Over the last 24 hours, it’s become clear that the “statement” Jane Doe gave to the Cornell University police, which was then delivered to the Tompkins County District Attorney, was not anywhere close to the initial statement she gave to the police. As Paisley Currah has been saying for days, it’s critical we understand this piece of the puzzle because otherwise we can’t make any sense of how this case of gang rape at Cornell was handled.

After she was gang-raped, Jane Doe talked to the Cornell police for hours. The transcript of what she said to the police is about 120 pages. Here are some of the statements she gave them:

“I can say with 100 percent confidence I was raped.”

A “ring of men” surrounded her. “There was really no escape.”

“I will never know who all touched me. I will not know.”

“I had become extremely uncomfortable with how this night was turning out, so my thought was, if I do ketamine again, maybe I will pass out. My thought was that if I passed out and these men had sex with me, then they could be charged with rape.”

None of these statements sound remotely consensual, even by the antediluvian standards of NYS rape law.

None of these statements appears in the final statement that the Cornell police handed over to the district attorney.

Instead, the 120 pages of her interview got boiled down to a six-page statement, which, as the NYT and other outlets are now reporting, leaves out many critical claims and statements from Jane Doe. That’s the statement that led the district attorney to conclude that he simply did not have enough evidence to file a charge against the men.

How could this happen? Here’s where Currah’s point comes in. The Cornell University police have all the power of a regular police force, but they report to and are employed by the university. Think of them as the gendarme of a company in a company town. That’s what they are. Their interests are Cornell’s interests. And not Cornell students, and certainly not Cornell’s female students. Their interests are the administration’s interests.

When Jane Doe spoke to the police, there were other people present. One of the university’s Title IX officers was there. As people have long pointed out, Title IX officers are seldom interested in the rights and interests of women students; their concern is managing the reputation of the university.

So you have a woman student stating she was gang raped. You have a police officer and an administrator beholden to an institution that wants, more than anything, to cultivate a reputation for itself as a hallowed place of learning and study rather than as a playground for rapists. It doesn’t take much to see how the representative of those institutions could massage and produce, out of 120 pages of blood-curdling testimony of a terrified and confused woman, a bland statement that a not terribly energetic or inquisitive district attorney could tuck away and think, I’ve done my job for the day.

One other detail: After the woman made her initial filing with the police, they tried to speak with all the men whom she had named in her filing. They were not able to reach them all. A police department at Cornell tasked with investigating a gang rape can’t seem to summon the wherewithal to speak to all the men accused of the crime.

People wonder how it is that a university could so expeditiously expel or suspend students who protest Gaza while resorting to essay assignments for male rapists. It’s the wrong question. This is not a failing of the institution. This is the institution working exactly as it is set up to do. This is what the institution and all its principals and procedures are designed for: to manage and launder the reputation of the institution so that it keeps the money from donors and the government coming in.

One last point: We call these institutions liberal. Even people on the left complain about the tepid/centrist liberalism of these institutions. Nothing could be further from the truth. One of the hallmarks of the most tepid/centrist liberalism is the separation of powers. Remember your Montesquieu? These institutions have no separation of powers. They’re like Chinatown. Remember at the end of the film, when Faye Dunaway yells at Jack Nicholson, “He owns the police.” Think of Cornell as the playground of Noah Cross, the character played by John Huston. That’s what universities are like.