Episode Details

Hey fam, welcome back to the Gilead Gazette, where the men in charge keep saying they love women, and I keep asking them to do it from farther away.

This week: one Democrat in Albany is protecting the law that got the Cornell case closed. The Education Secretary locked in weaker rules for every campus survivor in America. Three attorneys general want the name of every woman in their states who ordered abortion pills. Missouri Republicans are fighting over whether their abortion ban is mean enough. And Tennessee tried to execute a survivor of child sexual abuse, twice in one night.

Let's get into it

Cornell Rape Loophole Has 100 Votes to Close It, One Democrat Won’t Allow the Vote

New York Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, a Democrat, is blocking a vote on the bill that would close New York’s voluntary intoxication loophole. Under that law, if a woman chose to drink, she isn’t legally too impaired to consent unless she’s basically unconscious. Falling down drunk doesn’t count, and neither does not knowing where she is. That’s the law the district attorney leaned on to defend closing the Cornell case, where a student says seven fraternity brothers assaulted her, and he closed it without ever interviewing her. This week Governor Hochul took the case away from him and gave it to Attorney General Letitia James. The orange menace said the accused men “won’t get a fair shake” with her, which is a lot of concern for a case he didn’t seem to know anything about, from a man a jury found liable for sexual abuse. The fix has passed the State Senate unanimously. In the Assembly it has nearly a hundred co-sponsors from both parties, out of a hundred and fifty members. Heastie has never let it come to a vote, and his explanation is that he doesn’t have the votes, which is a strange thing to say about a bill you won’t let anyone vote on. What he did do this week is announce a working group, which is what you form when you’d like credit for doing something without the hassle of doing it. If you’ve ever had two glasses of wine in the state of New York, this is your law too.

Title IX Can’t Arrest a Rapist, Can Stop a Homecoming Queen

Education Secretary Linda McMahon formally killed the Biden-era Title IX rule this week, the one that protected LGBTQ students, and locked in the 2020 rules that survivor advocates say make it harder for victims to report. So let’s check in on how Title IX is doing out in the wild! At LSU, a student named Kendall Francis says a football player sexually assaulted her. LSU’s own Title IX office found him responsible for forcible rape and upheld it on appeal. But a Title IX office is a school process. It can discipline a student, and it can’t arrest one. She thought a rape finding meant criminal charges were coming. They weren’t, until she filed a criminal complaint herself almost a year later, and he still hasn’t been arrested or charged. A state lawmaker looked at all that and said, “LSU followed the law here.” She’s right, and that’s the whole problem. Meanwhile in Clayton County, Georgia, the school district told a trans senior named Riley Williams she can’t run for homecoming queen because of Title IX. The district admits it has no policy on this and is just scared of losing federal money. They did offer to let her run for king. So Title IX in 2026 can’t get a man found responsible for rape into a courtroom, but it can keep a teenager out of a sash. On Thursday, October 8, Women’s March and me too International are holding a national day of action against sexual violence, and restoring Title IX’s enforcement powers is on the list. Go find one near you.

Three AGs Sue for Patient Names, Compare Pills to Mail Bombs

Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill and her friends from Alabama and Arkansas asked the Supreme Court this week to strike down the shield laws in New York, California and Massachusetts. Shield laws are what stop a state with an abortion