Susan Svrluga, Todd Wallack and Amy B Wang
Cornell University conducted an internal disciplinary investigation involving more than 50 interviews with 32 witnesses after a student reported she was drugged and raped by several men at a fraternity house in October 2024, according to court documents unsealed in a New York state court this week.
The court documents show at least one fraternity member is fighting in court to overturn the disciplinary action against him and clear his academic record.
The rape allegations gained national attention after the woman filed a lawsuit last month, both because of the brutality of the alleged crime and the fact that none of the accused students faced criminal charges. Cornell has said it meted out a range of sanctions, including suspensions and expulsions. The Cornell chapter of the fraternity was closed in 2024 and has been barred from campus.
Students and alumni have publicly questioned whether the Ivy League School, police and prosecutors did enough to investigate, pursue criminal charges and punish the students accused of the assault. As news of the case spread across the nation and social media over the past week, some observers took matters into their own hands, doxing the accused men online and publicly accosting one of them.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul said Thursday evening that she had lost faith in the Tompkins County district attorney’s ability to fairly oversee the case and had appointed New York Attorney General Letitia James as special prosecutor.
A spokesperson for Cornell said Thursday night that the university supports the governor’s decision to assign the case to the New York Attorney General’s Office.
The county district attorney, Matthew Van Houten, has publicly said that his office did not bring charges at the time because it did not have all of the information it has now.
Cornell said in a statement on its website that its university police department investigated in 2024 and shared the woman’s sworn statement and screenshot Snapchat messages related to the alleged incident with the county district attorney’s office, “which is the established protocol if the department believes it is possible a crime has occurred”. The school did not respond to a question Thursday about whether it turned over all the evidence it gathered from interviews to law enforcement.
The woman, identified only as Jane Doe, filed a civil lawsuit last month against a number of defendants, including Cornell University and seven members of the Chi Phi fraternity. When she was a 20-year-old student at Cornell in 2024, Doe alleges that she was the victim of a gang rape at the fraternity house while she was drunk, pressured to inhale the drug ketamine and incapable of consent.
A fraternity member allegedly invited other members to come to the room to join in, according to the lawsuit, with a message on Snapchat say that there was “free p—y”. Another added: “Like you can walk in and whip it out.”
“I felt like bait. I felt like lions around me,” Doe said at a May 2025 disciplinary hearing, according to the newly unsealed documents. “It just was a totally debilitating place to be in.”
The hearings were part of a Title IX investigation. The landmark civil rights law prohibits sex-based discrimination, including sexual violence. The panel’s decision was among court documents unsealed this week.
After Jane Doe sued, Van Houten announced his office planned to pursue potential criminal charges based on the new evidence in the lawsuit.
But Van Houten defended the 2024 decision not to bring charges, saying in a statement earlier this week that Doe had told police that the sexual conduct and drug use was “voluntary, conscious and consensual.”
His description of the situation sparked outrage.
An online petition from Cornell alumni has attracted more than 40,000 signatures and calls for a public apology from the Ivy League school and “removal of all school officials who are revealed to be complicit” in protecting people accused of participating in the rape.
All seven of the accused have been named in some news reports, on social media and on an anonymous website called the “Cornell7” that displays their photos and information about the allegations. TMZ reported that one of the men lost his job at a bank branch in Charlotte.
Andrew Miltenberg, an attorney for one of the student defendants, said he did not want to minimise the trauma that Jane Doe described and that her experience deserved to be treated seriously and with dignity.
“But empathy for an accuser and fairness to the accused are not mutually exclusive. Due process exists for precisely this reason,” he said, adding that his client is entitled to have the evidence tested through the legal process.
Miltenberg said his client was publicly accosted Thursday and that his client’s mother has received death threats. Miltenberg and his legal partner have also received death threats, he said.
One of the students who was punished filed a lawsuit this year to challenge the findings of the 12-day hearing and a failed appeal at the university.
According to the court filings, the student admitted he entered the room in the fraternity house where the woman was allegedly raped after seeing a group text inviting people to “free p—y”. He claimed both that he thought it was a joke and that he was concerned there was something wrong and wanted to check it out.
The panel found he was responsible for attempting sexual exploitation because he saw the message and entered the room. But the panel did not find evidence that he sexually assaulted the woman or inhaled ketamine from her body, as some fraternity members were alleged to have done.
The man tried to challenge the punishment by saying it was unfair for the panel to find him guilty of violating rules against attempted sexual exploitation because he was never accused of that. He had been accused of violating rules against Sexual Assault and Sexual Exploitation, and the panel cleared him of those and reduced his case to attempted sexual exploitation.
The court dismissed the man’s case, saying it was analogous to a defendant in a criminal case being convicted on a lesser charge. He is appealing.
The court documents show Cornell launched its investigation after Doe spoke to police, kicking off a lengthy process beginning in November 2024 with witness interviews for months and a hearing in May 2025.
“This investigation wasn’t perfect, the hearing wasn’t perfect, but after 45-plus witnesses, five months of investigations, 12 days of hearings, a thousand pages of transcripts and evidence, it’s hard to say they were not thorough,” Miltenberg said of the Cornell Office of Civil Rights’ hearing panel decision. “It’s a 100-page decision – that’s more than the United States Supreme Court writes,” he said.
Hochul said in a statement Thursday that she wanted to ensure the case was thoroughly investigated by the new special prosecutor.
“The young woman at the centre of this case deserves to know that every fact will be examined and justice pursued,” she said.
The Washington Post
Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for our weekly What in the World newsletter.
From our partners
Discover more from PressNewsAgency
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.