How the “Cornell Seven” Rape Case Became a National Scandal
Close to midnight on October 19, 2024, a young woman arrived at the Chi Phi fraternity house, a twelve-thousand-square-foot Tudor Revival on the campus of Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York. She was there to see a friend. According to a sworn statement that she gave in November, 2024, to the Cornell University Police Department, the woman, a twenty-year-old undergraduate referred to in court documents as Jane Doe, had been drinking earlier that evening. At Chi Phi, she opened a beer and flirted and danced a bit with her friend, who suggested that they engage in a threesome with one of his fraternity brothers. She recalled feeling “pretty O.K. with having this threesome,” which involved oral and vaginal sex, though the friend who proposed it eventually left to go to sleep, and the second man got the dry heaves. At some point, she took ketamine, but she could not remember “where or when.” The second man repeatedly grabbed at her genital area, and she pushed his hand away.
Then came a knock on the door, and this is when the night may have taken an irrevocable turn. The woman said in her sworn statement that a third member of the fraternity came into the room—his bedroom, as it turned out. He “introduced himself” and reached as if to shake her hand, then yanked Jane Doe toward him and kissed her. The second man began groping her again. They “began to have a threesome,” she said. At some point, her friend woke up and suggested a foursome, but she said no.
According to a lawsuit that Jane Doe filed on September 14th, the second man sent a message in the fraternity’s group on Snapchat, called “Chi Phi Actives,” at around 1:42 A.M., alerting members to the “free pussy” they could find upstairs. “I fuckin love chi phi,” Jane Doe’s friend replied to the group, and added, “Like you can walk in and whip it out.” Later, according to Snapchat messages viewed by Mahsa Saeidi of CBS News New York, a fraternity member asked the chat, “Shop still open?” Another member replied that it was.
Four more frat brothers entered the room, according to Jane Doe’s sworn statement, and she hid under the bedcovers. She had trouble recalling precisely what happened next. She backed away from another man who grabbed and forcibly kissed her. She said that the second man “again tried reaching for” her vagina, and remembered snorting a line of ketamine off his erect penis. She remembered the third man and a companion coming into the room and announcing that they were “shutting down whatever the fuck this is.” She remembered her friend and another fraternity member taking her to another, smaller room, where she was given yet more ketamine, and felt “extremely high.” Her friend “said he wanted to have sex again.” She remembered saying that she was tired, but then—and she wasn’t sure how it started—she engaged in a threesome with the two men in the smaller room after all, oral and vaginal sex. It continued until 5:45 A.M., when she asked them to stop, and they did, so far as she could remember.
Two days later, according to reporting by Saeidi, one of the fraternity brothers apologized to Jane Doe via text for “how things went down.” He and another fraternity member felt bad, he said, that they were too drunk to “shut it down and kick people out before it got way out of hand.” She replied that her memory was “super clouded,” but she reckoned that none “of the sexual stuff was illegal.” She said that she would like to see him again, “but like leave out the extra 5 billion men and ketamine.” (Victims of sexual abuse or violence often minimize or rationalize what has happened to them in the immediate aftermath of an assault, especially when it involves a friend or acquaintance.)
Jane Doe’s suit names seven Chi Phi members—alleging that they drugged, raped, and assaulted her—and Cornell, the fraternity, and her own sorority, among other entities, for not acting to prevent or redress the alleged abuse. Her complaint has become national news in the last two weeks, in no small part because of reporting in the Cornell Daily Sun, the student newspaper, which has pointedly and repeatedly named the seven accused assailants, now known as the Cornell Seven. Their photos, labelled with their names, have circulated widely on social media.
“We know who you are and we refuse to let you benefit from the University’s concealment,” the Sun’s editorial board warned on September 21st, in a piece that also called Cornell’s administration to account. “This is not a dark chapter in Cornell’s history,” the board went on, “it’s a morbid pattern,” one that can only be “rectified with thorough criminal investigations in the hands of parties independent of the University”—meaning local police and the Tompkins County District Attorney’s office.
Had law enforcement and prosecutors engaged more thoroughly with Jane Doe’s original complaint, they might have tempered the vigilantism that would eventually tinge much of the response to the case. But campus police made no arrests, and the district attorney, Matthew Van Houten, initially declined to pursue charges against the seven fraternity brothers. In the wake of the public outcry, Van Houten announced on Monday, via a lengthy press release, that he is reopening the criminal investigation. But he also maintained that the events as Jane Doe recounted them to campus police two years ago “do not constitute a crime,” and he appeared to cast doubt on the credibility and consistency of her story, opining that her sworn statement “provides a different narrative and set of facts of the events of October 19, 2024 than those alleged in the lawsuit.”
Many people following the case will disagree. The facts of Jane Doe’s civil complaint are largely congruent with those of her sworn statement from two years prior—or, rather, with the excerpts of the statement that Van Houten has deigned to release to the public thus far. Van Houten laments that he cannot simply release Jane Doe’s sworn statement in full, as it would have to be “heavily redacted” for privacy reasons and “would ultimately result in a statement without context or clarity.” But such a scenario would be preferable to Van Houten’s abridged version of her account, a paraphrased mess of fragmented, bracket-strewn quotations. (“Jane Doe had difficulty remembering parts of what happened next. She remembered ‘[Male Number 7] said something very rude and mean to [her].’ Male Number 7 apologized and ‘grabbed [her] face and started kissing [her].’ ”)
Van Houten avows that “Jane Doe’s statement described her participation in drug use and sexual conduct as voluntary, conscious, and consensual.” Unless today’s undergraduates make a habit of reporting consensual sex and drug use to campus police, the D.A.’s confidence on this point is confusing. On Tuesday evening, Saeidi of CBS reported that she had tracked down a transcript of Jane Doe’s interview with campus police—from which her sworn statement was prepared—in which she states, regarding at least one of the later sexual encounters, “I can say with 100% confidence I was raped” and that she was “completely and totally incapacitated.” These declarations do not appear in the abridged version of Jane Doe’s statement as provided by Van Houten, who maintains that he has never seen the transcript, despite being one of the multiple men who were tasked with determining, in one way or other, whether Jane Doe was raped. (Thus far, three of the men named in the lawsuit have denied any sexual misconduct.)
New York State has rigid standards for criminal allegations of rape, requiring evidence of either “forcible compulsion” or “incapacity to consent,” often meaning physical helplessness. Furthermore, if an accuser in New York State was “voluntarily intoxicated,” she cannot argue that she was mentally incapable of consent. (In June, the New York State Senate passed a bill that would close what is known as the “voluntary intoxication loophole”; it now awaits action in the State Assembly.)
Despite these state-level constraints, a layperson might still wonder how any prosecutor could set aside the matter of criminal responsibility so quickly when confronted with a story such as the one that Jane Doe volunteered in front of a campus-police investigator and a Title IX investigator about meeting up with a guy she liked at his frat house—a milieu whose habitués are notoriously overrepresented in sexual-assault statistics—only to find herself alone with up to seven men at a time, ingesting a dissociative anesthetic that can cause sedation and unconsciousness, and eventually having penetrative contact with at least four of the men, until sunrise. In Jane Doe’s sworn statement, however, Van Houten is able to detect traces of something akin to chivalry. The D.A. notes that “each time Jane Doe asked to stop the sexual conduct, the sexual conduct stopped.” No means no, but you have to keep saying it, you see. It wears off.
Cornell University’s investigation, of course, did not have to adhere to New York’s arguably archaic criminal standards, but its response, too, has triggered anger and disbelief across airwaves and social media. According to Jane Doe’s civil complaint, in November, 2024, Cornell placed the fraternity and its seven accused members on suspension and eventually commenced a Title IX probe. Later, Cornell barred Chi Phi from campus. According to Jane Doe’s attorney, Thomas Giuffra, only two of its accused members were expelled, while others, he said, received lesser punishments, including attending workshops and writing essays. (Cornell has denied that any of the accused men wrote essays as their “sole consequence.”) Jane Doe, meanwhile, has dropped out of school; Giuffra told CNN’s Jake Tapper that she tried to leave during the fall 2024 semester, but that Cornell refused to refund her tuition. (A spokesperson for the university stated, in an e-mail, “Cornell works with students who wish to take a leave of absence or withdraw. The university regularly refunds payments if students are no longer enrolled.”) “Her life has been destroyed,” Giuffra said.
Many officials in New York State are dismayed by what they view as a lacklustre response from Cornell. Appearing at a previously scheduled town hall in Ithaca, the congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez decried the “culture of rape” that pervades Cornell and other élite institutions. The governor, Kathy Hochul, has called for an independent review of Cornell’s response to Jane Doe’s allegations. On Monday, Robert G. Cantelmo, the mayor of Ithaca, issued a scathing statement. “Despite the severity of these crimes,” he wrote, “Cornell University administrators and police failed to contact or coordinate any response with the Ithaca Police Department.” Owing to “this appalling response from university administration,” Cantelmo went on, he has implemented an “immediate moratorium on all student event and special event permits, including, but not limited to Greek life.”
On Monday, Kyle Kimball, Cornell’s vice-president for university relations, issued a statement in support of Van Houten reopening the criminal case. Kimball also affirmed that the university conducted a “thorough Title IX investigation,” resulting in expulsions and suspensions. He concluded with a defensive flourish: “A continuation of the false narrative that there were minimal consequences in this case is irresponsible, will make survivors feel less safe and supported, and will perpetuate the underreporting of sexual assault.” In other words, if you wonder aloud whether an alleged rapist should face consequences beyond expulsion from Cornell, or whether a young man who may have egged on an assault should face consequences beyond temporary suspension from Cornell, or simply whether Cornell—at any point during this miserable, humiliating, and all too common ordeal—might have ever done more or better for Jane Doe, then you are not an ally of sexual-assault survivors.
In examining the “morbid pattern” of Cornell’s careless treatment of some students, one must look back to a bizarre incident at the end of April, on a night when the university’s president, Michael Kotlikoff, appeared at a campus debate on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Following the event, several members of a student free-speech group followed Kotlikoff to his car, peppering him with questions about tight restrictions that Cornell placed on speech and assembly following the pro-Palestinian and pro-divestment demonstrations of 2023 and 2024. In video footage from multiple angles, Kotlikoff is seen getting into his car and simply backing into two members of the group—a student and a recent graduate—and then driving away from the scene. (Neither person was seriously hurt.) When Cornell’s board of trustees convened an investigatory committee, it issued a statement blaming the incident entirely on the students.
In contrast to the reviled events at Chi Phi, the largely peaceful protests of 2023-24 led to multiple arrests, criminal referrals of students, and suspensions. In October, 2024, just days before Jane Doe visited the frat house, a coalition of leftist student and community groups announced that Cornell had handed down a three-year “persona non grata status” to four students who had demonstrated against the presence of defense contractors at a career fair the previous month. These protests, though harshly sanctioned by Cornell administrators, were democratically supported by the Cornell community—in the spring of 2024, for example, nearly seventy per cent of voters in the Student Assembly favored Cornell’s divestment from weapons manufacturers.
Cornell’s post-2024 limitations on what it calls “expressive activity” include restrictions on “amplified or otherwise loud sound,” “heckling,” and “postering, signs, and chalking.” These rules help to account for why the Cornell campus, now a nationwide locus of outrage, has not yet had much protest activity related to the Jane Doe case, though that will likely change. A friend of mine who was just at Cornell for Family Weekend, visiting her son, texted me some photographs of chalking she had seen on campus sidewalks. One patch of concrete read “CORNELL PROTECTS RAPISTS.” Another read “PROTESTERS SUSPENDED RAPISTS GO FREE.” Yet another: “CHALKING BECAUSE PROTESTS ARE BANNED.”
These messages, presumably written by students, are arguably reductive in their analysis. They are certainly transient in their medium. They are also invaluable as primary documents, blessedly untouched and unmediated by the adults in charge who say they know better, or who might pretend that their authors really meant to say something else instead. ♦