Glenn Greenwald on the Cornell case and online mob justice

In the last day or so, a firestorm of media reporting has covered the alleged gang rape of a woman by seven male students at a Cornell University fraternity in 2024.

These are exactly the kind of headlines the mainstream media lives on.

Very little of the media frenzy has reported accurately the fact that in 2024, the woman (who is protected by anonymity) said in a statement to police that she engaged in the sexual acts consensually and consented to the drinking and drug taking as well. So according to what she said to police there was no crime.

And it’s not like the incident was not investigated - according to Cornell President Michael I. Kotlikoff two of the accused were expelled, two suspended for at least two semesters, one had already graduated before any punishment could be handed down, and two were found not to be responsible for sexual misconduct.

However now two years later this woman has filed a lawsuit against the seven other then-students and the university, and she now says she was sexually assaulted and pressured into taking drugs. It also appears that she told University police at the time that she was “raped”, although she also told them despite being “super drunk when I got there” that she was “pretty OK with all of this”.

We have reproduced here an excellent commentary on all of this by Glenn Greenwald, with a superb description of the “primitive, cretinous and unreliable” social media mob, which has now set out to destroy the seven accused men.

About the speaker

Glenn Greenwald is a journalist, former constitutional lawyer, and author of four New York Times bestselling books on politics and law. He wrote for Salon and the Guardian before co-founding The Intercept in 2013, leaving in 2020 for independent journalism on Substack and Rumble, where he hosts System Update.

His reporting on the Edward Snowden NSA archive won the 2013 George Polk Award for National Security Reporting and shared in the Guardian team’s 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service; it also underpinned CitizenFour, which won the 2015 Academy Award for Best Documentary. His later reporting on corruption in the Bolsonaro government in Brazil contributed to the release of former president Lula da Silva.

The programme below was published on 30 September 2026 and is well worth watching in full.

The transcript follows. The words below are Glenn Greenwald’s, transcribed from the recording and lightly punctuated for reading; the headings and the introduction above are ours. Passages spoken by other people — a clip of Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and a clip of Sunny Hostin on The View — are marked where they occur.

“The complete abandonment of any foundational values”

I want to talk about the controversy surrounding this alleged rape case that took place in 2024 at Cornell University, and particularly the complete abandonment of any foundational values of how we treat accused people — an absolute erosion of a cultural belief in things like due process and a presumption of innocence.

It’s not just a matter here that people are debating guilt, which often happens. It’s that very prominent people have simply stated, based on not only very little but a lot of conflicting evidence, that all seven of these students are guilty of gang rape — spreading their names and photos everywhere while the one single accuser is protected, and then demanding punishments for them and obtaining punishments for them without them even having been charged, let alone convicted.

They’ve gotten several of them fired from their jobs, and are trying to get all of them fired. They are basically attempting to render them completely radioactive in life. Now, they’re not going to be imprisoned, presumably, unless they’re convicted at a trial. But there’s all kinds of punishments that are devastating and permanently debilitating to someone’s life, including calling them a gang rapist, getting them fired from every job, rendering them unemployable and unable to earn a livelihood.

“The most primitive, cretinous and unreliable way to judge somebody’s guilt”

All because a social media mob — which is basically the most primitive, cretinous and unreliable way to judge somebody’s guilt. Mob justice in general is typically extremely sinister and dangerous and unreliable, but mob justice on social media, with all the accompanying peer pressure and fear and attacks on anyone who peeps a word of dissent, is even worse.

The whole point of a jury trial, and the reason we protect the anonymity of jurors, is because people need to be free to stand up and say: look, I know this person is accused of a horrific crime, and I know a lot of you think he’s guilty, but I don’t believe the evidence proves that beyond a reasonable doubt.

One of the reasons why it was so disturbing to watch what was done in this Clancy case — a woman who strangled her three young children to death — and then 11 of the jurors accepted the insanity defence that she offered, and there was one lone holdout juror who didn’t. And he was just maligned, his character destroyed. He was called all kinds of names by mostly the women on the jury. He was a black man, as it turns out. And in retrospect, you can see how they’re talking about him. Because we need, in order to have reliable deliberations of guilt and innocence, the ability to dissent and to question without having a mob attack you.

Duke, a decade ago

And what is happening here is beyond belief, especially because it wasn’t all that long ago — just a decade ago — when we had a very similar case at Duke University. A woman accused the Duke University lacrosse team of having gang raped her. They were vilified, expelled, their lives were ruined, and there was never much evidence for it. And then years later she admitted to having fabricated the whole thing, and they can’t get their lives back.

“You don’t get to pick and choose”

So let’s just walk through this. I understand that rape is obviously one of the worst crimes you can commit. And traditionally it’s been difficult to prove, because it’s usually just a matter of he said, she said. And when you have a standard of guilt beyond all reasonable doubt, which is foundational to our justice system, it’s actually quite hard.

But you don’t get to pick and choose which crime you want to eliminate basic protections of due process and presumption of innocence from. Like, yeah, for murder, let’s make sure they get every robust protection and legal defence possible, every appeal, every evidentiary ruling in their favour. But for rape, let’s just believe the accuser and that’s it. Call it a day. Off with their head.

And I do find it particularly disturbing, to be quite honest, that this is in this particular case being led by the left. There are plenty of instances where it’s the right trying to assault due process, and I’ve talked about those many times. The war on terror was that. Deporting people for claiming they’re a member of a gang with no due process is that. But in this case it’s the left doing that.

And what’s so disturbing about it is the left has traditionally, throughout the 20th century, had as one of their foundational causes and values the need to provide the most robust protections possible for criminal defendants. It’s so basic. It’s usually people on the left who have gone, for example, to become public defenders, to defend the indigent who are accused of crimes, to make sure they get the full panoply of protections they deserve. And it’s the Warren Court and the left-wing justices in the 20th century who provided the most expansive readings of things like Miranda warnings and other protections.

All of that’s gone. All of that’s gone. It has been subsumed by this — far more important to a lot of people on the left and to the left-wing movement in general — this social justice cause of feminism and rape culture. And they don’t care at all about due process, presumption of innocence or anything.

I went to law school. I don’t like a lot of lawyers. But one thing about lawyers is that you do have it drummed into your head: the utter centrality, the indispensability of a commitment to the Bill of Rights and to the core protections of it. Free speech, free press, due process. And I just can’t believe that people would want to give that up.

As always, you can give it up in a case where you think it’s merited, but you’re going to create a climate in which it’s not going to be available to you, or someone you care about, or people you like, when they’re accused of crimes — and a mob on the internet decides they should be convicted and their lives ruined over it, with absolutely no recourse.

What actually happened

So let’s look at the New York Times account of this. First of all, there’s the headline from yesterday: Cornell’s sexual assault investigation to be reopened.

Now, just the quick facts. In 2024 there was a frat party at Cornell, and a woman went there and she ended up having sex with multiple men. She was also drinking and using drugs, and she was definitely intoxicated. Under New York law, if you voluntarily intoxicate yourself — namely, if you drink or take drugs, not because someone injects it into you, but because you choose to — intoxication doesn’t mean you can’t consent. You can be drunk and high; as long as you’re conscious, you can still consent. That’s just New York law. I’m not saying that should be the law or not. That is the law.

And what happened was, after this incident she went and spoke with the Cornell police and then the district attorney. And the district attorney never brought charges against any of these seven students. Two of them were expelled because there was a group chat they obtained where some pretty vulgar things were said — nothing about how she couldn’t consent or she was being raped, but just talking about her as a very sexualised object, in ways that were definitely vulgar. I don’t know that it’s that unusual for kids that age to speak in these terms amongst themselves. But if you read it, it is definitely vulgar and offensive.

But she told the DA — at least according to the DA, who came out today and said here’s why we never brought charges two years ago when this happened — she told the interviewers, number one, that nothing criminal took place; number two, that she drank and used drugs willingly and consensually; and number three, that she had sex with multiple men consensually.

So the DA said, well, it might be bad behaviour, but how can you bring criminal charges for rape when she’s saying she had sex consensually, she drank and had drugs consensually, and she was not unconscious during this whole time? She blacked out ultimately at like five thirty, six in the morning. But during the event she was conscious. And under New York law, the fact that you decide to get drunk doesn’t mean you can be accused of rape.

The gendered framework

But of course it leads to this other question, which is that the guys of the fraternity were also drinking and high. And I do think there’s always this odd gendered framework that gets applied oddly by the left, that claims to believe in the equality of women and feminist support for the strength of women and their autonomy and their agency.

If two people have sex and the woman is drunk and so is the man, why can the woman accuse the man of rape on the grounds that she was so intoxicated she couldn’t give consent, but the man can’t accuse her of rape on the grounds that he was intoxicated and thus couldn’t give consent? They were all drinking. They were all doing drugs. They were snorting ketamine off of her body. They were all drunk. It doesn’t excuse anything. But under law, because she said she had drunk and used drugs consensually and that she had sex consensually, the DA couldn’t bring charges.

The civil lawsuit

And now what happened is, two years later she brings a civil lawsuit for monetary damages against Cornell — obviously a very deep-pocketed institution with all kinds of liability insurance. She has a lawyer working on contingency, so the more money she wins, the more money he wins. And they make all these allegations, which are just that — allegations in a complaint in a lawsuit against Cornell and these students.

They were all students, by the way. She was a student at Cornell. They’re students at Cornell. We don’t know her race, because she’s anonymous for now. Some of the students were white, some of them are Hispanic. So even this left-wing framework of who’s privileged and who’s not, it’s hard to apply in a clean-cut case here, because she was also an Ivy League student — not exactly someone very marginalised.

So this is basically trying to create this culture, which came from MeToo and from lots of other prior attempts, to say that you have to believe women: the minute a woman utters an accusation, that’s the end of the story. Even though how many times have we seen that that’s been abused? You have to wait for the evidence to be presented. Also, there are seven of them who are now being called gang rapists. There’s no attempt to even differentiate among them — who did what? There’s no record of evidence.

Here’s the rest of the New York Times story, that says: Jane Manning, a former prosecutor and director of Women’s Equal Justice, a nonprofit which serves survivors of sexual assault, said it appears the prosecutors had decided that there was no case based only on the initial police paperwork — a practice she said was common, but, quote, unacceptable. Another likely complication was that New York law defines rape narrowly, Ms Manning said, excluding a person who was subjected to unwanted sex while voluntarily intoxicated unless they are fully unconscious at the time of the assault.

So that’s the law. And it’s not like the initial police paperwork was incomplete or just dubious. The prosecutor said she herself claimed that she drank and had sex and did drugs consensually. She wrote emails afterward to at least a couple of them saying she wanted to do it again, but this time with not as many guys.

Now, I’m not saying all of this means she wasn’t raped. There are all kinds of explanations and theories about why a woman who’s raped might still write nice letters to her accused rapist, and maybe she would not realise, or not want to say immediately after, that she was raped, and only realises it two years later when it’s time to bring a monetary lawsuit against a deep-pocketed institution like Cornell. Who knows?

But that’s the point. Who knows? And to go around posting these guys’ photos everywhere — these are young kids, like 20, 21, 22, students like she was — and calling them gang rapists and ruining their lives based on allegations.

“Filled with things that turned out to be absolute lies”

You know how many criminal complaints, civil complaints I’ve seen filled with things that turned out to be just absolute lies? I was a lawyer before I was a journalist, for some of you who don’t know — a litigator.

What happens is, the process is you meet with your client, your client tells you what their version of events was. You do as much of an investigation as you can, but you’re limited, because you only have your client — you don’t have subpoena power, you don’t have discovery. And then you write down what your client claims happened. You’re under an obligation to use some good faith to make sure it’s not filled with lies. But sometimes you end up saying things in the complaint that your client tells you, or tries to lead you to believe, that turn out to be disproven. I’ve seen that as a plaintiff’s lawyer. I’ve seen it as a defence lawyer.

Proclaiming people guilty of a violent, horrific crime like rape, and destroying their lives, based on a civil complaint and that alone — I’m sorry, that is sinister and repulsive.

A congresswoman declares them guilty

Now, in case you think I’m exaggerating when I’m saying that people are just proclaiming them to be guilty without the slightest questioning, the slightest possibility that they’re not — I give you one Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I just want you to listen to her. This was her speaking earlier this morning, maybe last night actually, at an event for the group called For Perfect Union.

And she has concluded that all seven of them are guilty of despicable violent crimes without the slightest bit of question — not just beyond reasonable doubt, but beyond any doubt — and that Cornell’s refusal to treat them as criminals, and the prosecutor’s and the police’s refusal to charge them, is because we live in a rape culture. Just listen to her.

The news coming out of Cornell University about what they did regarding Jane Doe. For those of you who may not know, it has just been revealed that in 2024, just about two years ago, seven men drugged and gang raped a 20-year-old woman. They lured her into a fraternity house. They drugged her with ketamine. They then posted to a group chat that she was incapacitated. And seven men took turns gang raping her for seven hours.

Okay, I’m going to continue with that, but: seven men gang raped her for hours, period. No question, it happened. These men are guilty of one of the most horrific crimes imaginable.

She also claims that in the group chat, she said that she was incapacitated. They did not say that. As I said, they said pretty vulgar things — like her pussy is open for business, things like that. And the guys were asking, oh, is she still available? And they were like, yeah. But nothing like she was blacked out, or that we were raping her. It’s just a total fabrication. And it’s the reason why we don’t treat people as guilty of horrific crimes based on the ignorant assertions of people like AOC, or online mobs, especially before there’s any investigation.

She went on basically just saying that Cornell and the police and everybody else are guilty of rape culture, of sanctioning gang rape. And she called the supposed victim a girl, and the seven men, seven men — without mentioning they were essentially the same age. They were all students at undergraduate school at Cornell.

If you’re comfortable having guilt determined by politicians like AOC with no investigation, no criminal charges, nothing — just the statements of a civil lawyer highly motivated to accuse Cornell of overlooking rape culture, since that’s the only way he’ll really get paid — and then destroying people’s lives on the basis of it, I don’t know what kind of system you think you’re creating, but it’s nothing good. Quite the contrary.

“Cornell won’t, but we will”

Before I show you this, I just want to show you the kind of things that are going on. Here’s the Cornell Daily Sun. This is their editorial page. Cornell refused to release the names of the seven students, because they haven’t been charged or found guilty of anything. So the students on the editorial board published this editorial with the headline: Cornell won’t, but we will. And then it names all seven of the accused students.

And then it says: these are the names of the seven men named as defendants in a civil complaint filed on September 14th, alleging they drugged and gang raped a Cornell student identified as Jane Doe in the Chi Phi house in October 2024.

So notice there that the accuser is protected. Her anonymity is safeguarded. But the accused, simply by virtue of being accused, we’re going to spread their names all over the place. In what remote sense is that just? What is this double standard? Where did we get this from — that the accuser gets to be protected, but the accused, before any charge, let alone finding of guilt, have their names basically sullied for life as gang rapists before they even begin their life?

Maybe they are guilty. I have no idea. I’m certainly not arguing that they’re not. And if they are, you have a trial and appeals, and if they’re found guilty you put them in prison for as long as the law permits. Obviously. But as I said, even if there was a gang rape — which there’s so much reason to have skepticism about — you have to treat all these people as individuals. You can’t just group them all together and be like, hey, they’re all gang rapists. And nobody has any idea what they’re even accused of each doing. No one cares.

An unexpected dissent on The View

Here is — this really surprised me, pleasantly surprised me. This is Sunny Hostin, who is one of the co-hosts on The View. I don’t typically say this, but I have to give her a ton of credit for speaking so fearlessly and eloquently in defence of the rights of these students, and the ample reasons there are to have serious skepticism about whether they’re being fairly treated and accused.

Now, obviously, usually Sunny Hostin is very aligned with the cultural left. She’s not a leftist in foreign policy or economics — very standard, kind of Hillary, Biden, Obama, Kamala Harris voter. But on culture issues she’s very much to the left, very woke, whatever. And she really dissents from that here. But she’s usually the leader of that.

But the thing about Sunny Hostin is she’s also not just a lawyer — meaning she went to law school and therefore got drummed into her head all the things I described earlier about the crucial importance of due process and a presumption of innocence, and you understand how often accusations are false, or people are falsely accused, even falsely convicted, wrongfully convicted. And then 20 years later you find out, oh — we thought for sure they were the murderer, they were convicted beyond a reasonable doubt, and now we have DNA evidence exonerating them that didn’t exist, or confessions from a witness that they lied, or some other guy comes forward and confesses.

And the thing that’s so important to note about Sunny Hostin is she was a prosecutor of sex crimes. She was a federal prosecutor who prosecuted basically all men for sex crimes — principally things like rape and sexual assault against women. She went to the government to work as a prosecutor to basically avenge male sex crimes against women, which is exactly what this case is. And you would think someone with that background might be the first one to stand up and say, you know, burn them at the stake. But she didn’t. And I’m sure it’s because not just she has this legal background, this law school background, but also because she has seen up close a lot of prosecutions of this kind and knows that accusations — just listen to what she says. She says it so well in her own words, I don’t even want to summarise it.

Sunny Hostin: I actually have the statement that Jane Doe wrote at that time. And —

Co-host: Just give it to us in a sentence. We don’t have a lot of time.

Sunny Hostin: It’s several pages long.

Co-host: I know, but —

Sunny Hostin: It’s nine pages long. And I will say that under current New York State law, voluntary intoxication or drug use — and she voluntarily drank a lot, she voluntarily snorted ketamine off of one of the boys’ body parts. Even though she was highly intoxicated when she arrived at the frat house — she was highly intoxicated, but had made plans to meet one of the young men. She allowed other boys, and consented to other boys, snorting ketamine off of her body. And under New York law, voluntary intoxication or drug use that merely impairs judgment does not legally constitute an inability to consent to sexual activity, right? So that means if you voluntarily ingest drugs, you voluntarily take alcohol, you can agree to have threesomes — which, in her statement, she agreed to have two separate threesomes. One young man did walk in and say, everybody out. So there was one person that did that. And according to her statement, three of the young men did not touch her. But I say all that to say: the pictures of these young men, who have not been charged, not been adjudicated, are being plastered all over the internet. I think people are reporting this story inaccurately. I think they’re reporting it unfairly. And while this is something that we have to take very seriously, there is no way, according to her statement in 2024, that any prosecutor would have brought forth the case.

Co-host: But she was intoxicated. How did she —

Sunny Hostin: It’s this New York law. Again, under New York law, voluntary intoxication — if you voluntarily drink 10 beers and you voluntarily ingest ketamine, but that intoxication —

Co-host: That doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that the guys attacked her, whether she’s drunk or not.

Sunny Hostin: Well, according to her statement, she says they did not attack her. Her statement in 2024, she —

Co-host: My issue’s with this New York law, though.

Sunny Hostin: She consented to the sexual activity. She consented to it according to her own statement in 2024. Now, I prosecuted sex crimes for 10 years. I believe women. I am not saying that we shouldn’t believe her. But in 2024 she said one thing, and now in 2026 she is saying another thing.

God, that is so righteous. Every word of that was so well stated. I’m not saying that because she’s making the point I’m trying to make. She’s speaking from expertise. You can’t actually get anybody with greater credentials to speak on this case than someone who is a feminist, who went and became a federal prosecutor for a decade prosecuting male sex crimes, primarily or overwhelmingly against women, in exactly cases like this.

“No company can withstand this kind of mob justice”

There are several points she made. The point about how they’re having their faces spread all over the internet — let me just give you one example. Already a couple of them have been fired from their jobs, and now you have this Twitter page, which turns out is based in like South Asia or India. I don’t know why, but you can see how viral it went: 10,000 retweets, 32,000 likes. So this guy’s face is now all over the place. His name is — I don’t even want to say his name — but they’re basically saying: next stop, one of the Cornell seven gang rapists to be fired, and his name, his employer, company email and phone number below. Repost. Everybody just madly reposting.

They have no idea what this guy actually did. No idea what he’s even alleged to have done. And yet they’re posting the name and address and phone number of his employer and spreading it to millions of people, encouraging them to call and demand he be fired. I’d be shocked if he’s not already fired. No company can withstand this kind of mob justice — especially to defend some recent graduate who’s junior in your firm. What business would do that, unless you really get a brave and principled one?

“The standard for conviction”

So she’s absolutely right about that. But she’s also going beyond the due process point and saying — and this is absolutely true — if you have a supposed victim who says at any point, at the beginning, the middle, wherever, that actually she was not the victim of criminal activity; she had sex consensually, she drank consensually, she showed up drunk at a party, obviously no one forced her, she used drugs consensually. Even if she changes her story later on, this is not actually I was raped, they forced me, they coerced me into drinking or drugs or whatever.

Maybe you as a kind of person are still inclined to believe her. You believe rape victims deny what happened because of shame or suppressed memories or whatever. That’s all fine to debate. But the standard for conviction — not just for rape defendants, but for all defendants — is guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. And prosecutors are ethically obligated not to bring cases unless they first conclude that the evidence proves that the defendant is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. They just can’t bring cases unless they believe that can be proven. You can’t just charge people unless you believe the evidence justifies a conviction.

And as Sunny Hostin said — she herself was a sex crimes prosecutor — there is zero chance that any prosecutor under these circumstances, given what she said, would ever, ever bring charges. How could you not have reasonable doubt when she herself has made these statements? And yet the campaign here is to bully and force and socially coerce these prosecutors to bring a case that they know they can’t win.

The district attorney’s own account

Now, just to underscore this, let me show you this last thing. When all this broke this week, the DA came out and wanted to explain himself. And here’s what he said — this is the DA who’s responsible for deciding whether or not charges will be brought, saying here’s why I didn’t bring charges:

Jane Doe’s sworn statement in November of 2024 did not allege that she was drugged against her will or gang raped. On the contrary, Jane Doe’s statement described her participation in drug use and sexual activity as voluntary, conscious and consensual. My office obviously did not and could not have based our November 2024 decision on the allegations in a civil lawsuit that would not be filed until two years later.

It’s not even just that the civil lawsuit got filed two years later. It’s that once she said that, she can maybe win a civil lawsuit, where the standard is much different. It’s kind of like OJ Simpson got acquitted in his criminal trial because the jury believed that the prosecutors didn’t prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, but the Goldman family sued him for the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson and they won, because the standard is preponderance of evidence — basically more than 50%.

So you can sue somebody, maybe, and try and explain to the jury why that prior statement shouldn’t be seen as precluding guilt. But in a criminal case, because so much more is at stake — namely the thing most valuable to human beings, which is our liberty, our ability to live life without being put in a cage for the next 30 years by a state at the age of 20, 24 — that isn’t enough. Preponderance of evidence isn’t enough. It’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

A flawed system is not an argument for the mob

And look, I understand that our justice system is deeply flawed and often renders extremely unfair verdicts. I wrote a book in 2012 called With Liberty and Justice for Some, the point of which is that if you’re rich and powerful you obviously are shielded in a lot of ways from legal accountability, even for the worst crimes. We have a two-tier justice system.

I talked about Wall Street, Obama shielding the Wall Street barons who caused the 2008 financial crisis and not prosecuting any of them. About torture and rendition and all of that being dismissed away. I drew it back to — not saying that it began here, but this is kind of the modern-day model of it — when Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon on the grounds that prosecuting a president would be too tumultuous for the country. We have to look forward, not backward. Which is the same thing Obama said when he said why no one in the CIA would be prosecuted for war on terror crimes. We have to look forward, not backward — even though all prosecutions by definition require looking backward. But for important people, powerful people, wealthy people, it’s a different standard. Everyone knows this.

And you can definitely reform the criminal justice system. But the alternative to the fact that we have a flawed and imperfect and often quite systemically unfair justice system is not to scrap the whole thing and start declaring guilt and punishing people based on online mob justice, social justice warrior mob justice. I can’t think of anything more horrifying than that in terms of the standard we use for determining guilt. And yet that’s what it’s rapidly becoming.

“Due process is fundamental to any decent civilised society”

And in case you think I’m picking and choosing when I think this — I defended Brett Kavanaugh on the same grounds. I started my journalism career based on a defence of due process for people accused of, but never charged with or convicted of, being terrorists in the war on terror. People put in Guantanamo for 25 years with no charges, no opportunity to get into a court. People who are picked up and kidnapped with no due process of any kind. Even people who were arrested on American soil and declared enemy combatants by George Bush, even though they were US citizens, put in a military brig for three and a half years, tortured, kept from even their lawyer, let alone communication with the outside world.

Due process is fundamental to any decent civilised society. It’s foundational to the centuries of justice that we constructed as part of common law, Anglo-American law, the Western concept of justice, and throughout large parts of the non-Western world as well. The idea that you have to be proven guilty through due process before you can be treated as a criminal, declared guilty and punished as one — not just with prison, but even with life destruction. That should be obvious.

The question here is not constitutional. You can get people fired and go on a campaign to destroy their reputation, because you’re not bound by the constitution if you’re not the state. It’s an ethical and moral question. You have no idea if these people are guilty. None. You don’t even know anything based on a civil complaint. And yet there are millions of people, led by the AOCs of the world and that kind of crowd, who are just out there saying these seven young men are gang rapists, period. It’s despicable to do that.

And this is like with free speech, where huge parts of the left and the pro-Israel right have decided, eh, it’s not really important, there are higher causes than that. Same with due process.

“It intimidates and deters”

And it is alarming to watch just how — and I’ll say the final thing — when you have this mob justice assembled online, gathered online, just stewing in their own sense of righteousness and rage, it also intimidates and deters a lot of people from standing up and saying, wait a minute, I don’t think this is warranted yet. Because those people — and I can show you how many times it’s happened to me, and not just me but many other people — you get accused of either being a rape sympathiser, or supporting a rape culture, or being a rapist yourself, whatever.

Now, people who are in a position where you can endure that, as I feel I am, have the responsibility to be the ones to stand up and say: wait a minute, this is not warranted, this is not just. If there’s evidence and it’s proven in court, convict them and punish them. But not until. And certainly not based on what we have now, which is a money-hungry plaintiff’s lawyer trying to fill his own pockets based on allegations that his own client, who was supposed to be a victim two years earlier, vehemently negated and denied.