When Olivia Petter first saw the news about the sexual assault allegations at Cornell University, she was shocked by how familiar parts of the story felt for her."The more I found out, the more triggered I became," she said."I think for me, the worst thing was seeing the group messages that these boys were allegedly sending to each other on the night of the alleged rape."Reading those exchanges brought the London-based author back to boarding school in England, where she says older boys targeted her and her friends from the age of 13."They would walk past us and whisper 'Fresh meat,'" Petter said.
"They would rate us out of ten and shout numbers at us when we walked down to the dining hall." Petter says she recalls boys pulling down girls' trousers while they held their lunch trays, humiliating them in the school cafeteria.After a party, when she was 17, she remembers a boy putting a "hand down my pants" when she was trying to go to sleep."No preamble.
We hadn't been kissing...and I was kind of wriggling, trying to get him to stop.""The thing that people need to understand is when something like that happens to you, it's really hard to just say, no, get off me, because your body goes into this panic mode," she said.
"You freeze and it takes a while for you to understand what's happening.""There were just so many instances of sexual assault and we didn't really recognize it at the time because we didn't have the language," she said, adding that the culture continued into her time at university.Petter, now 32, is among those sharing their own experiences online in response to the recent rape allegations that have emerged at a Cornell University fraternity house.A former Cornell student, identified as Jane Doe, sued the university and seven former students last month, alleging she was drugged and repeatedly raped at the Chi Phi fraternity house in October 2024, when she was 20 years old.Attorneys for some of the men have denied the accusations.The case has led to a...