Nearly two years after a Cornell University sophomore said she was sexually assaulted by multiple men at a fraternity house, the case has turned into a national reckoning over how campus police, prosecutors and one of America's most prestigious universities handled her allegations. Prosecutors in central New York have reopened their criminal inquiry, New York Governor Kathy Hochul has secured an independent outside review of Cornell's response, and a series of leaked university records has exposed sharp gaps between what the woman told investigators and what ultimately reached the district attorney's desk.
What Jane Doe Alleges Happened At The Chi Phi House
In a 101 page civil lawsuit filed on September 16, the woman, identified in court filings as Jane Doe, alleges that on the night of October 19, 2024, seven men from Cornell's Chi Phi fraternity chapter assaulted her for hours in an incident involving alcohol and the drug ketamine. She was a 20 year old undergraduate at the time. According to the BBC, she said she left her sorority sisters after drinking that night and "stumbled alone" to the fraternity house in Ithaca to see a male friend. The suit, filed against the university, the fraternity, her sorority and the men, alleges sexual assault and battery, negligence, breach of contract and violations of New York's Human Rights Law, and argues she was too intoxicated to consent at any point.
The lawsuit includes an image said to come from a fraternity Snapchat group titled "Chi Phi Actives," in which members discussed a "free" sexual encounter with her in coarse terms just before 2 a.m. on October 20, 2024. Cornell's police department provided that image to prosecutors as evidence in November 2024, the university said. A heavily redacted 99 page university report obtained by ABC News also found that ketamine was being used by several people in the house at the time, and that one person there had overdosed on the drug on or about October 18, the day before. "I felt like bait. I felt like lions around me," Jane Doe told a university hearing in 2025, according to that report.
Three Weeks From Shame To A Police Report
Hundreds of pages of documents from Cornell's private Title IX proceedings, obtained by The New York Times, trace the three weeks between the party and Jane Doe's decision to go to campus police. In the first days, she told roommates she had taken ketamine and had sex with multiple men, but did not use the words "rape" or "assault." One roommate said she seemed to be "in shock." When one of the men she would later accuse texted to apologize for being too intoxicated to "shut it down and kick people out before it got way out of hand," she reassured him, writing that "none of the sexual stuff was illegal."
As rumors spread across campus, most of them blaming her, she wrote that her reputation was destroyed and that she could only "sleep and cry all day." She told a Cornell Health doctor she had contracted a urinary tract infection "in a traumatic way." Her view shifted, she later told investigators, after she read an anonymous online post accusing Chi Phi members of having "gang raped a sophomore." "That's the first time I had ever heard the narrative change that I wasn't a whore and that I was assaulted," she said, according to the records. After she was disinvited from a fraternity Halloween party, she texted one of the men on November 3 that "90% of what happened that night was not consensual." Days later she went to an emergency room in Ithaca, and she then reported the alleged assault to Cornell University Police.
A 120 Page Interview Became A Six Page Statement
On November 14, 2024, Jane Doe spoke for hours with a Cornell police investigator and a Title IX investigator, with a victim advocate and an adviser present. According to a transcript obtained by CBS News New York, she said she was "pretty OK" with an initial encounter with two men she considered friends, though she was "super drunk," but that what happened later was different. "I can say with 100% confidence I was raped," she said. Asked whether she had eventually given in after being repeatedly asked for sex, she replied, "Yes. It was coercion, yes," adding that she had been "completely and totally incapacitated."
That roughly 120 page conversation was condensed by the police investigator into a six page statement that she signed the next day, and according to The New York Times' review of more than 1,000 pages of investigation files, the summary left out much of the context about her state of mind, her history as a survivor of an earlier sexual assault, and her "100 percent confidence" statement. The signed statement did record that she had considered taking more ketamine in the hope of passing out, reasoning that if the men then had sex with her, "they could be charged with rape," and that some later encounters "felt like coercion."
The District Attorney Says He Never Saw The Transcript
Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten declined to bring charges in 2024, saying the signed statement was the main evidence he relied on. In a statement this week announcing he was reopening the case, he said that statement "did not allege that she was drugged against her will or gang raped" and instead described her drug use and sexual conduct as "voluntary, conscious, and consensual," adding that the allegations in her lawsuit are "dramatically different."
But Van Houten told CBS News New York he had never seen the interview transcript. "I'm going to follow up on this because this is news to me," he said, calling her statement that she was raped "a legal conclusion" while acknowledging, "If she had said those words, we certainly would want to have explored that more." He also told ABC News that his office relied on the Cornell Police investigation and did not independently investigate. He now plans to present the case to a grand jury. Jane Doe's attorney, Thomas Giuffra, said he and his client have no confidence in Van Houten, arguing that the prosecutor "had a woman who told an officer she was raped and a group chat inviting sexual assaults."
Inside Cornell's Title IX Investigation
Cornell's internal process was considerably more extensive than the criminal review. The university conducted 50 interviews with 32 witnesses and held at least a dozen hearings before a panel of trained faculty and staff, which issued sanctions including expulsions and suspensions, according to the university. Jane Doe's lawyer has said two of the men were expelled, and that she later dropped out. Public anger intensified after her lawsuit alleged the men were "afforded the opportunity to mitigate their conduct by submitting essays." Cornell did not deny that essays were part of some punishments, but said none of those charged were allowed to write essays "as a sole consequence of their involvement," and that "any suggestion that the University did not impose consequential punishments for those involved is false."
At one hearing, a fraternity member whom the panel found had not taken part in the assault, but who was held responsible for "attempted sexual exploitation," apologized. "If it wasn't consensual and she was victimized, I was sorry for not stopping it," he said, according to the report obtained by ABC News.
The Accused Men Deny The Allegations
In Title IX interviews with six of the seven men, the accused almost universally denied wrongdoing and said any sex was consensual, with several suggesting Jane Doe had initiated the encounters, according to The New York Times. Lawyers for at least three of the men have publicly denied the allegations. The Chi Phi chapter at Cornell was closed in 2024 and remains barred from campus. Trey Robb, the fraternity's interim executive director, said the chapter voted to remove the accused members within three days of the police report and that the national fraternity later expelled them permanently. Cornell's student newspaper published the defendants' names on September 21 in an editorial titled "Cornell Won't, We Will," fueling an outcry on social media.
Governor Hochul Secures An Independent Review
Governor Hochul said this week that after a call with Cornell's president, the university agreed to "an independent outside investigation of what happened," and Cornell has confirmed the review without yet providing details. The allegations, she said, raise "serious questions about Cornell campus culture." "People need to know the truth," Hochul told ABC News, adding that the public, the victim, her family and the university community deserve to know "that their university did everything that they're supposed to do." Cornell's internal data show that 35 percent of undergraduate women reported experiencing sexual assault while on campus, though Hochul said the problem extends to every campus. "There's been a culture of this kind of treatment of young women on campuses for as long as I've been in college, and it has to change," she said.
Cornell has said it supports presenting the case to a grand jury, and that the events of 2024 "were appalling then and remain so now."
