Josh Gad on the Cornell Rape Case
by Sari Moon · Thought CatalogBy Sari Moon
Updated 4 minutes ago, October 1, 2026
You probably know Josh Gad as Olaf from Frozen or from The Book of Mormon. He’s an actor and comedian who’s usually the funny one.
This week he was furious.A former Cornell student filed a lawsuit this month alleging that in October 2024 she was drugged and sexually assaulted for hours by multiple members of the Chi Phi fraternity. According to the complaint, one of the men posted in the frat’s Snapchat group chat that there was “free p*ssy” upstairs. Other messages followed, including one asking if the “shop [was] still open.”
She reported it to campus police weeks later. No criminal charges were filed at the time. Cornell ran its own Title IX process. The lawsuit says some of the accused were allowed to “mitigate their conduct by submitting essays.” Her attorney has said two of the seven named students were expelled and the rest got lesser sanctions. Cornell has since said the punishments included expulsions and suspensions and that no one got an essay as their only consequence. The Tompkins County DA has now reopened the criminal investigation and plans to take it to a grand jury.
That’s the case Gad was reacting to when he wrote:
“When we start setting a precedent that our girls and women can be brutally raped, and the resulting disciplinary action is to hand out (checks notes) ESSAYS (like it’s Bart Simpson being a lil’ rascal) about why it was wrong to brutally violate an innocent girl, we have lost our f-cking minds.”
He called it a violent crime, not a campus “oopsie,” and said there is no such thing as white-collar rape.
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