Cornell scrubbed 'rape' from the file that cleared the frat, then warned against rushing to judgment.

…(cont) Sometime after that — the file doesn't give me the day, so I won't guess at it — Cornell's own campus police sent a condensed statement of what she'd reported to the Tompkins County prosecutor. The prosecutor read that statement and declined to bring charges.

On September 28th of this year, she filed a lawsuit naming seven fraternity brothers. The Tompkins County district attorney reopened the investigation that same day, saying the case would go to a grand jury.

The same day, a member of Congress stood up at a town hall in Ithaca and talked about a culture that protects the accused and pushes out the accuser.

On October 1st — I'm writing this in the same week, I didn't have to go pull this one out of a drawer — the New York Times got hold of the file. The condensed statement, the one that went to the prosecutor, the one the decision not to charge was built on, did not have the word "rape" in it anywhere. That same day, New York's attorney general announced her own review. That same day, the Times reported that the accused fraternity brothers gave investigators accounts that didn't agree with each other, though every one of them denied doing anything wrong. And that same day, a Cornell law professor told the New York Post that the real problem in all this is a lynch mob mentality — too many people, they said, rushing to judgment.

That's the whole order. I didn't arrange it that way. I just copied it down the way the papers have it.

Here's the part that got me. I had a fender-bender two winters ago — nothing serious, my fan belt was already shot so the car wasn't exactly having a good month to begin with. Other driver ran the light. Officer wrote it up. But the report that went to my insurance company just said "vehicle contact, intersection" — nothing about the light. I didn't lose the case. I lost an afternoon at the agency getting the long version sent over instead of the short one, the one somebody had already decided was good enough for the people who'd be making the decision.

I'm not saying that's what happened at Cornell. I don't know who decided what belonged in that statement, or why. I only know what the Times found: the short version is what the prosecutor had in front of them. The short version is what the decision rode on. And the word that wasn't in the short version was the word for what she says happened to her.

So — I'm sorry, I know you want the next page — excuse me, before you go. The professor says the trouble now is a mob that formed after the fact. The file says the statement that decided whether anyone would be charged left that word out before the lawsuit, before the attorney general's review, before any of this was ever public at all. I've only got the one question, and I think it's a fair one. Which came first — the mob, or the missing word?