A Stop Sexual Violence protest in the wake of the Cornell University rape allegations, in Seattle, Washington, on Thursday. Photograph: David Ryder/Reuters
Arwa Mahdawi
Every time a story about a woman being raped becomes headline news, the same pattern repeats without fail
If she really was raped, why didn’t she speak up earlier? Why did she get drunk? Why was she wearing such a short skirt? Why did she walk home by herself?
God, it’s exhausting, isn’t it? Every time a story about a woman being raped becomes headline news, the same pattern repeats without fail. People accuse the woman of asking for it. They question her motives; they scrutinize her looks; they attack her character. And without fail, she is punished for speaking up.
It happened to Christine Blasey Ford when she accused Brett Kavanaugh, then a supreme court nominee, of assaulting her when they were both teenagers in the 1980s. Ford and her family reportedly had to flee their home because of threats and harassment.
According to her lawyers, her email was hacked and she was impersonated online. Her entire life was turned upside down. Meanwhile, Kavanaugh was praised by Donald Trump and now has a lifetime appointment on the supreme court.
It happened with E Jean Carroll, who accused Trump of sexually assaulting her back in 1996. Trump said Carroll was not his “ type ” and “totally lying”. His lawyer asked Carroll why she didn’t scream during the alleged attack and why she didn’t go to the police at the time. Carroll’s life was upended and the Trump administration opened a criminal investigation into her.
Now we’re seeing the cycle repeat with the woman known as Jane Doe in the Cornell gang-rape case. According to her attorney, Thomas Giuffra, Doe is receiving threats from people who have discovered her identity and is terrified for her safety. Doe was even the victim of a swatting episode this week, a form of harassment where someone places a false call to emergency services with the goal of sending armed officers to the victim’s location. Giuffra told CNN that officers pointed weapons at Doe’s family after a fake tip about someone “killing people in the house” on Tuesday evening. “If you had a trigger-happy cop, or somebody had done the wrong thing, somebody could have ended up dead,” Giuffra said.
Nobody ended up dead on that particular occasion, but Doe’s character is systematically being assassinated. “What attracts women to those parties – late at night, like Jane Doe – to walk alone to a fraternity house and take her chances?” Caitlin Flanagan tut-tutted in the Free Press. “What she’s really looking for is a man. And she has no idea how to find a good one.” The underlying message here? She should have known better than to go to a frat party. Silly little girl: she was asking for it.
Rightwing commentator Megyn Kelly, who has been vocal about her experience of sexual harassment at Fox News and should really know better, went even further and attacked Doe’s looks. “No one will even consider the possibility that this woman made a decision to get it on with four men total, not seven, and enjoyed it because, I’m just going to be honest, she’s not the most attractive gal,” Kelly said on a recent episode of her podcast. “She’s extremely beefy in like her arms and her legs. She has a whole video online talking about her cankles. And she possibly enjoyed being admired. This is how women make these mistakes.”
It should go without saying that being raped is not a “mistake”. It should go without saying that a woman should be able to go to a party and have a drink and walk home at night and wear whatever she likes without it being an invitation for men to rape her. And yet it seems that women have to keep saying all this over and over again.
Arizona congressional candidate says she was raped while repairing campaign sign
Bernadette Greene Placentia told the Phoenix New Times that she was attacked in August while walking across a parking lot in the middle of the night to fix a damaged campaign sign.
“Speaking publicly about what happened has been incredibly difficult for Bernadette,” a campaign spokesperson said. “She chose to share her story because she knows many survivors struggle in silence, and she hopes that by speaking about her experience, others will know they are not alone.”
A Pentagon influencer said liberal women will ‘end Western civilization’
“The Pentagon has secretly installed several conservative military veterans with large online followings in government roles … [to] amplify Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s viewpoints,” the Washington Post reported in August. One of these influencers is a retired army colonel called Kurt Schlichter who is, surprise, surprise, a raging misogynist.
This week, Wired highlighted a number of Schlichter’s disturbing writings, including an article for Townhall in which he argues “liberal women” could end western civilization. “These self-righteous crones are a pestilence, a plague upon Western society … whose antics, if unchecked, will inevitably lead to the fall of civilization,” he wrote.
Child killed in Gaza every 71 minutes for the past three years
Nearly 22,000 Palestinian children have been killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza over three years, with more than 71,000 orphaned, according to a report by Gaza’s health ministry summarized by Drop Site news. That number includes 5,444 children under five and 1,125 infants under one year old.
Israeli politician says Israel should have left Gaza ‘empty’
The Zehut party chair, Moshe Feiglin, who is running in the October elections with the finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, told the Jerusalem Post that the whole of Gaza should have been emptied of Palestinians and annexed by Israel. In another interview on i24News’s Israel Out Loud, Feiglin said everyone in Gaza should leave, “down to babies born prematurely”.
JD Vance does not seem to know what ‘socialism’ means
When asked to define the term during a Thursday press conference, he said: “Classically, you would think socialism is about prioritizing workers … [But now] what it actually means in the American context is, that you want to replace American workers with foreign workers, and you want boys to play in girls’ sports.”
Kimberly Guilfoyle allegedly asked Trump donor to pay $100,000 credit card bill
Guilfoyle is the US ambassador to Greece and the former fiancee of Donald Trump Jr. She is also a former prosecuting attorney, Fox News host, and first lady of San Francisco during her ex-husband Gavin Newsom’s tenure as mayor of the city. All of which to say: the woman should be more than capable of paying her own credit card bills. But, as we know, Maga types don’t like paying for anything themselves. According to the Wall Street Journal, days before her confirmation hearing last year, Guilfoyle asked a Trump donor to pay her $100,000 American Express bill in exchange for access to the administration. (Guilfoyle’s attorney has disputed the authenticity of text messages cited in reporting.)
Margaret Hamilton, the woman whose work allowed men to walk on the moon, dies aged 90
The pioneering computer scientist helped launch software engineering as an industry and was hired as the first programmer for the Apollo project at MIT. In that role, she led a team of software engineers who powered the first moon landing.
Flag football is all the rage among US teen girls
“According to data from the National Federation of State High School Associations, more than 100,000 American high school girls played flag football at school during the 2025-26 academic year, which constitutes a 48% jump from the previous year and an increase of more than 550% from just five years ago,” Bloomberg reports. This is largely because the NFL has poured $192m into the sport, which is safer and simpler than traditional US football. The idea is that participation as a kid will translate into fandom (and profits for the NFL) as an adult.
A naked Trump statue has been unveiled inside the European parliament
It’s called the Orange Plague and shows an unrobed and gold Trump sitting on the shoulders of another man while wielding a large golf club. It was only on display for a day at the parliament’s Winston Churchill building in France, but the sculptor has said he was “astonished” that the exhibition took place at all.
The week in pawtriarchy
As if the Orange Plague in the US and the “ possible ” plague in Siberia weren’t enough to worry about, Los Angeles county recently documented its first rabid raccoon in more than 50 years. Somehow this feels paw-tentous.
