New York state prosecutors say they will reopen a criminal inquiry into the alleged rape of a woman at Cornell University in 2024. The woman filed a civil lawsuit on 16 September alleging she was drugged and raped by multiple people at a fraternity house at the university. "Once we determine the appropriate charges, the case will be prosecuted in the most objective and impartial means possible" through a grand jury, Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten said Monday.
Cornell University said that while it supported the case being bought before a grand jury, "any suggestion that the university did not impose consequential punishments for those involved is false". The woman, referred to in court documents as Jane Doe, alleges in her lawsuit that on the night of 19 October 2024, seven men from Cornell's Chi Phi fraternity chapter allegedly assaulted her in an incident involving alcohol and the drug ketamine. Jane Doe said in her lawsuit that she was intoxicated during the alleged incident and was incapable of providing consent.
She said she reported the incident to Cornell University Police on 8 November 2024. The lawsuit also contains an image purported to be from a Snapchat fraternity group chat, in which a participant alerted other members, in vulgar terms, to the potential for a sexual encounter with Jane Doe. Van Houten said on Monday that at the time of the assault two years ago, his office concluded that evidence from her statement to authorities did not meet the legal threshold to bring charges.
He said he reached out to Jane Doe and her lawyers for more information as he prepared to bring the case to a grand jury. In the US legal system, prosecutors convene grand juries to weigh evidence and testimony and eventually vote on whether they merit criminal charges. In his statement, Van Houten included a summary of what Jane Doe told the Cornell University Police Department in 2024 after the alleged attack.
He noted the statement differed from the allegations laid out in the lawsuit. "Jane Doe's sworn statement in November of 2024 did not allege that she was drugged against her will or gang raped," Van Houten said in a statement on Monday. "On the contrary, Jane Doe's statement described her participation in drug use and sexual conduct as voluntary, conscious, and consensual." Van Houten added that Jane Doe's lawyers had never been in touch with him to say her original statement was inaccurate or to ask him to reconsider his decision not to bring charges.
He later acknowledged "the reality that it can take years of therapy and healing for victims of sexual assaults to fully process and understand what happened to them". The BBC has contacted Jane Doe's lawyer, Thomas Giuffra. In a statement on Monday obtained by CBS, the BBC's US partner, he said: "In the days following the assault, [Jane Doe] was traumatised, numb and unable to function or accept the horror of what had happened.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
