Beth de Araújo Rips Cornell Rape Case at Critics Choice Awards — SkimNews
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- Beth de Araújo accepted the Breakthrough Director Award at the Critics Choice Association's Celebración of Cinema & Television 2026 at the Four Seasons Beverly Hills on Friday, pivoting from her planned remarks to address the Cornell University rape case.
- "Josephine", de Araújo's sophomore feature, won both the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award for the Dramatic Competition at Sundance this year, and she connected the film's genesis to witnessing a rape as an 8-year-old alongside her Brazilian immigrant father, who chased the attacker and helped police make an arrest.
- De Araújo directly criticized the Cornell administration for giving "leniency" to the perpetrators, calling them "at best sympathizers who valued those boys' lives over Jane Doe's," and noted "not one of those 50 men behaved like my father."
- The director referenced a fraternity text chain, declaring "the words we've read in the fraternity text chain are not an anomaly," and framed rape and rape culture as "global epidemics."
- De Araújo called on men in the audience to "hold each other accountable even when it's uncomfortable" and "be the man who chases, not the man who laughs with the group," while also urging established male filmmakers to mentor emerging women directors by giving notes on their cuts.
- The speech ended with de Araújo wondering what Jane Doe "would have grown up to be" — "the doctor, senator, the journalist" — and thanking her cast including Gemma Chan, Channing Tatum, and lead Mason Reeves.
Why it matters: De Araújo leveraged a major industry platform — the Critics Choice gala — to redirect attention from her own accolades to a high-profile campus rape case, specifically naming the Cornell administration as complicit and tying her personal trauma to a broader indictment of how institutions protect perpetrators. Her dual call to action (campus accountability and industry mentorship) puts pressure on both a university under public scrutiny and male gatekeepers in Hollywood to be visibly present for women and girls.
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