New York Times columnist Michelle Cottle is taking fire after suggesting on national television that President Donald Trump bears responsibility for the culture surrounding an alleged gang rape at Cornell University that took place in 2024 — when Joe Biden was still president.
Cottle made the comments Sunday during an appearance on ABC News, discussing a civil lawsuit filed by a woman identified in court records as Jane Doe against seven men. The woman alleges she was gang-raped during a ketamine- and alcohol-fueled incident at Cornell in 2024, according to Fox News. The men have denied wrongdoing — some claiming the sex was consensual, others denying they participated at all. No criminal charges have been filed.
"What this is, is it's a fundamental disrespect for women," Cottle said. "You can't send those messages no matter how drunk you are as a frat boy without having some kind of misunderstanding about what women are there for and whether this is a real person you're dealing with."
Then came the pivot.
"And that, I think, starts, you know — we can go to the president for this one," Cottle continued. "I mean, we are in a moment in this culture where the glorification of being thuggish and swaggering and mistreating women is kind of making you a cool kid."
Within hours, the clip — first surfaced by the Media Research Center — was circulating across X, where critics pointed out that the alleged assault occurred while Biden occupied the Oval Office, not Trump.
Fox News contributor Joe Concha blasted the remark. Another X user asked flatly, "This happened in 2024 when Biden was President. Did she not know that?"
CNN contributor Scott Jennings mocked the segment: "Latest edition of 'Trump turned me into a newt!' brought to you by a very very smart person."
Tricia McLaughlin, former assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Homeland Security, called the punditry reflexive: "Media and pundits fall all over themselves trying to make everything and anything about Donald Trump. It's embarrassing and so incredibly lazy."
The Media Research Center, which first posted the clip, wrote simply: "Of course, it's Trump's fault."
Trump himself has weighed in on the case, but notably not on Cottle's theory. Asked about New York Attorney General Letitia James being appointed to investigate the alleged gang rape, Trump attacked James — a longtime political foe who in 2022 filed a civil fraud lawsuit against him. Trump was found liable for fraud in 2024 and ordered to pay more than $350 million, but the penalty was overturned on appeal, according to Fox News.
The lawsuit remains a civil matter. No criminal charges have been filed against any of the seven men, and the allegations have not been proven in court.
Our Take
Here is what Cottle did on Sunday: she took a case that is genuinely horrifying, dropped it into a partisan frame, and handed every conservative in America a free talking point.
A woman says she was drugged and assaulted by seven men at one of the most prestigious universities in the country. That deserves a serious reckoning — with Cornell, with the men accused, with a campus culture that allegedly let a ketamine-and-alcohol haze become the backdrop for a lawsuit. What it does not deserve is a cable news segment that treats the whole thing as a referendum on a president who was not in office at the time.
The date matters. The year was 2024. Biden was president. If the culture Cottle is describing was flourishing on his watch, then the question she should be asking is what four years of the Biden-Harris administration's policies — on campus, on Title IX, on the message sent from the top about what it means to be a man — actually produced. Instead, the answer was Trump. It is always Trump.
Patriots, this is the game. The legacy media has one move left: take any ugly story, regardless of when it happened, and staple it to the 47th president. It is not analysis. It is not journalism. It is a reflex, and Cottle got caught running it on live television.
The question now is whether The New York Times treats this the way it would treat any other on-air misfire — with a clarification, or with silence. And whether ABC News lets a column stand that blamed a sitting president for something that happened two years before he took the oath.
What do you think? Should Cottle apologize — or does the media machine just move on to the next one?
