When Assistant Editor Kimberly Wear reported on the death of convicted violent sexual predator Richard Stobaugh’s death last week (“‘Ski Mask Rapist’ Richard Stobaugh Dies,” Oct. 1), many women and girls released sighs of relief. State law nearly allowed Stobaugh to be housed in Manila in 2025 and he was appealing the eventual decision against his conditional release when he died. While I’m not an advocate of capital punishment, the death of a rapist, or any abuser, can feel like brief respite, one less vector of vigilance to maintain.
The news rolled in with a tide of horrors from Cornell University, where the independently funded student newspaper The Daily Sun’s Cereese Qusba broke the story of a civil suit against members of the Chi Phi fraternity for the alleged 2024 drugging and seven-hour gang rape of a female student. The suit, filed by victim Jane Doe, also alleges the school administration swept aside the crime, expelling only two named participants and assigning essays to the other five. (Daily Sun reporters are still running it down like champs; give them a read.)
Not named in the civil suit are the 50 other men in the fraternity text chat, screenshots of which show an invitation to join a clearly questionable if not blatantly nonconsensual act, and not one man intervening.
That might shock more if Donald Trump, an admitted sexual assaulter who has been found liable for sexual abuse, weren’t in his second presidential term and if he and others on the list of guests to Jeffrey Epstein’s island weren’t going about business as usual. Our nation is not truly committed to protecting girls and women in any real way against sexual assault. Nor are we serious about seeking justice on their behalf — not enough to dismantle the systems that enable and perpetuate sexualized violence in the first place.
By now the statistics are familiar. While vastly underreported, according to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), 89 percent of sexual assaults over a 20-year span were deemed “founded” by law enforcement, yet only 8 percent led to convictions. (This, along with fear, re-traumatization and social stigma, is its own deterrent to reporting.)
For women and girls (89 percent of the targets of rape, though it can happen to anyone), the threat and the trauma of sexual assault is an electrical buzz in the background of our lives, sometimes sharper or duller but never fully absent. From the time we are children, we are warned how to sit, where and where not to look, how to avoid drawing attention without looking too vulnerable. We are told to cleave to the protection of men — those statistically most likely to harm us — but only the good ones. We’re told to yell “fire” because nobody will help if we yell “help” or “rape.” Sometimes not even good ones.
We learn infinite ways to fail at our safety. We’re told to comply to avoid making an attacker angry; we’re told not fighting makes a rape our fault. Where we go, what we wear, what we drink and who we’re with can call down the ever-looming attack that somehow nobody will believe happened or that will make people believe the worst of us.
Shifting the message to teaching men not to rape seems like the simplest pivot — raise boys to be good men who know about consent. That’s back on mothers again, but presumably with the aid of good men: fathers, coaches, mentors.
Still, it’s doubtful Stobaugh or the men in Cornell University’s chapter of Chi Phi weren’t clear on the rules. The feeling of power from breaking that rule and abusing someone for selfish satisfaction are, after all, the point of rape. Whether the rapist is a monstrous figure of violent compulsion like Stobaugh, or a fresh-faced 20-something opportunist with more access to drugs and lawyers than empathy, the result for women is the same. Look back at those conviction statistics. Consider that Brett Kavanaugh is a U.S. Supreme Court justice despite Christine Blasey Ford’s damning testimony alleging he sexually assaulted her in high school. What are the deterrents rapists are supposed to be afraid of?
Meanwhile, many women are playing a grim strategic game in our heads, determining whether a man is safe to be around socially, to accept an open drink from or to be alone with. Who are the good ones? (Despite a relentless right-wing campaign to turn trans people and drag queens into the terrors of sports arenas and bathrooms, they continue to be some of the safest individuals you’ll meet. Don’t try to gaslight ladies who’ve been FBI profiling our fellow bus passengers since junior high.)
The Cornell University story has unlocked a new level of this terrifying game for some of us as we shuffle the deck of men we know, asking how they’d have behaved in that fraternity house, how they’d respond to that text thread. What would the men you know do? Would they have told their friends to stop or put themselves between them and this stranger? What if they only read the text message? Would they question what was happening? Would they stop it, call the police on their friends? That is the very least a decent man does. To whom is an incapacitated woman an opportunity? To whom is she none of their business?
A man who does nothing, says nothing, is not a good man. He is an accomplice to rape.
It is not an empty slogan to say we are all Jane Doe because we know we could be or have been in similar straits. Despite our careful calculations, we could all mistake a bad man for a good one. And it’s deeply unsettling to find yourself puzzling over whether someone you’ve shared a joke with considers you a full human or something lesser. Plenty of men tell on themselves in conversations around sexual assaults in the news: Typical victim blaming, slut-shaming, obsessing over statistically rare false rape allegations and generally misogynistic comments are giveaways. These are not safe men. (Also, if you, as a man, can make comments like these knowing that one in five women in the U.S. experiences an attempted or completed rape in her lifetime, you are not a good man.)
But the bar for male behavior has been in the basement and needs raising if the onus of preventing rape is to shift to men. Simply refraining from committing a horrific violation of another human being shouldn’t earn anyone a cookie or a gold star. Confronting the culture of sexual violence in male spaces and conversations is where men can begin to hold each other accountable, to establish what is and isn’t acceptable. In practical terms that ranges from asking, “What do you mean by that?” to calling 9-1-1 like every man who saw that room and that text thread should have, followed by full cooperation. It means not only not harming women but not tolerating or carrying water for men who do.
Aspiring good men: Don’t ask yourself what you’d do if it was your sister or your daughter in her place. Ask what you hope someone would do if you were in her place. (Keep in mind one in 10 reported sexual assault victims are men or boys, according to RAINN.) You’d want someone to stand up for your humanity. You’d want them to say something, to intervene.
You likely wouldn’t want people in your community cozying up to your abuser or entertaining rape apologists who fret over your attacker’s ruined reputation, either. Innocent until proven guilty is the standard for the courts but it’s not enough to earn a place at my table when I believe someone has committed sexual assault. Is it enough for you? Especially in small communities, we too often choose to sacrifice the well-being of survivors to avoid conflict with abusers. This isn’t peace and it’s no kind of safety.
Social consequences — real and lasting ones, unlike the brief media flurries waved off by Hollywood stars and famous authors — and breaking the code of silent complicity between men may be all we have until we can force some meaningful shift in government and law.
If we are going to say we believe survivors, we must act like it. If you want to be one of the good ones, then do what a good man does.
The North Coast Rape Crisis Team, a local nonprofit dedicated to ending sexualized violence, operates a 24-hour hotline, (707) 445-2881 in Humboldt County and (707) 465-2851 in Trinity County, and offers a variety of support, counseling and advocacy services.
Jennifer Fumiko Cahill (she/her) is the managing editor at the Journal. Reach her at (707) 442-1400 ext. 106, or jennifer@northcoastjournal.com. Follow her on Bluesky @jfumikocahill.bsky.social.
This article appears in Gold in the Cracks.
