📄 What’s in the Cornell lawsuit?
🎥 Elon Musk documentary
🧓 Why many Congress members don’t retire
💵 Social Security
Hi friends,
Chris Vazquez, your Friday newsletter writer here. I am back to once again ask you to watch the new episode of “What’s Your Source?”, LNI’s new show that I help research, write, edit and fact-check, alongside my very talented teammates. This week, we dive into what’s up with all the food recalls. Not to whine, but I worked until almost 10pm one night this week editing myself into a fake wholesale store with Dave. Please do me a solid and make it worth it.
Beyond the artificial, green screened walls of Cost-low, things aren’t looking too hot. From censorship to social media insolvency to new details around the Cornell Seven case, this week was a lot to process. Dave’s covered it all, so let’s dive in.
A timeline of the Cornell Seven case
On Oct. 19, 2024, a young woman studying at Cornell went to the Chi Phi fraternity house. In a lawsuit, she alleged that two members of the fraternity pressured her to snort ketamine before sexually assaulting her. A photo in the lawsuit shows a group chat called “Chi Phi Actives” in which defendants appear to invite other members to sexually assault the woman. That photo shows that the first messages were sent at 1:42 a.m. The lawsuit alleges that the assault continued for four hours after that, until 5:45 a.m. During that time, the lawsuit says a fraternity member pressured her to take more drugs.
Less than a month later, in November 2024, the woman reported the incident to university police. Her lawyers say she was never contacted by the district attorney’s office or any investigators beyond the university who specialize in speaking with rape survivors. After Cornell conducted an internal review, Jane Doe’s lawyer says the university expelled two fraternity members. Five others were allegedly suspended or told to write essays. Cornell has said the essays were not the “sole consequence of their involvement.”
By all accounts, the justice systems one would turn to for accountability here did close to nothing. It’s not clear whether police ever interviewed the accused men, the district attorney’s office with jurisdiction over Cornell didn’t think they could bring criminal charges, and the woman’s lawyers say police and prosecutors kept her out of the loop throughout this entire process.
Cornell’s Chi Phi chapter then closed. The police department in Ithaca, New York — where Cornell is located — said no one ever reported the assault to them. You might see media coverage of a text the woman sent to one of the defendants saying “non[e] of the sexual stuff was illegal.” But it’s common for survivors to downplay what happened to them.
Feeling overwhelmed and burnt out by this news? That’s where this week’s tip from our friends at MediaWise comes in. You can stay informed and also take breaks from an onslaught of information that feels like too much.
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How platforms censored an exposé on Elon Musk
Just in time for spooky season, theaters in New York and LA will screen the documentary “Musk” starting Oct. 9 before the film makes its way to other cities starting Oct. 16. Back in 2023, Universal Pictures bought the international film rights and last month the documentary was shown at the Venice Film Festival. Then, Elon Musk himself called the film a “hit piece” and “boring.” After that, The Hollywood Reporter wrote that Universal was second guessing whether it would release the film.
But as Universal was weighing Musk’s anger at the documentary, the film earned 100% on Rotten Tomatoes. The film’s domestic distributor, Bleecker Street, started promoting it. But guess who got in the way of people seeing promos for a documentary critical of an ultra-wealthy tech CEO? Other ultra-wealthy tech CEO-owned social media platforms. YouTube, TikTok and Meta didn’t allow ads for the documentary on their platforms.
Backlash ensued. So, Meta and YouTube reversed their decisions. YouTube claimed in the same sentence that the ad “has always been available” and “was temporarily restricted.” Meta said the whole thing was an error. Elon Musk’s X is still not running the ads. So YouTube is contradicting itself, Meta said, Our bad, guys, X is being petty, and TikTok is the platform equivalent of your milquetoast acquaintances who just “aren’t really political.” The platform has remained quiet about the trailer and doesn’t allow political ads in general.
This is part of a broader pattern of censorship from the Trump administration and its allies. The White House recently banned reporters, CNN is getting new owners with ties to Trump because of a huge corporate merger, and months ago, that same Trump ally’s father gained a major stake in TikTok.
I’ve been watching this for 20 mins not realizing you looped it into self
Imagine dreaming of labor into your 90s
Remember a couple weeks back when 84-year-old Mitch McConnell returned to the Senate after a hospital stay? And he looked like…well…an 84-year-old who had just been in the hospital? That sparked a lot of conversations around whether lawmakers stay in office too long. So, we made a video about it for Local News International’s new show, What’s Your Source?
The median age in Congress is close to 60 while the median age of the country is nearly 40, which kinda throws a wrench in the whole “being truly representative of the people” thing. Now, voters aren’t against older lawmakers in general: Democrat Ed Markey definitively won against a younger primary challenger, and Republican Chuck Grassley won by a not small margin against a younger opponent, too. But voters do have concerns that many older leaders, like Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden, are no longer physically or mentally sharp enough to govern.
So, why aren’t these officials retiring? They can certainly afford to, since most senators are worth more than a million dollars. But seniority also often comes with power, office space and a large staff. In other words, job perks that sound hard to give up. That said, some lawmakers do retire, often going into lobbying.
Reporters were also barred from filming McConnell when he returned, sparking backlash. As reporter Marianna Sotomayor, our expert guest on last week’s episode of “What’s Your Source?” explained, rules preventing filming in certain parts of the Capitol exist so that weirdos and/or insurrectionists can’t track the movements of lawmakers, journalists and other potential targets of political violence who work on the Hill. McConnell’s team seemingly exploited those rules by taking their boss to areas where filming isn’t allowed.
Will the rest of us be able to afford retirement?
Recent polling from AARP, which paid LNI to make videos about this, shows that nearly all adults say Social Security is important to them. And 91% say they want Congress to protect it for future generations.
Why does it need protecting? Social Security’s retirement trust fund is set to go insolvent in 2032. That doesn’t mean the program will stop existing completely, but it does mean that people will get less money from it if Congress doesn’t act before then.
This is especially relevant heading into the midterms. AARP’s polling also shows that 93% of voters over 50 are likely to support candidates who propose solutions to protect Social Security.
Each week, after running through the news Dave has covered in the past week, I turn things over to him for some analysis. Dave, take it away!
Why aren’t men talking about the Cornell case?
That’s the question that I’ve seen posed all week long from women creators, women commenters and just generally women, following the revelations in a lawsuit filed by the alleged victim of a gang rape at Cornell University in 2024. And, anecdotally, it seems to be mostly true that men aren’t talking about this. Case in point, and I am not doing the liberal coffee shop meme, the two women sitting in the coffee shop next to me are talking about the case as I type this. None of the men within earshot are.
There are some exceptions. When someone commented that I was the first male creator they were aware of talking about the case, I thought that seemed off. Sure enough, Philip DeFranco and Alex Pearlman had already thoughtfully covered this. And Jake Tapper dismantled the district attorney’s weak answers around the case on live television.
Still, nearly every villain in this story is a man. That’s not surprising, but it’s almost too on the nose. The alleged perpetrators and fraternity? All men. The district attorney who didn’t press criminal charges? A man. The lawyers for the defendants? So far, all men. However, at least one of the lawyers for the victim is a man, and has been relentless in speaking to the media on behalf of his client.
Naturally, almost all the heroes are women. There’s the alleged victim, who pushed through an unimaginable traumatic experience to file the lawsuit. The student journalist did not let go of the case for the last two years.
And on the flip side, the general chatter from men has been rather muted. And I want to explore the why of that.
I’ll go first! When I first got just a glimpse of the news, I wanted to turn my phone off and run far, far away. It was Sunday, so I kind of did, not reading more about it until Monday. Then, once confronted with the horrors of the Snapchat group chat in particular, I felt the uncontrollable urge to scream into a pillow.
Ultimately, I knew from our very busy content schedule this week that I would not be able to cover the story until Wednesday, and frankly, I was relieved in a small way. We needed to make a video about it and were going to, but I could temporarily spare myself the details.
I also read the comments on posts and videos about this. People are rightfully furious. They’re angry at the defendants, the university and the fraternity that failed to act. I think there’s some generalizing happening, and that was what I spent some time thinking about the last couple of days.
In my view, the issue is not fraternities as a whole, but the rape culture and misogyny that feed certain fraternities. The concept of having a group of men to support you should be, at its heart, a good thing. But when ill-conceived ideas about men seep into these spaces from chauvinistic podcasts, influencers, and yes, President Trump, who has been accused by dozens of women of sexual abuse, it’s easy to see how many young men and these institutions could be corrupted. This situation was so bad, yet nearly an entire fraternity allegedly did nothing to stop it.
This is all to say that in addition to feeling outright depressed by this story, I also felt some despair knowing so many people are “okay” with this kind of behavior. It’s been a decade, but I am STILL shocked that President Trump was voted into office after a tape leaked of him bragging about sexually assaulting women. I don’t like talking about this, but I think we have to talk about it and not let up this time.
I want to hear from you. What was your initial reaction, or later reactions? Do you think men aren’t talking about it? Why or why not? Reply to this newsletter or start a separate email chain at [email protected].
If you made it to the end of this newsletter, you get two rewards. The first is a pet picture from a loyal reader. To quote the email in which I received this photo, “This is Blue. Blue loves everyone.”
I love you too, Blue.
Your second reward is the reveal for this week’s link scavenger hunt, in which I hide a non-news related link in this email, task you with finding it, and tell you where it was down here. This week, when writing about why members of Congress won’t retire, I linked out to a synopsis of comics that legendary writer Chris Claremont wrote after coming out of his (semi-forced?) retirement from the X-Men line. I am about to get to the Revolution period in my big X-Men read through! If this means anything to you, wish me luck!
Until next week!
Chris
