What the Morning After a Sexual Assault On Campus Really Looks Like

The case against Jane Doe, as scores of strangers have assembled it online, begins the morning after. She reportedly walked home from Cornell’s Chi Phi fraternity house and told her roommates she had taken ketamine and had sex with multiple men, without calling it rape or assault. One roommate later said she seemed to be “in shock.” The next day, she texted one of the men she would later accuse to reassure him. Days later, she still wanted to attend a Halloween party at Chi Phi.

The Jane Doe in question has become the centre of one of the most closely watched campus sexual assault cases in years. Her civil lawsuit, filed in September, accuses seven Chi Phi members of sexually assaulting her after she says she was pressured into taking ketamine at the house in October 2024. The Tompkins County district attorney declined to prosecute, but the case only grew from there. Governor Kathy Hochul appointed Attorney General Letitia James as special prosecutor, and an #IamJaneDoe solidarity campaign spread across social media.

But the informal prosecution—the one running in comment sections, group chats, and viral threads—keeps circling back to what Jane Doe did in the aftermath. The logic is stubbornly persistent: that a real victim would act like one right away, and that anything short of immediate collapse or a police report is something closer to regret. It is an assumption that decades of research have discredited, and one that survivors exposed to even a fraction of this scrutiny recognise immediately, because most of them failed the same test.

Jennifer Freyd, Professor Emerit of Psychology at the University of Oregon and founder and president of the Center for Institutional Courage, has spent decades researching how people respond to sexual trauma. Asked whether there is a typical response against which to measure Jane Doe’s, her answer was simple: “No, I don’t think there is.” In anonymous surveys, Freyd and other researchers have asked people about sexual experiences behaviourally, without first requiring them to identify what happened as rape or assault. Some respondents describe experiences that meet the legal definition of rape, she says, but still do not use the word themselves. “Very few people say that they were raped,” Freyd says. “Even if they just indicated to us with a behavioural item that their experience met the legal definition of rape.”

While the public debate has turned on what Jane Doe should have done, Marie Claire asked five women who say they were sexually assaulted in college to describe what they actually did in the hours and days that followed. If post-assault behaviour is going to be used as a litmus test for credibility, it seemed worth asking the people who say they have actually lived through it what the morning after really looked like for them.

Caroline Raphael, now 27, was 18 and in her first semester of college at the University of Miami when she says she was drugged at a fraternity date party and sexually assaulted afterward. What she remembers first about the next morning is the few seconds before she remembered. “Just like I was waking up confused, but not scared or that anything had happened or that anything was wrong,” she says. “And then that ended really quickly and I remembered everything and it was horrifying.”

Her next thought was about an exam. “It was an excuse to think about anything else,” she says. Raphael grabbed her books and computer and went to the common room on her floor, where she read without absorbing much. “Feeling frantic and feeling like I couldn’t pause,” she says. “I had to move and keep going.” Friends from the night before tried to check on her. “I don’t even think I said words,” she says. “I think I just was hands up, like I can’t do this. I can’t talk about it.”

She took the exam anyway, sitting through it thinking, Why am I here? Why am I doing this? Afterward, walking with a classmate, she started crying and told her some of what had happened. Over the next several days, Raphael went to a tailgate, another fraternity party, and a football game, where she did a beer bong. “I was trying to do what felt like normal college behaviour on paper,” she says.

Freyd sees that pull toward normalcy in case after case. “There’s this desire to not have had a terrible victimisation experience,” she says. “If you can return to things being normal, then maybe it wasn’t so bad after all. People don’t want to be victims. They don’t want to have lived through a terrible thing.”

Research bears this out at scale. Across 28 studies encompassing nearly 6,000 survivors, psychologists found that roughly 60 percent of women whose experiences met the legal definition of rape never identified them as such. Among college-age women, the figure was closer to 63 percent.

Amalia Bob-Waksberg, now 35 and based in Oakland, California, was a 19-year-old freshman at Brandeis around 2010 when she says she was sexually assaulted while visiting a friend at Harvard. She woke in the man’s bed the next morning and remembers leaving while he was in the shower, then finding her friend and the friend’s boyfriend in a dining hall and trying to explain the night. “I was trying to make it sound playful almost,” she says. “I feel like I was trying to rewrite it as a bad hookup.”

On the shuttle back to Brandeis, she fell apart. “I went into a foetal position in a ball on the floor of the shuttle crying,” she says. “I was really embarrassed, but I felt so out of my body.” A friend met her at the stop and helped her find someone to talk to. Bob-Waksberg says her therapist was eventually the person who put a name to what had happened: “You were sexually assaulted.” Bob-Waksberg was still parsing what that meant. “I wasn’t raped, so I didn’t know if I could use that word,” she says.

In the days afterward, someone uploaded a photo from the party to Facebook. Bob-Waksberg tagged herself and her friend in one. “Looking back, I remember being like, ‘That’s so weird that I did that,’” she says. “I think I was trying to rewrite that night as a fun thing.” The man she says assaulted her later sent her a Facebook friend request.

Those things can exist together, Freyd says: someone can be deeply distressed and still resist the explanation for why. “People are complicated. There can be two things going on at the same time,” she says. “If they’re able to compartmentalise it and in some sense pretend it didn't happen and that everything's okay, that’s a very understandable desire.”

Only one in five college students who experience rape or sexual assault report to police, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. What happens when a survivor first tells someone can help shape what comes next. Freyd says survivors will sometimes disclose only a small piece of an experience to someone they trust and wait to see what happens. “If it doesn’t go well, they shut up,” she says. “But if they get really supported and there’s a compassionate, respectful listening occurring, they may tell the whole story.”

Rachel Newman, 22, had someone who listened. Her morning began around six, when she says she woke to a man she knew raping her in her dorm room at a small college in Florida during her first semester. Newman says she pretended to remain asleep, hoping he would stop. Eventually, she physically moved him off her but stayed in the lofted bed because getting out would have meant crawling over him. “I didn’t really want physical contact from him in that moment,” she says. She thought about whom she could call once it was a reasonable hour. “And I went back to sleep.”

When Newman woke again, she began calling friends. Most were off campus, so she eventually reached her roommate, with whom she had recently had a fight, and the two met in a parking lot. “All I could say was I needed to go to the ER, but I couldn’t verbalise, oh, I need to get a rape kit, or I have just been raped. And so I remember I made her guess because I just couldn’t get the words out.”

She remembers the rape-kit process taking about eight hours. Her roommate stayed and brought snacks: cotton candy and Apple Jacks. At one point, Newman put on one of the monthly playlists she kept on her phone, only for it to shuffle to a song called “Bimbo Doll.” “That’s probably not the best song for the circumstances right now,” she remembers saying before turning the music off.

Newman reported to campus police two days later and also pursued a Title IX case. The criminal investigation remained open for two years without charges; the Title IX case was dismissed after the other student unenrolled. “There’s just no right way to respond,” Newman says. “There’s no guidebook on how to navigate something like that.”

It took Jill Christman about a year to find the word for what happened to her. She was 18 and a freshman at the University of Oregon when she says an older student raped her during a fraternity trip to a houseboat on Lake Shasta. Christman says he put a pillow over her face so other people wouldn’t hear her struggling. By the next morning, the man was offering her donuts from a paper bag stained with grease. “You get first choice,” he told her. She remembers the bright sun after a long, cold night. She remembers him looking “monstrous” in the daylight. “I wanted to reject everything about the situation,” she says.

She still needed to get back to Oregon, so she rode back in an SUV with him, her friend and others from the trip. He started calling her almost immediately afterward, she says, apparently thinking they would go on another date. Christman, meanwhile, returned to being an honors student and a straight-A student and remembers crying when she was alone. “Nothing stopped me from doing what I was supposed to do in the world,” she says. “It would’ve been completely imperceptible to anyone who knew me except for when I was alone and I was crying.”

“I failed to identify what happened to me as rape,” Christman says. “I just didn’t know how to name it. I did not have language for what had happened to me.” About a year later, as a sophomore, she read Robin Warshaw’s I Never Called It Rape and began telling people what had happened.

The man, in Christman’s telling, used the word before she did. Within weeks of the assault, she needed a ride from Eugene to the Portland airport and knew he would give her one, so she asked. When he picked her up, she says, a lace belt she had worn the night of the party was tied to the mirror of his car “like a trophy.” On the way, he stopped at his parents’ house, took her into his bedroom and pushed her down onto the bed. Christman panicked. He laughed and asked, she recalls, “What did you think I was going to do? Rape you?”

Freyd calls this larger dynamic “betrayal trauma”: when the person who harms you is someone you trust or depend on, acknowledging the betrayal can threaten the relationship itself. “If you respond to that betrayal by pulling away or confronting the person, that can put the whole relationship at risk,” she says. In some cases, a person may try to salvage the relationship by smoothing over what happened or making it feel somehow okay.

Christman, 57, wrote the full story down 30 years later for Roxane Gay’s anthology Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture. She describes shedding the shame around assault as a decades-long process. Looking at Jane Doe’s account now, Christman says: “I would say that she reached a place of clarity and truth astoundingly quickly. It took me a year to say that.” And then: “It’s going to take her years to put the shame down. I know that because I’ve been through it.”

The basement computer lab at Beloit College was empty, which is why Kristina Erickson went there early one morning during her freshman year. She was 18, and minutes earlier, she says, she had pushed a man’s hand away and said no, but he persisted.

Afterward, Erickson made an excuse about getting ready for breakfast and went straight to the computer lab in the basement between their dorms, connected by a tunnel. She hesitated before logging in, worried her username might leave some kind of record. Then she typed a question into Google, trying to find out whether what had just happened to her was rape. She refined the search, adjusting the terms, but couldn't find an answer that felt right. “I didn’t want those words to apply to the situation,” she says. Then she closed the browser and went to breakfast. She’s fairly sure she saw him there.

In the years that followed, Erickson became one of the most visible sexual-assault prevention advocates on her campus, leading Take Back the Night rallies and training with the Sexual Assault Recovery Program (SARP) of Rock County to counsel survivors in hospitals and with police. On the hotline, Erickson says, it was common for women in their fifties and sixties to call about something that had happened when they were children. “They finally had the time to process it,” she says. “Life stopped enough that they kept thinking back to what happened.”

Erickson, now 35, was 20 when she started counselling other survivors. Often, the women would describe what happened and ask the same question: Was that rape?

Erickson always knew the answer. She recognised it every time.

This content originally appeared on Marie Claire US