A self-defense instructor’s thoughts on the Cornell sexual assault case

I’ve been teaching self-defense for 25 years. I teach people to strike, to escape, to fight when they have to. I teach sexual assault prevention. And I’m going to tell you something most instructors won’t say out loud.

There is no technique for this.

Look at what is unfolding at Cornell right now.

A former Cornell student says that in 2024 she was pressured to drink and take ketamine at the Chi Phi fraternity house until she could no longer function. Then, according to her lawsuit, seven men raped her over a period of hours. One of them allegedly advertised her in a fraternity group chat and invited his brothers to join in.

No one was arrested. No one was charged.

The only reason this story is in front of you now is that she filed a civil lawsuit this month. The public saw it. The public got angry. And only then did the district attorney reopen the case and announce he would take it to a grand jury.

Read that again. The system moved because of public outrage. Not because of what happened to her.

Cornell says it ran a months-long Title IX process. Her attorney says two of the seven were expelled. The rest got suspensions, workshops, and written assignments. The lawsuit alleges they were allowed to write essays to soften their punishment. Cornell denies that. But even by Cornell’s own account, most of the seven men accused of a gang rape were not expelled.

And the men in that group chat? The ones who watched the invitation come in and did nothing? I haven’t heard a word about consequences for them.

Online, the pile-on has already started. Not on the men. On her. She wanted it. She put herself there. She should have known better.

That’s rape culture. Not a slogan. A pattern.

Now let me speak as an instructor.

Here’s the hard truth from the mat. I can teach a woman to fight off an attacker. I cannot teach a woman to fight off an attacker when her brain has been chemically switched off.

Alcohol and ketamine don’t just slow your reflexes. They take away your judgment. Your awareness. Your ability to recognize you’re in danger at all.

Every defense starts in the mind. When the mind is compromised, the defense is gone.

The only tool left is the one that works before you lose it: presence of mind. The ability to notice that something is wrong with you and leave while you still can. I know how close this can come to home. Two stories stay with me.

My daughter was a student at NYU. She was in a friend’s dorm room. Two male students were there. She took a drink. Within minutes she felt herself changing. Something had been slipped into it.

She recognized what was happening. She said she was going to the bathroom. She walked out quietly, called an Uber, and went back to her own dorm.

She did everything right. And I think about that night all the time. If she had waited ten more minutes, if the drug had hit harder or faster, she wouldn’t have had a choice to make. It could have ended very differently. And the people asking questions afterward would have been asking about her drinking.

I know that because of the second story.

One of my students has a daughter at a well-known university in the Southeast. Her daughter’s roommate was raped. When the university investigated, they interviewed my student’s daughter. Every question pointed in one direction. Was her roommate promiscuous? Was she the kind of girl who invited attention?

They weren’t investigating a rape. They were building a case against the victim.

Why would a university do that? Because institutions protect themselves first.

Universities live and die by reputation. Sexual assault numbers hurt enrollment. Headlines hurt donations. So, there is pressure, spoken or not, to shrink the story. Reframe it. Find a reason it wasn’t really what it looked like.

Essays. Workshops. Quiet suspensions. A victim who leaves school while the accused move on. That isn’t justice. That’s damage control.

The law isn’t much better.

New York has what’s become known as the “voluntary intoxication loophole.” Rape charges generally require force or a clear refusal, unless the victim was unconscious or drugged without her consent. If she drank on her own, even to the point where she could no longer say yes or no, prosecutors face a steep climb. The Tompkins County DA pointed to that very law when he explained why no charges were filed the first time.

Think about what that means. The moment a woman takes a drink, the law hands her a share of the blame for whatever is done to her after she can no longer resist. The man who chooses to exploit her incapacity is protected by her choice to have a beer.

That thinking runs deep, and it doesn’t stop at the dorm room door. It reaches into marriage. In 2015, a lawyer for Donald Trump insisted that you cannot rape your spouse. Years earlier, a Virginia lawmaker argued that a husband-wife rape conviction was nearly impossible when a couple shared a bed. These weren’t fringe voices. They were people with power, saying out loud that a woman’s consent can be assumed.

And the imbalance doesn’t stop there. In a number of states, a woman who becomes pregnant from rape has no legal way to end that pregnancy, because the abortion ban makes no exception for rape. In some of those states, the doctor who helps her faces a harsher maximum sentence than many convicted rapists. She carries the consequences. He may never be charged at all.

So where does that leave someone like me?

I’m frustrated. I’ll say it plainly. I’ve spent my career building women’s confidence and capability. I believe in that work, and I’ll keep doing it. But if we measure sexual assault prevention by whether a woman can physically fight off her attacker, we are measuring the wrong thing.

The defense has to start earlier. Before the drink gets spiked. Before the group chat lights up. Before anyone decides a woman’s body is there for the taking.

It starts with men.

“Boys will be boys” is not an excuse. “Locker room talk” is not harmless. Words become thoughts. Thoughts become actions. A culture that shrugs at the words will eventually shrug at the actions. We just watched it happen in a group chat, where one message offered a woman up and nobody stopped it.

So, here’s what I’m asking for.

From the law: close the loophole. Incapacity is incapacity, no matter how it happened.

From universities: stop managing your reputation and start delivering consequences. Expulsion, not essays.

From men: speak up. In the chat. In the locker room. At the party. The bystander who stays silent is part of the system that lets this happen.

I’ll keep teaching women to protect themselves. But I’m done pretending that’s where the defense begins.

It begins with the people who choose to cause harm, and the people who let them.

Gus Bottazzi is Chief Instructor at Krav Maga Personal Safety and author of The Krav Maga Essentials Handbook: A Practical Safety System for College Students; How to Avoid, De-escalate, and Escape Real-World Threats

Courtesy of CT Mirror