By Just Ask Maxx, Founder of Life Coaching Today

There is a sentence almost every woman who has reported sexual assault has heard, from a parent, a friend, a dean, a detective, sometimes from herself in the middle of the night.

“Are you sure you want to ruin his life?”

Sit with how that sentence is built. It doesn’t ask what happened to her. It doesn’t ask if she’s safe, or sleeping, or eating, or still able to walk across campus. It moves the center of the story, quietly, from her body to his future. And it hands her the job of protecting the man she is accusing.

I’ve been coaching women through the aftermath of betrayal and harm for more than twenty years. I want to talk about where that question comes from, because it didn’t come from nowhere, and right now the whole country is watching it play out again at Cornell.

What we know about the Cornell Chi Phi case

A former Cornell student, identified in court papers as Jane Doe, says she was drugged and sexually assaulted at the Chi Phi fraternity house in Ithaca on the night of October 19, 2024. She was 20. Her civil lawsuit, filed this September, names seven former members of the fraternity, all of whom deny the claims. It also cites a Snapchat group chat called “Chi Phi Actives,” where, according to the suit, a message described her in degrading terms and encouraged other members to come to the room. Roughly fifty men were in that chat.

Two years passed with no criminal charges. Now Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten has reopened the case and says it will go before a grand jury. There’s a public dispute over whether his office ever received the group chat back in 2024. Cornell says it closed the chapter in 2024, issued sanctions that included expulsions and suspensions, supports the DA’s decision, and has agreed to bring in outside counsel for an independent review of how it responded.

None of that has been decided in court. These are allegations, and the men named have the right to answer them. But you don’t need a verdict to see the pattern I’m writing about. The pattern is in how long it took anyone to look.

The psychology of “his life”

Philosopher Kate Manne has a word for what’s happening when we flinch on his behalf: himpathy. It’s the reflex to feel more sympathy for a man accused of harm than for the woman he harmed, especially when he looks like someone we’ve been taught to root for. Smart. Athletic. Ivy League. Somebody’s son with a future.

Here’s how I see that reflex working in real life.

1. We measure his life in potential and hers in damage

When a young man is accused, people describe what he could become: the degree, the career, the family he’ll have one day. When a young woman is assaulted, people describe what she already lost, if they describe her at all. Potential feels like something worth protecting. Damage feels like something already done. So the future wins, and the future is always his.

You might remember the 2016 Stanford case, when Brock Turner’s father wrote that his son shouldn’t pay a steep price for “20 minutes of action,” and the judge worried aloud about the impact prison would have on him. Ten years later we are asking a different young woman, at a different elite school, a version of the same question.

2. We’ve been taught that boys are unfinished and girls are responsible

We raise boys with “he’ll grow out of it” and girls with “you should have known better.” Watch it come out after an assault. Why did she go to the party? Why did she drink? Why was she upstairs? The questions all point at her choices, as if a man’s choices were weather, something that just happens.

3. The group protects itself first

Fraternities, teams, companies, churches, families. When one member is accused, the group feels accused too. Protecting him starts to feel like protecting us. Psychologist Jennifer Freyd calls the institutional version of this institutional betrayal: when the place that was supposed to keep you safe protects its reputation instead of you. Research on survivors suggests that kind of betrayal can deepen the trauma on top of the assault itself.

4. Silence feels like neutrality

Fifty men in a group chat. I keep coming back to that number. We don’t know yet what each of them saw or understood. But most people in a group like that tell themselves that not saying anything is the same as not taking part. It isn’t. Silence is a vote. It tells the man who sent the message that the room is with him.

What that question costs her

When a woman hears “Are you sure you want to ruin his life?” she hears something underneath it: Your pain is less important than his plans.

I worked with a woman years ago, I’ll call her Renee, who was assaulted by a friend of her brother’s. The first person she told was her mother. Her mother’s first words were, “Are you sure? He’s such a good boy.” Renee didn’t report. She didn’t tell anyone else for eleven years. When she finally sat across from me, the assault wasn’t even the first thing she cried about. It was her mother’s question.

That’s what this does. It teaches women that telling the truth is a kind of violence, and staying quiet is a kind of kindness. Then we act surprised when women don’t come forward, or come forward two years later, or change details as they heal and remember.

And her life? Her life gets “ruined” in quieter ways nobody writes op-eds about. She leaves school. She stops going out. She can’t sleep with the door closed. She flinches when a group of men laughs behind her. According to what’s been reported, the woman at the center of the Cornell case is no longer a student there. Nobody asked her in 2024 if she was sure she wanted that.

Where the question really comes from

If I had to name the root, it’s this: for a very long time, a woman’s body was treated as something that belonged to the men around her, her father, then her husband. Harm to her was framed as harm to them, to their name, their property, their honor. We’ve changed the laws. We haven’t finished changing the instincts. So when a man is accused, some part of the culture still asks, “What will this cost him?” before it asks, “What did this cost her?”

You can feel compassion for a young man’s future and still say he is responsible for his choices. Those two things are not in competition. What ruins a life is the act. Not the report.

What to say instead

If someone you love tells you she was assaulted, here is what she needs to hear. Write it down if you have to.

• “I believe you.”
• “This was not your fault.”
• “Are you safe right now?”
• “Whatever you decide to do, I’ll stand with you.”
• “You don’t owe anyone your silence.”

And if you’re raising sons, talk to them about the group chat before they’re in one. Tell them the bravest message in that chat would have been one word: Stop. Then tell them to pick up the phone and get help.

If this is your story

You can call RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Hotline any time at 1-800-656-4673, or chat online at rainn.org. If you’re in immediate danger, call 911.

And if you need someone to talk to about the aftermath, the sleepless nights, the people who asked the wrong question, Life Coaching Today has coaches available around the clock through Relationship Rescue. You don’t have to have the words ready. Just come as you are.

Want to talk with me directly? Book a free 15-minute discovery call with Just Ask Maxx.

Read the book: Red Flags: A Woman’s Survival Guide to Dating in the Manosphere by Kiddada Asmara Grey and Georgia Ann Hunter Jones. Get your copy on Amazon.

Just Ask Maxx is the founder of Life Coaching Today, a Master Relationship Coach, Master Hypnotherapist, Certified NLP Practitioner and Certified Divorce Mediator. She writes the weekly Just Ask Maxx column and co-hosts He Said, She Said.