Netflix’s ‘Jane Doe v. Cornell’ Is Election-Season Activism Dressed Up As A Documentary

Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. The politically timed accusations, media storms and related rallies, riots, and protests, hyper-organized as though planned and ready to launch on a moment’s notice, that function to whip the Democratic base up into a frenzy of renewed hatred for something or someone. This is how the Democrats operate: not in unity, not in building something positive, but in hatred, hysteria, and calls to destroy, to eliminate, to silence, and to ban. 

This fall’s featured hysteria was the supposed “gang rape” at a Cornell University fraternity in 2024, which activists conveniently renewed as a nationwide focal point just before the midterms. Last month, Netflix released a documentary examining the “often flawed systems that investigate students’ claims of sexual assault,” focusing heavily on an “investigation” pursued by the school paper, The Cornell Daily Sun. The 36-minute “Instadoc,” titled “Jane Doe v. Cornell,” doesn’t really examine much of anything, but rather begins from an assumption that a rape took place, as well as a grave injustice in the response to this alleged rape. The film presents “Jane Doe” as an unquestionable victim whom the university mistreated and argues this all is part of a longstanding pattern and a pervasive “rape culture” on campus.

The doc opens with clips of female TikTokers announcing, “I am Jane Doe,” as well as of images of legions of angry protesters demanding “justice.” It presents the student newspaper as the only effort to seek this “justice.” Cereese Qusba, senior editor at The Cornell Daily Sun, explains, “We didn’t want to sugarcoat anything, we didn’t want to omit details, we wanted to provide the community with as much transparency as we wish we had from the university.”

“Transparency” isn’t exactly the vibe I got from this documentary.

A statistic widely reported during the last major “rape culture on campus” panic ahead of the 2014 election — that “one in five undergraduate women report having experienced sexual assault” — reappears in the film, minus the caveat that the surveys behind the reference included things like unwanted kissing and touching, as well as actual rape, in these numbers. The stat offers a view of campus as a dangerous place for women, where they are constantly facing predators, as well as a place where the university doesn’t care about their safety and well-being.

The question of “why didn’t law enforcement handle this” connects to a not-so-vague accusation that Cornell police are compromised by the fact they work for and therefore are incentivized to protect the university above students. This leads into the explanation of an alternate route toward justice in Title IX, which Amanda Walsh, deputy director of the Victim Rights Law Center, explains, “is a civil rights law, and it applies to educational institutions that receive federal funding, and it prohibits discrimination based on sex.” 

It is true that Title IX obliges these institutions to respond to sexual assault allegations. It is also true that a main purpose of the law is to ensure female students have fair and equal access to athletic opportunities on campus, something that disappeared under Democratic rule after former President Barack Obama published guidance aiming to “protect gender identity under Title IX.” Obama’s 2016 letter asserted that transgender-identifying students have the right to access bathrooms and locker rooms and participate on athletic teams based on their proclaimed gender identity. This meant schools were to treat males who claimed to be female as such, and therefore allow them to compete as “women” in sports, as well as access female locker rooms.

The great hypocrisy of the legions of feminists and leftists up in arms about “Jane Doe” and the university’s purported failure to protect its female students from male violence is that not one has expressed concern, never mind outrage, at their party’s decision to allow predatory men to access some of the spaces in which females are most vulnerable. There is no concern for the safety of female athletes endangered and disenfranchised by being forced to compete with and against males, or for the girls and the women expected to tolerate men watching them change — something once considered a sex crime. 

This is among the reasons Democrats’ efforts to claim the mantle of “party for women” fall flat. These people can’t even begin to define the word “woman,” lest it exclude males, yet suddenly when election season rolls around they are up in arms about sexism and women’s safety. 

You would think people who care deeply about sexual assault would also care about allowing actual male rapists to share prison cells with female inmates — women who truly are voiceless, marginalized, and extremely vulnerable and likely have a history of serious trauma connected to their crimes. You would think people who claim to care about “equality” would care about the young women being deprived of opportunities so that Democrats can play “good guy” and win elections on that basis. 

Clearly, they don’t.

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Meghan Murphy is a writer from Vancouver, now living in Mexico. Find more of her work at www.meghanmurphy.ca.