A New York Times columnist is facing fierce backlash after suggesting President Donald Trump helped create the cultural environment that led to an alleged sexual assault involving seven men at Cornell University — even though the incident occurred in 2024, when Joe Biden was president.
Michelle Cottle made the comments Sunday during an appearance on ABC News while discussing the civil lawsuit filed by a woman identified as Jane Doe in court records.
“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 she made the political leap.
“And that, I think, starts, you know — we can go to the president for this one,” Cottle said. “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.”
The problem with that argument is not subtle: the alleged incident took place in 2024, during the Biden administration.
Jane Doe has filed a civil lawsuit against seven men whom she accuses of gang-raping her during an incident involving alcohol and ketamine at Cornell. The defendants have denied wrongdoing. Some have maintained that the sexual activity was consensual, while others have said they did not participate.
No criminal charges have been filed.
Those facts make Cottle's attempt to connect the case to Trump particularly difficult to defend. Whatever ultimately happened at Cornell must be established through evidence and the legal process — not retroactively assigned to a president who was not in office when the incident occurred.
The backlash came quickly.
Fox News contributor Joe Concha highlighted the obvious timeline problem, while another critic asked bluntly on X: “This happened in 2024 when Biden was President. Did she not know that?”
CNN contributor Scott Jennings delivered the sharper punchline, mocking the increasingly familiar habit of attributing every troubling development to Trump.
“Latest edition of 'Trump turned me into a newt!' brought to you by a very very smart person,” Jennings wrote.
And there it is.
A serious accusation involving alleged sexual violence deserves serious scrutiny, compassion for anyone who may have been victimized, and a determination of the facts. What it does not require is a political shortcut that somehow makes Donald Trump responsible for an incident that occurred before he returned to the White House.
There is also a larger problem here. When political commentators instinctively turn criminal allegations into another opportunity to blame Trump, they risk obscuring the very issue they claim to care about: accountability.
The Cornell case will ultimately turn on evidence, testimony and the courts. The defendants remain entitled to the presumption of innocence, and the woman who filed the lawsuit is entitled to have her allegations taken seriously.
But blaming Trump for something that happened under Biden is not accountability.
It is political theater — and Americans are increasingly tired of being told to ignore the timeline when the preferred narrative demands it.
