Cornell rape case explained: Allegations, investigation, lawsuit - USA Today

She was a Cornell University undergraduate. A 20-year-old from a small town. A sorority sister, thrilled to be getting an Ivy League education at the sought-after Ithaca, New York campus.

Late on a Saturday night in the fall of 2024, she arrived alone at the front door of a gabled fraternity house to visit a friend. What happened over the next several hours is now the subject of a sprawling civil lawsuit, a reopened criminal inquiry and an escalating controversy at Cornell.

The woman, known anonymously as Jane Doe, alleged in a Sept. 18 lawsuit that she was gang-raped on Oct. 19, 2024 by members of Cornell’s Chi Phi fraternity after being pressured into taking Ketamine and being too intoxicated to consent. 

A screenshot of a fraternity Snapchat group, included in the complaint, shows someone announcing there was “free p***y” available.

The lawsuit names seven then-fraternity members, Cornell University, the Chi Phi Fraternity and others. No fraternity members have been criminally charged. At least two have denied the allegations through attorneys.

The case has rocked Cornell’s campus and fueled public questions about the campus police investigation, the university's Title IX investigation and the local district attorney's decisions: How did the same alleged event produce no criminal charges in 2024 but result in university expulsions, suspensions, and nearly two years later, spark a high-profile lawsuit?

Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten has defended his decision not to charge any fraternity member in 2024, citing discrepancies between the lawsuit and the woman’s initial account, which he said characterized her drug use and sexual contact as voluntary.

Now facing criticism and pressure, Van Houten has reopened the criminal inquiry to consider any new evidence.

The allegations have struck a national nerve, fueling outrage online and highlighting both the persistent problem of college sexual abuse and complications that can arise in prosecuting such cases.

For the woman at the center of the case, it marks a reckoning years in the making. 

USA TODAY reconstructed the timeline of case from the civil complaint and court filings, statements and records from Cornell and prosecutors, contemporaneous messages published by other news organizations and statements from the parties.

In August of 2022, Jane Doe was 18, a recent high school graduate full of “hopes, expectations and trepidation” when she flew more than 1,000 miles across the country to Cornell, according to the lawsuit.

She joined about 16,000 other undergraduates at the Ivy League university located in Ithaca, a city in upstate New York. With 37 fraternities and sororities recognized by Cornell, the complaint said. Greek life was promoted as being “vital” to making friendship and connections.

Drawn by "promises of sisterhood,” the lawsuit said, she joined the Alpha Beta chapter of Tri Delta, whose brick mansion at 118 Triphammer Road was situated in a leafy neighborhood near campus.

The lawsuit said Doe wasn't aware when she arrived that during the fall semester of 2022, Cornell received reports at least 5 cases of drugging and 2 reports of sexual assault, each at a fraternity location.

Records show that from 2018 through 2024, more than 1,200 incidents of sexual assault, dating and domestic violence and stalking were reported to Cornell University’s Title IX office, USA TODAY has reported.

By 2024, Doe was 20 and living at the Tri Delta house. On a Saturday night that fall, Oct. 19, she drank some vodka at the house before heading out to a sorority gathering, according to the lawsuit.

At about 8:30 p.m., the complaint says, she took an Uber with the chapter's house mother, identified in the lawsuit only as "Jade," to a Tri Delta social event at Moonies Bar & Nightclub in downtown Ithaca, about 2 miles away.

While bar staff drew an "X" on each of her hands to mark her as under 21, and the sorority had its own designated “sober monitors,” Doe had at least one drink at the event, the lawsuit said. By 10 p.m. she and several sorority sisters walked to another bar. 

At 11 p.m, Doe “stumbled alone” to see a friend at the Chi Phi fraternity house, nearly a mile away, the suit said. Her lawsuit says she arrived visibly drunk after about 10 drinks in three hours. At the fraternity house, her friend gave her a beer and they danced before he proposed a threesome with another fraternity brother.

“In her drunken state, Plaintiff was incapable of consenting to this proposition,” the lawsuit reads.

The complaint says she was pressured into snorting a white powder said to be ketamine, a dissociative anesthetic, using marijuana and drinking rum before the men started having sex with her. The complaint maintains she was unable to consent. At one point, another man also had sex with her, the complaint says.

At 1:42 a.m. one participant posted a message to a Snapchat group called "Chi Phi Actives" there was “free p***y” available, according to the lawsuit.

"Shop still open?" one fraternity brother wrote later, according to video of the chat obtained by CBS News.

The lawsuit says Doe hid under the covers as more men came in. One “commanded her” to snort drugs off his genitals, the suit said. She was later taken to another room and assaulted again by two men. The lawsuit says she was "completely incapacitated" by then.

About 5:45 a.m. the “assault concluded and Plaintiff lost consciousness,” the lawsuit said.

Later that day, the lawsuit noted that what happened was spreading around campus.

Text messages between Doe and one of the defendants in the civil lawsuit, recently published by CBS, show the defendant wrote that he and another man felt bad for being too intoxicated to "shut it down and kick people out before it got way out of hand."

Doe replied that “non(e) of the sexual stuff was illegal.” However, her attorney has said she was in denial and traumatized at the time.

“What I experienced from those who raped me in the fraternity was the worst experience of my life,” Doe said in a statement to CNN. “I was brutalized and it injured me physically but perhaps more importantly, emotionally.”

Trey Robb, Interim Executive Director of Chi Phi Fraternity, wrote in a statement that three days after Jane Doe’s initial report, the chapter voted unanimously to remove the accused members from the fraternity rolls and the national fraternity later expelled them.

On Nov. 8, with the encouragement of her friends, Doe reported the incident to Cornell University Police. Van Houten said it included a six-page, typed statement with more than 20 handwritten notations.

"Once she was emotionally ready, she went to the University police and bravely shared what had occurred to her. She went to the police because she believed that she was the victim of a crime," her attorney, Thomas Giuffra, told CBS News.

The same day, Cornell temporarily suspended the Cornell Chi Phi chapter and the seven students for alleged violations of the Student Code of Conduct. 

A campus crime alert issued that day noted “an individual reported being sexually assaulted by several males and coerced into consuming ketamine and other drugs” in the month prior, according to the Cornell Sun student newspaper.

Beyond taking Doe’s statement, it is unclear what investigation the Cornell police conducted, including whether they interviewed the fraternity members. Ithaca Mayor Robert Cantelmo has since criticized campus police for failing to contact city police.

Giuffra said in interviews that after her initial meeting with campus police, his client was never contacted by anyone trained to interview rape survivors.

Campus police provided Doe’s statement to Van Houten’s office, he said, and asked if a crime had been committed. He said that multiple prosecutors and criminal investigators reviewed Jane Doe's statement.

To establish that a sexual assault occurred under New York law, he said, prosecutors must show there was, among other factors, forcible compulsion, cleary expressed non-consent or mental incapacity from a drug given without consent.

In New York, unlike some other states, a victim of sexual assault impaired by alcohol or drugs that they chose to consume – as opposed to being drugged without their consent – is not automatically deemed "mentally incapacitated" and unable to consent.

Van Houten said that Doe's initial statement also characterized her actions as “voluntary, conscious, and consensual” despite memory gaps. He has not released the full statement, citing privacy concerns.

“While the behavior of certain Chi Phi fraternity members was without question disgusting and morally reprehensible,” he said in a statement, “the decision made in November of 2024 that the evidence did not support the filing of criminal charges was legally correct.”

Doe never asked him to reconsider his decision, he said. 

On November 26, 2024, Cornell’s interim president, Michael Kotlikoff, wrote an update to the Ithaca community. It said Cornell University Police Department continued to pursue its criminal investigation in the case.

“The behavior that has been outlined in the many allegations received is abhorrent and cannot be tolerated within our community,’ the letter read, urging people to report sexual misconduct.

In January of 2025, Cornell launched a Title IX investigation into Jane Doe’s allegations. During the month of May, the university conducted at least twelve hearings on her allegations, the lawsuit states.

The university said that in this case, the faculty-and-staff panel issued a range of sanctions, including expulsions and suspensions, but declined to provide further details,  citing privacy requirements. Chi Phi  remains barred from campus.

“Any suggestion that the university did not impose consequential punishments for those involved is false,” Kyle Kimball, Vice President for University Relations, said in a statement.

A separate USA TODAY analysis of seven years of state data found Cornell received more than 1,200 reports of sexual and gender-based violence from 2018 through 2024. Of 51 cases that ended with someone being found responsible, 21 resulted in suspension, expulsion or dismissal.

Giuffra has said in interviews that only two of the men were expelled, and he told the New York Times that his client did not feel justice had been done.

That fall, a university survey found 35% of undergraduate women reported nonconsensual sexual contact during their time at Cornell, up from 23% in 2023. The survey's response rate was 13%.

Doe stopped attending Cornell because of the incident. Meanwhile, “some of these men graduated with Ivy-league degrees,” New York State Sen. Lea Webb said in a statement.

On Sept. 16, Doe's lawyers filed the civil complaint in state court in Manhattan, seeking unspecified damages and a jury trial.

The suit named Cornell, Chi Phi Fraternity, Tri Delta's local house corporation and its national organization, the company that runs Moonies, the seven former fraternity members and the chapter's president at the time, along with others.

Doe suffered “severe emotional and psychological distress, humiliation, fright, dissociation, anger, depression, anxiety, a severe shock to her nervous system, physical pain and mental anguish, and emotional and psychological damage,” according to her lawsuit. 

In a sworn affirmation filed with the suit, Doe asked to stay anonymous. She wrote she fears retribution and that the fear of being identified has caused "many sleepless nights."

While some questioned the delay in filing the lawsuit, Nicole Bedera, the author of "On the Wrong Side: How Universities Protect Perpetrators and Betray Survivors of Sexual Violence,” said it’s not unusual for sexual assault survivors to come forward with additional details over time, or even initially deny that an assault occurred.

Many survivors hesitate to fully disclose what happened because they're trying to understand the potential consequences of reporting the crime, she said.

Since it was filed, the lawsuit sparked national outrage. Van Houten said his office got a flood of calls and emails, some of them threats. New York U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said a “culture of rape” existed at elite universities like Cornell during a recent town hall in Ithaca. 

Gov. Kathy Hochul has called for an independent investigation of Cornell’s handling of the case. And Ithaca Mayor Robert Cantelmo moved to suspend student event permits until Cornell develops new standards for preventing and prosecuting sexual violence.

On Sept 28, Van Houten, the district attorney, said he would examine new evidence and likely take it to a grand jury.

Meantime, Cornell’s student newspaper has published the names of the fraternity members in question. At least two have rebutted allegations through their attorneys, including one who argued the case was thoroughly investigated by Cornell. 

“What is now being said publicly does not tell the full story,” Andrew Miltonberg, a lawyer representing one of the men, said in an email to USA TODAY.  He wrote that “statements, contemporaneous communications, and other evidence that provide important context” will be addressed in the legal process.  

Doe wrote in her statement to CNN that she is still working to put her life back together. 

“I want to recover from this trauma but it is extremely difficult,”she wrote.”It affects every aspect of my life. It will haunt me and be part of me the rest of my life.”

As to what comes next, Van Houten said a senior sex-crimes prosecutor will prepare a grand jury presentation that includes Doe's testimony and any new evidence raised by the complaint. 

Reporter Chris Kenning is a national correspondent. He can be reached at ckenning@usatoday.com

USA TODAY's Stephen Beard contributed to this report. USA TODAY staff contributed to this report.