Florence Pugh used Instagram to address in detail her thoughts on the 2024 drugged gang rape case involving a female student at Cornell College, Mount Vernon, Iowa. The case left her feeling sick and anxious, and she called upon men and institutions to show courage and stand up for what is right.
“After reading about the young woman who was gang raped at her college by her friend and school peers, I’m feeling uneasy and sick and anxious,” Pugh writes. “I’m processing quietly and watching everything and everyone and every man.”
Some of the thoughts of the actress regarding the disgusting act carried out against the young lady at Cornell College are detailed below.
“I know this has happened before, and I hate the idea of it happening again,” she continues. “This is really the moment where we need our men to be as horrified and as sickened as us. You need to be leading conversations about how we change the allowance and complicity of this behaviour as much as we are. How can you expect us to trust that it’s ‘not all men’ when in moments like this, many of you stay quiet?”
The question she poses is whether the gang rape was planned in advance and adds that any individual who knew anything about it is equally responsible for what happened.
“A drugged gang rape takes action and conversations,” she wrote. “It immediately makes me wonder: had it been in the works for a while? Was the damage of this poor woman’s body thought about over and over before? Every single person who knew or heard about this happening should be looked at with serious concern. They are as evil as those planning it. To know that a torture as violent as rape is about to happen ‘upstairs’ and not do ANYTHING ABOUT IT is sick, cowardly, and cold.”
Pugh describes the act as an attack on the poor woman’s very being.
“The thing that makes me most heartbroken is it’s a want to kill a soul,” Pugh wrote. “This is a killing of a soul. Destroying of a body and killing of a soul.”
Pugh was not impressed with the leniency of the sentence given to the perpetrators.
“And they’ve been let off?” she wrote. “All it takes is write a quick ‘I’m so sorry I raped a girl while she was drugged with my friends, we thought it would be fine?’ essay and you’re good to go! This is unacceptable. We are not hard enough on those that want to damage human lives.”
Pugh commends the students and others at the college who fought for the lady and made it difficult for the boys to enjoy themselves while studying at the college.
“I salute all those at the college that are fighting for that girl, exposing those boys and making life unbearably impossible to find joy during their terms,” Pugh wrote. “They should not be allowed to walk freely like the rest of us who treasure and care for souls.”
Pugh extends her comment to include colleges from other parts of the world for protecting perpetrators and putting the lives of victims at risk.
“Colleges/schools/universities repeatedly fail women around the world,” she writes. “You build men that get taught through time and time again that they can do extreme harm and that they won’t be harmed in return. I’m no longer tired; I’m enraged by schools protecting boys, in fear of their futures being wrecked. What about the life that those girls then have to endure, with the knowledge that his reputation is more precious than her truth? Or to feel that no one with the power to do something cares that you were abused. It’s further soul-destroying.”
Pugh calls for harsh measures to punish those institutions that protect the perpetrators.
“Those that protect and lightly sentence men that rape and destroy, should be punished and watched closely,” she wrote. “Why are you protecting someone that.”
Pugh ends by calling for equality and safety for women.
“There is no equality until you respect our bodies. There is no equality until you stop damaging our souls. There is no equality until you let us live. There is no equality until we can say we feel safe,” she wrote. “We are the life force of this earth; start f***ing protecting us. Be angry for us.”
