Prediction market platform Polymarket removed a contract that had attracted more than $450,000 in wagers on whether any of the seven men accused of sexually assaulting or exploiting a Cornell University student in 2024 will be charged with a felony sex crime — doing so Tuesday after a wave of criticism from women's advocacy organizations, legal scholars, and the company's own high-profile celebrity endorsers, who found themselves publicly associated with a market that reduced an alleged gang rape to a financial bet.
The Cornell case involves a civil lawsuit filed September 16 by a plaintiff identified in court documents as Jane Doe, who alleges she was drugged and gang raped in October 2024 by seven members of Cornell's Chi Phi fraternity. The lawsuit names all seven fraternity members, the fraternity itself, and Cornell University as defendants, alleging sexual assault and negligence in the university's handling of her complaints. All seven accused men have denied her allegations, saying either that their interactions were consensual or that they were not involved. Polymarket's contract, which opened September 30 and was scheduled to close January 31, asked users to bet on whether any of the seven accused would be charged with a felony sex crime. The contract was available on Polymarket's international platform — not its U.S. CFTC-regulated exchange, which bans trading on activities unlawful under federal or state law. By the time it was removed Tuesday, it had accumulated $451,633 in trading volume.
"Our primary goal at Polymarket is to bring objective, data-driven insight to the most important questions of our time. This market addressed whether the government would take action — a process that deserves scrutiny, particularly in a case of such serious concern. That said, we believe in the wisdom of crowds, have heard them loud and clear, and removed the market." — Polymarket spokesperson statement, October 20, 2026
The public pressure that produced the removal came from multiple directions. UltraViolet, a women-led national advocacy organization, launched an online petition singling out Polymarket's celebrity endorsers — including LeBron James, Eli Manning, and Alexandra Daddario — and calling on them to cut ties with the platform. The campaign pointed out that the Cornell market was not the first time Polymarket had been criticized for allowing bets on sensitive real-world events involving identifiable victims. Separately, Polymarket's international platform continued to operate another active Cornell-related market as of Tuesday — allowing users to bet on whether Cornell President Michael Kotlikoff would leave his position by October 31, a market with approximately $10,700 in volume, reflecting the ongoing controversy over Cornell's handling of Jane Doe's complaint.
The episode raises a genuine and unresolved question about the appropriate boundaries of prediction markets. The intellectual case for prediction markets is that they aggregate dispersed information more efficiently than expert opinion, producing probability estimates that are genuinely useful for understanding likely outcomes. That case is strongest for questions like election results, economic indicators, and event outcomes where participants have real informational advantages. It is considerably weaker — and considerably more troubling — for markets that commodify pending legal proceedings in which identifiable victims have privacy interests, and in which the market itself could potentially influence the behavior of witnesses, potential defendants, or prosecutorial judgment about public attention. Polymarket is not the only platform that has had to navigate this question, but the Cornell case gave it unusual visibility because of the celebrity endorser dimension.
The Cornell case has drawn national attention since Jane Doe's civil lawsuit was filed September 16 and has prompted protests on Cornell's campus, a public grilling of President Kotlikoff by faculty, and a separate investigation ordered by New York State Attorney General Letitia James. The seven men accused in the civil suit have not been arrested or criminally charged as of publication. Cornell has said it is cooperating with the attorney general's investigation. Polymarket's decision to remove the market does not affect the civil lawsuit, which remains active in the relevant New York court.
Polymarket did the right thing by removing the market — but the statement it issued on the way out the door deserves scrutiny. Framing the Cornell gang rape allegations as a question of "whether the government would take action" and describing the removal as responding to "the wisdom of crowds" is a notably sanitized way to explain why betting on a named woman's sexual assault allegations crossed a line. The reason the market was removed is not that the crowd spoke. It is that there are things a functioning society should not reduce to financial instruments, and the legal fate of a woman who says she was gang raped at a college fraternity is one of them.