On Sunday, after word of the lawsuit broke, Pugh expressed her feelings about the case on her personal Instagram account, writing to her 10.8 million followers that she felt “uneasy and sick and anxious” about the “horrific act that happened at Cornell College in 2024.”
“Colleges/schools/universities repeatedly fail women around the world,” Pugh wrote in her eight-slide carousel. “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…. 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. We are the life force of this earth, start ****ing protecting us. Be angry for us. Please.” Pugh’s Instagram post currently has 1.9 million likes and counting.
After posting, Pugh says, Instagram briefly censored the post, putting a “sensitive-content warning” on it—blurring out the post and preventing some users from viewing or swiping through it, though the warning was later removed. Pugh addressed this in a now-expired Instagram story. “Rather worryingly, neither I nor some of my followers can access the recent post that wrote about the Cornell College sexual abuse,” she wrote in the Instagram story. “Why is that? Has it been taken down for others? Am I being censored for talking about rape? Great! Another lovely lesson to teach people that if you speak up about it, we will silence you.”
In a statement to Vanity Fair, a spokesperson for Meta, Instagram’s parent company, said the following: “We have rules on content describing sexual violence and exploitation in order to protect victims, warn people before seeing content they might find upsetting, and prevent teens from seeing content not appropriate for their age. A label was initially applied to the post, warning people that the content may be sensitive before they click through. We removed this label upon further review after we determined that it qualified for a newsworthy allowance. The post is now fully visible for adults.”
