per expert Tracy DeTomasi, was told to avoid reunions. She was also informed that her perpetrator was asked to complete a 30-minute anger management course.

Burn it down.

That was the name of the book I wrote after years of investigating abuse and all manner of violations and coverups in Hollywood. I’ve spent a decade listening as hundreds of people told me about trying to change systems that were quietly and persistently resistant to their efforts. Like too many colleges and universities, a lot of people with real power in Hollywood know a great deal about covering for monstrous, damaging people while pretending to care.

One Hollywood man I reported on in 2017 was investigated by HR — twice. After the first probe, he began joking that HR had a “shock collar” on him. According to my sources, he “doubled down”: “He was emboldened,” one source said. “He would brag about his bad behavior.” A few months after Variety ran my exhaustive story on those HR investigations and other allegations, the network he worked for at the time, CBS, offered him a new contract (a few months later, after I wrote about that contract offer, he was let go).

Absent Jane Doe coming forward and her civil lawsuit being publicized by the student journalists at the Cornell Daily Sun, what would have stopped any of those seven frat brothers from exhibiting reprehensible behavior after they left Ithaca, NY? A clue: When Chanel Miller, the survivor at the center of the Brock Turner rape case, spoke at Cornell earlier this year, the frat bros who had been required by their chapters to attend sat there scrolling, “bored, on their phones.”

Systems that bring about true accountability and prevent future harm are the dream, but where are they? I wish I knew. What is in place now is not nothing — it is worse than nothing. My experiences and my reporting have led me to this conclusion: Systems of “consequences” all too often embolden abusers and perpetrators. Slaps on the wrists are not reliable systems of accountability, they are forms of permission. They are gateways to further abuse.

Wouldn’t it be great if there were an organization devoted to severely curtailing or even ending sexual assault on campus? I think so. I’ve been on the board of one for two years. It’s called Callisto, and DeTomasi, the expert on sexual violence I quoted earlier, is its CEO. But a few months ago, the board made the horrible but necessary decision to begin the process of closing up shop. Callisto’s reporting portal was shut down, and if the organization doesn’t get a major injection of cash within the next month, Callisto will be a memory.
 
I learned about the nonprofit Callisto, which was founded in 2011, during my research for Burn It Down. It attempts to hand autonomy back to survivors of rape and assault on campus, and to catch serial perpetrators of sexual violence. Until the portal was shut down earlier this year — possibly permanently — Callisto served 21 million people with .edu emails, and its services were twofold, as I explained in this 2024 post.

Survivors could enter an account of what happened to them into an encrypted, private database. That information was not shared with Callisto’s staff, law enforcement, college Title IX offices, or any other authority. It provided survivors with a detailed, timestamped document outlining their experience.

The second function involved matches: A survivor could enter a name, a phone number and other identifying information about their assailant into that secure and encrypted system, and see if any other survivor had reported an assault by that person. If there was a match, both survivors got the services of a confidential advocate. All of this was free, because colleges refused to pay for it.

Yes, there have been reports at Cornell. And speaking more broadly, yes, of course there have been matches.

What is radical about Callisto is that it gave back power to people who’d had their consent violated. They were introduced to the other survivor(s) of a specific perpetrator, if they choose that option. They had the autonomy to decide on the best course of action for them. Matched survivors could, at the very least, get help and talk to someone else who could understand exactly what they’d gone through.

Perpetrators have networks, institutions, and norms that protect and enable them. Survivors deserve that kind of support.

Once the dust clears from the Cornell scandal, people will talk about creating something like Callisto — but it already exists. This is one of the causes of my internal primal scream for the past couple of months. As former Callisto board chair Brian Byrd put it in this essential post, “Callisto did not fail because the problem went away. Campus sexual assault rates have not meaningfully declined. Serial perpetration remains the dominant pattern. The organization failed because, as a society, we were unwilling to pay for the infrastructure of accountability, even when that infrastructure was cheap, proven, and elegant.” [Bold type added.]

Callisto was needed — and growing. Accounts have been created at more than 750 colleges and universities in every state, and the organization had exciting plans for continued growth into non-campus realms. But without a major financial intervention, the organization — and all those reports waiting for matches — will be gone in weeks. Everyone at Callisto and on the board is immensely grateful for the small-dollar donors who have helped the organization and who have spread the word about it. But at this point, Callisto needs millions to avoid shutting its doors permanently. The world of philanthropy could step up right now — and that’s long overdue.

Two percent of U.S. philanthropy goes to organizations focusing on women and girls. I’m not talking about organizations that address sexual violence. Everything devoted to women and girls gets two percent of American philanthropy. It’s an appalling stat, nearly as appalling as the lack of progress on creating systems of accountability that work for survivors, not against them.

“People think I’m being hyperbolic when I tell them how college campuses handle rape. At least the Cornell scandal is showing people how ridiculous or harmful these processes can be,” DeTomasi told me. “But beyond this one case, my experience shows that universities just don’t want to deal with this issue — and right now, they have no incentive to do so in a meaningful way. Unless someone like a Jane Doe sues an institution like Cornell, all the incentives converge on covering up rape and assault.”

Around 1 in 4 female students, 1 in 15 male students, and 1 in 5 transgender, nonbinary, or genderqueer students are sexually assaulted during their college years, and more than “90% of these assaults are committed by repeat perpetrators, who offend an average six times before they graduate,” according to Callisto. This problem is so entrenched that a feature of my time at college decades ago — Take Back the Night rallies — will be held once again, online and in person, across the nation on Nov. 1.

The Cornell reports would be awful at any time, but knowing that Callisto was about to die… that’s been extremely hard for everyone who cares about this organization and its goals. Real talk: I think it’s about to die in part because it makes powerful people uncomfortable. And I’m not alone in that belief.

“Accountability infrastructure implicates the institutions that sit adjacent to every major endowment and every corporate giving program: universities, fraternities, employers, the criminal legal system,” Brian Byrd wrote. “It names a category of person, the repeat perpetrator, whom our institutions have every incentive to treat as a statistical abstraction rather than a knowable individual. Funding a hotline says we care about victims. Funding Callisto said we intend for assailants to be found.”

Do people with real money and real power want that? Do any of them want to help survivors — or further traumatize them? Do the powers that be want accountability, or do we want a culture of impunity to continue to flourish?

This ask is the definition of a Hail Mary, but Callisto still has a chance — if major donors, deep-pocketed foundations or institutions of philanthropy step up (to start that process: development@projectcallisto.org). Everyone in those worlds who has said they care about the awful statistics about sexual assault: Time to put up or shut up. You could step up now and actually keep this organization open — and even help it expand into all the realms that need it. Or you could continue to talk a good game about caring about sexual violence, even as an organization devoted to ending it faces extinction.

A lot of us have been in these trenches for a long time. We’re tired. It’s time for those with real resources to step up.

Or to finally own the fact that they don’t care about the next Jane Doe.