# The Rape Issue "The Rape Issue" was a special issue of [[The Stanford Review]], the conservative campus paper [[Peter Thiel]] founded, published in January 1992 and devoted to sexual assault at Stanford. Its centerpiece was an article by [[David Sacks]] defending a senior who had just admitted to statutory rape of a 17-year-old freshman. It also carried a column co-written by [[Keith Rabois]]. Both men went on to PayPal with Thiel, and later into national politics. The issue is one of the most-quoted documents in reporting on where their politics began. ## The case it argued about On the night of Sept. 22, 1991, a first-year student reported that she had been raped after a party at Casa Zapata, a student residence in Stern Hall. According to her account, as reported by *Stanford Politics*, a 23-year-old senior had given her and other students a large amount of alcohol in his room, then pressured her into sex once they were alone. Campus police arrested him on Oct. 1 and charged him with unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor and furnishing alcohol to a minor. Stanford's president, Donald Kennedy, said in a statement that sex "by force or coercion, including coercion through the use of alcohol, is absolutely unacceptable here." A new university sexual-assault policy signed that December used the same language. On Dec. 18, 1991, the senior changed his plea after prosecutors reduced the statutory-rape count from a felony to a misdemeanor. *The Stanford Daily* reported it as a guilty plea to both misdemeanor charges; later accounts describe it as a plea of no contest. Separately, Stanford's student-faculty Judicial Council found him responsible for "exploitative, manipulative conduct" and withheld his degree for two years. *Stanford Politics* describes this as the first time the university formally charged anyone accused of sexual assault. ## What the issue printed The issue appeared in late January 1992, within days of Rabois's Jan. 19 outburst outside a lecturer's campus home, which the *Review* was also defending. - **Sacks's article** defended the senior. It dismissed the statutory-rape law as "a moral directive left on the books by pre-sexual revolution crustaceans." Thiel biographer Max Chafkin reports that Sacks gave a graphic account of the encounter and argued that the 17-year-old could have refused. Sacks was then a *Review* writer; he later became its editor-in-chief. - **Rabois's co-written column**, according to Chafkin's account as reported by *The American Independent*, made a joke of the dorm where the assault took place. Copies of the *Review*'s early issues are held in Stanford Libraries' Special Collections. ## Afterlife **The Diversity Myth (1995).** Sacks and Thiel revisited the case in [[The Diversity Myth]], their book on Stanford's campus politics. It argued that the definition of rape had been stretched to cover "seductions that are later regretted," and that "a multicultural rape charge may indicate nothing more than belated regret." **The 2016 apologies.** In October 2016, while Thiel was a prominent donor to [[Donald Trump]], *The Guardian* resurfaced those passages. Both men apologized. Thiel said, "Rape in all forms is a crime," and that he regretted passages "taken to suggest otherwise." Their apologies addressed the book. Neither statement mentioned the 1992 issue. **Back in view (2021–2022).** Chafkin's biography [[The Contrarian]] (2021) brought the issue back to light, and he discussed it on NPR's *Fresh Air*. In 2022 *The New Republic*'s profile of Sacks's political rise recounted it, as did *The American Independent*'s coverage of a Republican Senate fundraiser that Sacks and Rabois co-hosted that year. ## Why it's on the map The issue shows, in the network's own words, an argument that later spread through right-wing politics: sexual-assault claims, and the campus rules that respond to them, treated as a weapon against men. The same argument reappears in *The Diversity Myth*, and later in the national fights over Title IX and the [[MeToo Movement]] traced on the [[Rape Culture]] page. It also ties two of today's most politically active tech figures, Sacks and Rabois, to a specific, dated, documented position. ## Connections - [[The Stanford Review]] — the paper that published it - [[David Sacks]] · [[Keith Rabois]] · [[Peter Thiel]] — the contributors and the paper's founder - [[The Diversity Myth]] — the 1995 book that revisited the case - [[The Contrarian]] — the biography that brought the issue back to light - [[Rape Culture]] — the wider debate over how sexual assault is described and judged - [[Thiel Network]] · [[PayPal Mafia]] — where the contributors went next