Eiglarsh believes that the move to assign AG James to the case is not for her to conduct an investigation, but rather to indict the men.

“The governor is not assigning her for an independent investigation,” Eiglarsh said. “It’s, ‘Go bring justice,’ and justice is defined by indicting some of these kids. But keep in mind you can’t lump them all together. Each of these kids’ — their lives are precious. Same way the alleged victim is — each one. There needs to be proof beyond, and to the exclusion of, every reasonable doubt that meets the elements of the crime of a statute in New York. I think she’s going to find a way to bring charges.”

Banfield said that people should withhold judgment until “every scrap” of evidence has been reviewed, comparing the case to the 2006 Duke University lacrosse case, in which three men were falsely accused of rape.

Hochul and James are excellent examples of what happens when the left completely takes over a state, and there is no need anymore to even have a pretense of fairness or evenhandedness. Here’s an almost humorous statement by James (at the very end):

Reporter: “Attorney General, on your Facebook page three days ago, you wrote, ‘What this young woman has been forced to endure is horrific and unacceptable. I’m holding her in my heart and in my prayers. To her and to all survivors, you’re not alone. We stand with you.’ Why did you affirm her allegations as fact without doing your own fact-finding investigation? And to the governor, why did you appoint an official who made a public statement affirming those allegations as fact as someone who’s supposed to be doing an investigation?”

New York Governor Kathy Hochul (D): “I will answer that. I have every confidence in our Attorney General to do what she has always done. Look at the facts, examine the record, and draw the proper conclusions. That’s exactly what’s going to happen in this case. Attorney General, please.”

New York Attorney General Letitia James: “I will not comment on a Facebook post.”

“A Facebook post” – that’s her very own Facebook post that she won’t comment on – because she doesn’t need to.

The post Nothing says fairness like appointing Letitia James appeared first on The New Neo.

New details are emerging in the case of a former Cornell University student who claims she was drugged and gang-raped for multiple hours inside a fraternity house in October 2024.

The woman — identified only as Jane Doe, who was 20 at the time of the alleged incident — recently filed a civil lawsuit against seven then-Chi Phi fraternity members and the university, claiming they failed to protect her and prevent the alleged assault. While Cornell conducted an internal investigation, and expelled or suspended several of the men, no criminal charges were brought against the accused at the time.

The Tompkins County District Attorney’s Office confirmed on Monday, Sept. 28, that it will be reopening the criminal investigation amid pressure from the community and will bring the evidence to a grand jury. The DA said the woman’s sworn statement from November 2024 was different from what she alleges in the civil lawsuit, while her attorney claims investigators never followed up on her allegations.

You need to read the whole thing to get the picture of what is being alleged and whether her story changed. She initially was very drunk but says the sex was consensual, but then other men entered the scene and the situation changed to rape, although her memory is murky due to having ingested multiple substances. As with so many such cases, it becomes virtually impossible to tell what really happened, except that it reflects very poorly on everyone involved.

Because I’ve been blogging so long, I have written on the subject before – not about the Cornell case, but on related cases. Here’s a post of mine that’s nearly twenty years old but still relevant. Please read.

ADDENDUM:

I’m completely with Paglia on this:

The eternally-validated Camille Paglia on the Cornell case.

"The sexual revolution must be undone because middle-class women can't handle it. They cannot take responsibility for their own actions."
pic.twitter.com/FEXSjUd7M0

— Suffragent (@Suffragent_) October 1, 2026

The post The Cornell gang rape allegations appeared first on The New Neo.

This post of mine about love at first sight sparked a lot of discussion, including some personal stories about the phenomenon, some doubters, and some believers.

Until it happened to me I’m not sure I believed in the existence of love at first sight, either. And I certainly didn’t expect that it would ever happen to me. Indeed, the evening I met my husband-to-be, such a thing was furthest from my mind.

It was the evening of one of my very first days in law school. I had just arrived for a temporary stay in a spare room in the apartment of two other women while I looked for more permanent lodging. I was exhausted, and all I was really thinking about was that at least I had a place to sleep for a few nights. I entered a room where the two young women were talking to a young man, and I sat myself down in an available chair (a wooden rocker) to relax for the very first time that day.

And then I glanced at the man. His look intrigued and attracted me, but it wasn’t just that. He was talking to the two women, and what he said was very entertaining, witty, and humorous. They were laughing and laughing. I’ve always been attracted to humor in men, and the combination of that plus his good looks – and something else, some indefinable and indescribable perception that to this day I don’t understand, but let’s call it “connection” – was apparently all it took.

About 24 hours later I had a thought I’d never had before: “I might marry this guy.”

I was twenty-one years old. We married five years later, and although we’re divorced now we stayed married for over thirty years. Was the love real? Absolutely. And I still can’t explain the phenomenon of love at first sight.

And I’m still extremely surprised that it happened to me.

The post Love at first sight: a personal story appeared first on The New Neo.

I’ve noticed a great deal of confusion about postpartum depression versus postpartum psychosis. The two are different entities.

Postpartum psychosis is rare and postpartum depression is common. With postpartum psychosis, the sufferer is more likely to be at risk for harming or killing her children even through she has shown nothing but love and caring for them in the past. Postpartum psychosis does not lead to random assaults, when it does lead to crimes. It leads to child harming or child murder, usually under the sway of a delusion of some sort, and often coupled with suicide attempts or completed suicides.

See this:

The postpartum period is the time of highest risk in a woman’s lifetime for the development of a mental illness. Although the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, Text Revision (DSM-IV-TR) defines the postpartum period as the immediate, relatively short time following delivery, in research studies this period has been defined as ranging from a few days to 12 months.

Postpartum-onset psychological problems generally fall into one of three categories: so-called baby blues, postpartum depression, and postpartum psychosis. Baby blues affect up to 70 percent of mothers and include mild symptoms of crying and irritability which end by the second week after childbirth. Postpartum-onset depression affects from 7 to 15 percent of mothers and is characterized by sadness, crying, self-blame, loss of control, irritability, anxiety, tension, and sleep difficulties. Factors such as personality, negative feelings toward the infant, marital discord, poor social supports, and ambivalence over parenthood appear to predispose women to the onset of depressive symptoms in the postpartum period.

Postpartum psychosis, the most severe of postpartum mental disorders, occurs in 1 to 2 of 1,000 births and frequently requires hospitalization to stabilize symptoms. … The disorder is characterized by an extended period of loss of contact with reality that may include auditory or visual hallucinations, delusions, or rapid mood swings. The auditory and visual hallucinations may focus on violence toward self or the infant.

Risk factors for postpartum psychosis can be of both biologic and genetic origins. One study found that the rate of postpartum psychosis in mothers with bipolar disorder was 26 percent, with the rate in mothers with bipolar disorder and a family history of postpartum psychosis increasing to 57 percent. …

… [R]esearch supports that postpartum psychosis is associated with prominent cognitive disturbances, ranging from mental confusion and indecision to intrusive and bizarre thoughts. Women with this disorder can appear delirious and disorganized. Second, symptoms can arise and dissipate suddenly, with the woman appearing lucid one moment and psychotic the next. Third, although DSM-IV-TR classifies it as a psychotic disorder not otherwise specified, research shows that the syndrome can have both affective and psychotic components.

It has been estimated that four percent of women with postpartum psychosis commit infanticide. …

The insanity defense is successful in less than 0.1 percent of all criminal trials. However, major population studies, including McKee and Shea, d’Orban, and Bourget and Bradford, found insanity pleas successful in 20, 27, and 15 percent of infanticide cases, respectively. These results suggest that, regardless of the legal or medical guidelines, the law treats women who kill their children with more leniency. Nonetheless, infanticide case outcomes vary extremely. At least two such women have been sentenced to death, whereas some have been released without a prison sentence

That article is from 2012, and the review of cases goes back a ways before that. So we’re not talking about the result of recent internet social media hysteria influencing trials. Most of the data almost certainly predates the ascendance of social media.

You may decide that postpartum psychosis is a myth promulgated by those who wish to avoid punishment for killing their children. I think that underestimates the power of psychosis in general and this type of psychosis in particular. Note also that, as a defense to child murder, it’s most often unsuccessful. It certainly would be far less likely to be a successful defense in cases in which there is no history of deep postpartum disturbance and the seeking of psychological help prior to the murders.

Note also that postpartum psychosis is already very rare, and in that small group 4% go on to murder their children, which makes that phenomenon exceedingly rare indeed. However, I’ve seen people in discussion groups involving the Clancy murders to state that 50,000 women kill their children in the US every year. That bears no resemblance to the actual figures, which are much smaller although still profoundly disturbing:

Between 1976 and 2004, 30 percent of all children younger than five years old who were murdered were killed by their mothers, while 31 percent were killed by their fathers. A study by Brown University showed that from 1976 to 2007, on average, there were 500 cases of filicide a year in the United States.

So that 50,000 figure overstates filicide by a huge factor. Plus, mothers account for about half of the actual figure. This is in marked contrast to the much more lopsided statistics between the sexes for crimes of violence in general.

Nor is the idea of postpartum psychosis as connected with child murder an especially new one:

In the United States, psychiatrists recognized the significance of recent childbirth in acts against infants. In 1927, the field divided infanticide based on whether the mother was still lactating, or breastfeeding. Many cases were attributed to exhaustion or what was then called lactation psychosis, a recognition that hormonal changes and the stress of parenting a newborn could affect one’s well-being.

That article cites a different statistic for filicide in the US – a higher one, although still far short of 50,000 a year:

The Washington Post cites a Brown University study in 2014 that found three thousand filicides occur each year in the United States.

The following are the categories of motivations for maternal filicide (not just for filicide in which the perpetrator claims postpartum psychosis – this is for filicide in general):

Resnick, in his 2016 study, found that mothers who kill their children have one of five motives: altruistic filicide, or the belief that the child is better off dead (usually because the parent intends to commit suicide and does not wish to leave the child alone or because the child has a real or perceived disability); acutely psychotic filicide, or no understandable reason; fatal maltreatment filicide, when a mother abuses the child but does not necessarily intend to kill the youngster; unwanted child filicide, when a mother wants to be free of the child she feels is holding her back (possibly because a new partner does not want stepchildren or the parent seeks a benefit such as insurance money); and spouse revenge filicide, when a mother kills the child to wound the father for actions such as abandonment or infidelity, as in the myth of Medea. Altruistic filicide is the most common—Resnick found that it accounted for 49 percent of the cases reviewed—while spouse revenge filicide is the rarest at 2 percent. Among maternal infanticides, or the killing of a child younger than one year, perpetrators were often unemployed women in their early twenties.

My perception of the Clancy case is that most people who defend Clancy and think she was not criminally responsible believe that her motive was that she was acutely psychotic, period. On the other hand, those who believe she’s guilty of murder tend to believe that her motive was either the first – altruistic suicide – or unwanted child filicide (that she wanted to rid herself of inconvenient children cramping her style in some way).

There are also some Clancy-defenders who believe she didn’t even do it, but that falls into a different category entirely. In addition, there are some people who think Clancy should be found guilty who believe that even if she was psychotic it should not absolve her of any criminal responsibility.

Another high-profile case of maternal filicide and claimed mental illness was that of Susan Smith, in which it seems fairly clear that it was actually unwanted child filicide; Smith was found guilty of murder. She had also distinguished herself by claiming a black man had kidnapped her children:

On October 25, 1994, Smith reported to police that she had been the victim of a carjacking by a black man while driving her 1990 Mazda Protégé sedan with her sons – Michael, aged three, and Alexander, aged 14 months – still in the back seat. For nine days, she made dramatic pleas on national television for their safe return. However, following an intensive investigation and a nationwide search for them, she confessed on November 3, 1994, to letting her car roll into nearby John D. Long Lake, drowning them inside. Her motivation was reportedly to facilitate a relationship with a local wealthy man named Tom Findlay. Prior to the murders, he sent her a letter ending their relationship and expressing that he did not want children. She said there was no motive nor did she plan the murders, stating that she was not in a right state of mind.

Very different fact situation.

The post Postpartum psychosis is not postpartum depression appeared first on The New Neo.

More:

The Conservatives said any asylum seekers breaking UK law should be deported and Reform said the publication showed the government “knows that they are a menace”.

Prime Minister Andy Burnham said the government had “a very clear principle that if you break UK law, you will be removed from the country”.

He said the number of removals of illegal immigrants from the UK “are significantly up” and that he was working to ensure that foreign national offenders are removed from the prison system.

He added: “It follows that if we’re taking this approach, it’s made explicitly clear what the UK law is and what the societal norms of the UK are and that’s why this approach is being taken.”

A section on gender explains that women in the UK have equal rights to men, and do not need the permission from a husband, father, brother or any other man to do things like work, study, travel, or make decisions. …

And a section headed Respect in Public outlines how it is not acceptable to whistle or make kissing noises at people on the street, nor “make sexual comments to someone, even if you think it is a compliment

On the one hand, it actually is a step up, although a baby step. Did the British never impress these facts on newcomers before? At any rate, they’re doing it now. At the very least, that indicates that the authorities are setting up some sort of behavioral expectations.

But on the other hand, that is unlikely to make much of a dent in cultural customs and beliefs that run deep.

And furthermore: why has the British government been so eager to take in so many people with cultures that clash so violently (literally) with British life? That’s somewhat of a rhetorical question, because we know many answers. One for the left is that the left ultimately gains voters. Another (motivating both left and right) is for cheap labor. For some who support the policy, the reason is virtue-signaling. Still another reason is suicidal empathy. One more is a sense of being unable to do much to prevent it. And again, for the left, there are those who have wanted the peace of England’s previous high-trust society to be destroyed.

The post The British finally decide that maybe newcomers need some instructions on quaint British customs appeared first on The New Neo.

Hazard of the bodyguard trade, it seems. After all, it’s an intimate relationship of sorts, just not ordinarily that sort.

Ammel’s ex-wife is suing Sinema for “alienation of affection.” Boy, does that phrase evoke memories. When I was in law school a long time ago, it was one of a host of terms often involved back then in divorce law, such as “loss of consortium” and “condonation” and “collusion.” In particular, “alienation of affection” always seemed an odd offense to me. After all, it’s the spouse who makes the promise to be faithful, and if he or she strays I think the responsibility is wholly with that person rather than the paramour.

The idea of the nearly irresistible “homewrecker,” however, is apparently still alive and well and living in North Carolina:

Ammel’s now-ex-wife sued Sinema, 50, last year alleging “alienation of affection,” taking advantage of North Carolina’s “homewrecker law,” which permits women to seek damages from their ex-spouse’s lovers.

Heather Ammel is asking for more than $75,000 in compensation.

But Sinema, the first openly bisexual member of congress, claimed in court that she had no romantic feelings [for] Matthew during the final months of her political career in 2024.

“I’m not like that,” Sinema told her attorney, Steven Epstein, when asked under oath about the tone of her conversations with her bodyguard..

“When the opportunity presented itself, and when Mr. Ammel approached me, we had sex,” she added flatly.

Wow, that’s cold.

And the ex-wife is asking only $75K? That seems rather archaic, too.

But it’s the term “homewrecker” that brings up really ancient memories for me. When I was a kid, I loved the movie “Damn Yankees.” Saw it many times. I hadn’t thought of it in ages, but since I’m one of those odd people who remembers song lyrics to just about every Broadway musical from the 1940s through the 1960s, I recall that Ray Walston as the Devil says to Gwen Verdon as his sexy assistant Lola in the intro to one of the songs, “There isn’t a homewrecker on my staff better than you, Lola. But this fellow is stubborn.”

Verdon wasn’t conventionally beautiful, but she was exceptionally charming and a fabulous dancer. She played the role of Lola (“Whatever Lola Wants, Lola Gets”) with a tongue-in-cheek humor and lightness. Anyway, here’s the “homewrecker” scene. When I was a child, I loved the lavender decor, too:

The post Sinema the homewrecker appeared first on The New Neo.

Too much information.

AOC has bared hers to show us her quest to freeze her eggs in order to preserve her chances to have children. Also too much information. But certainly more interesting information, considering that this is a practice – purposely delaying conception and using medically-assisted means in an effort to get pregnant later at the “right” time – that has become more common.

AOC says:

“Maybe in life you can’t have everything,” she says. “But here’s the secret: You can have a hell of a lot.”

AOC is herself a good example of maximizing a gift for gab and a little bit of undergrad-type knowledge and gaining a position of some power, perhaps to gain even more. She’s thirty-six years old now and had been keeping company with a boyfriend of at least a decade, although they’ve now broken up:

… she also is single, with The New York Times reporting that she has split from her long-term fiancé and college sweetheart, Riley Roberts. …

… Now she finds herself at 36, still beautiful, considered youthful by the standards of the day, but with ovaries that stubbornly remain in nature’s grip. From the age of 35 a woman’s fertility falls off a cliff.

AOC is trying to outsmart the process by using hormone injections to force her ovaries to emit six to 10 eggs at once which are then removed and frozen in the uncertain hope that they can be successfully thawed and fertilized when she’s ready to become a mother.

The rest of the article discusses the difference between left and right on child-bearing and abortion and Having It All. It also contrasts AOC with Karoline Leavitt, who at 28 has two children and a great career but is leaving to spend more time with her baby and toddler.

What interests me more is whether AOC is giving women (and perhaps herself) false hope that conception can be almost indefinitely delayed and yet ultimately be successful. But even with egg-freezing that can definitely extend the window of possibility, actually having a baby gets more and more difficult and there are costs both monetary and in terms of health. The drugs involved to induce hyper-ovulation are disruptive and potentially damaging. The chances of successful fertilization and implantation get lower and lower as times goes on, no matter at what age the eggs were frozen. Pregnancy itself is more difficult and hazardous as a woman gets older. And then of course there’s the question of whether a partner or husband is ever found. Although a woman can go it alone with donor sperm, that’s still another difficult decision.

The other day I was watching an interesting podcast on these sorts of issues, and so here it is:

[NOTE: The article characterizes AOC as “still beautiful.” You may disagree. I happen to think AOC is a very attractive woman. I also think that’s part of her electoral success. If she weren’t attractive, I’m not at all sure she’d have been elected in the first place or would have such a large following today.]

The post AOC and freezing eggs appeared first on The New Neo.

A carpenter who helped restore Notre-Dame after the devastating 2019 fire was granted permission to marry inside the cathedral, becoming part of its first wedding ceremony in 30 years.

A remarkable exception was made when 29-year-old master carpenter Martin Lorentz was allowed… pic.twitter.com/xXccGqqbHI

— Historic Vids (@historyinmemes) August 6, 2026

A carpenter who helped restore Notre-Dame after the devastating 2019 fire was granted permission to marry inside the cathedral, becoming part of its first wedding ceremony in 30 years.

A remarkable exception was made when 29-year-old master carpenter Martin Lorentz was allowed to marry his fiancée, Jade, inside Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris. Lorentz had spent three years hand-carving the massive oak beams used to rebuild “the Forest”—the cathedral’s intricate medieval roof structure, which was destroyed in the devastating 2019 fire. Because Notre-Dame is classified as a national monument rather than a parish church, private weddings have been prohibited for decades, making theirs the first ceremony held there since 1995.

In recognition of Lorentz’s dedication to the cathedral’s restoration, Archbishop Laurent Ulrich personally granted the rare permission. Around 500 guests attended the ceremony, including family, friends, and many of the craftsmen who helped bring Notre-Dame back to life. As the newlyweds left the cathedral, Lorentz’s fellow carpenters formed a traditional guard of honor, raising their axes overhead in a moving tribute to the man who helped rebuild one of France’s most treasured landmarks.

Hand-carving oak beams for three years.

The post A wedding at Notre Dame appeared first on The New Neo.

“First-of-their-kind” transgender dolls — complete with removable genitalia — will debut in some Minnesota classrooms this fall to kids as young as 4 years old.

The paper dolls, with gender-neutral names like “Sam,” “Rory,” “Avery” and “Parker,” have removable internal and external genitals, along with more than 100 interchangeable pieces of clothing, accessories and hairstyles — like a trans Mr./Mrs. Potato Head.

The goal is for kids to “learn about the different options that exist for who they can be,” according to a therapist at the University of Minnesota Medical School, which spent over half a decade developing the controversial project funded by lefty Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz

The Medical School’s Institute for Sexual and Gender Health research over those six years included paying $20 to $60 for “trans and gender diverse” children and their parents to play with the dolls and “talk about gender and bodies” in groups.

Prototypes of the dolls were shown in a 2024 conference where one named “Sam” can be seen in what appears to be some phase of a gender transition, with a detachable penis off to the side, and a dress and girls’ underwear within reach.

The trans dolls — which promise to “make gender fun” — will be made available to teachers, school counselors, pediatricians and mental health providers …

This is terrible on so many levels. From the article, it seems they will be used with children who already “identify” as trans. But any child young enough to be playing with dolls is too young to be on such a track, and certainly it’s not the school that should be dealing with fostering this.

These dolls are wrong wrong wrong; attempting to become trans is not a game. So-called “bottom” surgery is so far from being a game that it is an obscenity to promote it or even visualize it in this way – for children, with dolls. It is a profoundly serious and disfiguring surgery with lifelong effects and dangers, and it is irreversible. It should never be marketed to children in any way or made into a game using a paper doll with easily detachable genitalia. There is no analogy to bottom surgery or to what human beings who undergo it experience.

And there’s also the problem of mission creep. Do we really think these dolls will be limited to children already saying they are trans? I very much doubt it; that’s not the way such things tend to work. These dolls should absolutely never be shown to children in general. Talk about fostering a little old-fashioned castration anxiety – not to mention just plain old anxiety and confusion of all kinds.

But sowing that sort of confusion is the point, isn’t it?

The post Transgender dolls for children: what could possibly go wrong? appeared first on The New Neo.

From Matt Taibbi, as quoted at PJ Media:

In sum, a Berlin-born man of Lebanese descent [the attacker] left Germany last year to join the ISIS militia, failed to reach Mauritania, failed to reach Syria, got arrested and sentenced in his family’s home country of Lebanon for ‘incitement to religious and sectarian conflict,’ then successfully returned to Germany to be arrested again,” Taibbi writes.

“He was convicted for planning a serious act of terrorist violence, but released despite a Prosecutor’s request for a ‘longer, non-probationary sentence for the juvenile’ — the 21-year-old juvenile — and put into ‘deradicalization counseling,’ which was about to report him for being ‘inscrutable,’ evasive, and a threat,” Taibbi continued. …

“Instead of examining border control policies that welcome back terrorist offenders so they can immediately be put into a criminal justice system that bars long sentences for 21-year-old ‘juveniles,’ or a probation policy that thinks it can counsel people out of religious fanaticism, the [New York] Times points the finger at a chancellor who refused to fly a Pride flag over parliament,” writes Taibbi.

So apparently it’s the right’s fault, of course.

Germany is in big trouble if it continues down this path. But Germany is hardly alone.

How was the suspect killed? Here’s the story:

“According to current findings, he is said to have rushed toward our emergency forces with a stabbing weapon, after which police firearms were used,” the Berlin Police said in a post on X, confirming that the confrontation occurred at approximately 6 p.m. local time Sunday. It went on to say that resuscitation efforts at the scene proved unsuccessful.

Is “a stabbing weapon” some sort of circumlocution to avoid naming the forbidden thing?

German authorities seem to think that their locating the suspect in such a timely fashion is something to brag about. But I would think that preventing him from being able to do this in the first place would have been much better. And in this case, this man already had fully demonstrated his dangerousness and should and could have been either deported or imprisoned. But it didn’t happen.

The post The jihadi attack on the German gay pride festival appeared first on The New Neo.