I haven't followed this closely but it has been getting a lot of attention online for the past couple weeks. The basic story is that back in 2024 a Cornell student whose name we don't know (she's going by Jane Doe in court documents) claimed she had been raped by seven men who were members of a fraternity. The case was investigated but after she submitted a written statement it never moved forward. No arrests and no charges filed.
This month she sued the men involved in her case and that has led to a lot of attention online and to calls for an investigation of how it was handled in 2024. All of that attention led to the DA suggesting he might belatedly prosecute the men involved. Here's what happened according to the lawsuit.
On Oct. 19, 2024, according to the lawsuit, the woman was raped repeatedly over nearly seven hours at the Chi Phi fraternity house in Ithaca, N.Y.
The lawsuit states that she started off her night drinking vodka at the sorority house. At around 8:30 p.m., she took an Uber to an event her sorority was hosting at a bar. Although the bouncer correctly identified her as underage, she claims she was served at least one alcoholic beverage. By about 11 p.m., she had decided to walk about a mile to Chi Phi’s fraternity house to see a man she considered a friend.
Once she arrived, according to the lawsuit, the man and his fraternity brothers gave her a beer, marijuana, rum and ketamine. In the lawsuit, she claims she had not tried ketamine before and was pressured into snorting it. The lawsuit then details a series of sexual assaults and continued drug use involving her friend and six other men.
After the incident, she reported it to campus police and a few weeks later the police asked the DA's office to review her written statement.
Some time that month, Cornell police asked the Tompkins County district attorney’s office to review a statement from Jane Doe. Criminal investigators advised the police that they did not think they could bring criminal charges under New York State law based on the statement. Jane Doe’s lawyer said that after she gave her initial statement, no police or criminal investigators ever contacted her again...
On Monday, the district attorney — who has released only excerpts from Jane Doe’s initial six-page statement — said that the statement did not make clear that she was forced into the sexual acts, or that she was incapacitated, though she was under the influence of drugs and alcohol.
And if you're reading the NY Times' coverage, that's all you get. There's no effort to explain what was in the written statement or why the DA may not have felt he could pursue the case. We're left to think that maybe someone dropped the ball here on a self-evident crime. But if you jump over to NBC News you can get some of what the DA actually said about why the case wasn't pursued.
Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten said in a statement Monday that his office is considering whether to bring criminal charges related to a 2024 incident at the Chi Phi fraternity house...
“While I generally refrain from commenting publicly on criminal investigations, the community outrage stemming from the incomplete news and social media coverage requires that I provide an answer to why the investigation resulted in a lack of criminal charges,” he said in the statement.
Van Houten defended his office’s decision not to seek criminal charges at the time, saying that in a November 2024 statement Doe did not allege that she was gang-raped or drugged against her will. “On the contrary, Jane Doe’s statement described her participation in drug use and sexual conduct as voluntary, conscious, and consensual,” he wrote, adding that Doe’s attorneys never reached out to him before filing the civil lawsuit two years later.
She also exchanged texts with the men later and specifically said in the texts (allegedly) that nothing that happened was illegal.
Screenshots of a separate text exchange, also reported exclusively by CBS New York, show what a source describes as messages sent two days later between Jane Doe and one of the defendants now accused in the lawsuit.
The man started by apologizing for "how things went down." He said his memory is "kinda fuzzy," and that he and another man feel bad for being too intoxicated to "shut it down and kick people out before it got way out of hand."
The woman in the text chain replied that her memory is "super clouded too," and said they had all been heavily intoxicated.
She also wrote, "non(e) of the sexual stuff was illegal." She said she liked being with him and another man. Later, she suggested they smoke together again, "but like leave out the extra 5 billion men and ketamine."
If you've followed cases like this in the past then you're probably aware that it's not uncommon for women to be friendly with people after what they later come to believe was rape. So I don't think the text is definitive about what happened and obviously the DA doesn't either. But the written statement seems to have gone into more detail about the sex and the drug taking being consensual. Obviously that's not what she is saying now.
Van Houten told CBS News the officer who took Jane Doe's original statement was "an experienced investigator" who was "trained in trauma informed sexual assault cases," and "not just somebody who was manning the desk."
Van Houten said he was never contacted by her attorneys to inform him that the original statement was inaccurate nor to ask him to reconsider his office's decision to not pursue criminal charges.
"Rather, I reached out to Jane Doe's attorneys after the lawsuit was filed to understand the discrepancy between the original statement and the lawsuit's allegations and the proper path forward in light of the lawsuit's allegations," he said in a statement.
It seems the issue here is that in the initial statement she did say that she agreed to have sex with more than one person, but that later on it became something she did not consent to.
The transcript shows she distinguished the initial sexual activity from what she says happened later, and when asked whether she was OK with the initial encounter, she said, "Yeah, as much as I can be because, again, I was super drunk when I got there ... But I was pretty OK with all of this."
Jane Doe added, according to the transcript, "And then, of course, I was being hit at the same time. Physically hit very, very hard."
When describing what happened later in the night, the transcript says Jane Doe said, "I can say with 100% confidence I was raped."
So she was okay with some of it but not with other parts of it. Under New York law someone is incapacitated if they were given drugs and/or alcohol against their will. But according to the initial statement that wasn't the case. In the lawsuit she specifically claims she was pressured into taking ketamine. It's not clear if that means taking it was involuntary. A grand jury may have to sort out which version of events it thinks is relevant here.
Finally, I'll leave you with a shocker. Sunny Hostin, of all people, said today that she thinks the DA's office handled the case appropriately based on the statement they had in 2024. She thinks the online treatment of the men involved has been unfair. All I can say is things are bad when Sunny Hostin is the voice of reason.
Sunny Hostin, a former sex crimes prosecutor, actually defends the Cornell 7. She argues that under New York State law, the girl consented and that the media is "reporting this story inaccurately. I think they're reporting it unfairly."
— Nicholas Fondacaro (@NickFondacaro) September 29, 2026
"The pictures of these young men who have… pic.twitter.com/ZbnJpS8G6R
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