This morning, my mind froze as I read about an alleged gang rape involving eight Cornell University students that occurred nearly two years ago, in 2024.
Most of us learned the details only after Jane Doe filed a civil lawsuit on September 14, 2026, in New York State Supreme Court, New York County, against Matthew Ingalls, Johnathan Newell, Winston Lee, Gillio Lopes, Diego Sarabia, Scott Norris, and Scott Kretzschmar, alleging that the seven men raped her while they were students at Cornell University. The alleged assault occurred during the night of October 19 into the morning of October 20, 2024. Jane Doe later reported the incident to Cornell University Police. Cornell separately conducted its own disciplinary investigation, followed by hearings under its Title IX process, while Cornell University Police conducted the criminal investigation that was referred to the Tompkins County District Attorney’s Office.
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No criminal charges followed. The District Attorney’s Office did not conduct an independent investigation. It did not separately interview Jane Doe. Instead, prosecutors relied on the investigation conducted by Cornell University Police—a police department employed by the same university where the alleged crime occurred and whose students stood accused.
A first-year law student could spot the problem. The police department investigating an alleged rape is employed by the university whose administrators are simultaneously responsible for protecting the institution, its students, and, inevitably, its reputation. Whether or not that arrangement satisfies the legal definition of a conflict of interest, it hardly presents the appearance of an investigation insulated from institutional interests.
But that wasn’t what froze me.
Universities have a documented history of failing to conduct sexual-misconduct investigations free from institutional bias and competing interests, so there was nothing particularly novel about discovering yet another case in which a university was permitted to investigate alleged sexual violence within its own walls. Nor is there anything particularly novel about a university invoking student-privacy law when asked to disclose the disciplinary consequences imposed on individual students. Cornell initially did exactly that, although it has since confirmed that its proceedings resulted in expulsions and suspensions without details. Cornell has not publicly said how many of the seven were expelled, how many were suspended, or which individual received which sanction.
What stopped me was Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten’s explanation for why his office did not pursue criminal charges in 2024.
According to Van Houten, the statement his office received through Cornell University Police did not allege that Jane Doe had been drugged without her knowledge or that she had not consented to sexual activity. He said she acknowledged voluntarily consuming drugs and alcohol and did not say that she had been forced into sexual acts, physically helpless, unconscious, or incapacitated while at the fraternity house. Based on the information his office had before it, prosecutors concluded that they could not establish the lack of consent necessary for criminal charges.
I must have missed the memo in which voluntarily drinking alcohol and taking a recreational drug became consent to have sex with seven men for hours.
Ketamine alone can cause dissociation, impaired awareness, impaired judgment and coordination, sedation, and memory impairment. Alcohol can compound those effects. Whether Jane Doe was actually impaired, and to what degree, is a question for evidence—not assumption. But the reported combination of alcohol and ketamine should have made her degree of impairment and capacity to consent an obvious subject of investigation. Voluntarily taking a drug answers how the drug entered her body. It does not answer whether she was capable of consenting to what allegedly happened afterward.
New York law makes the distinction rather important. Under Penal Law § 130.00(7), a person is physically helpless when unconscious or otherwise physically unable to communicate unwillingness—and New York courts have repeatedly held that voluntary intoxication does not prevent someone from being physically helpless. In People v. Shevchenko, a case involving alcohol and ketamine, the court found sufficient evidence to support a finding of physical helplessness, citing evidence that ketamine could cause unconsciousness or sedation.
So the fact that Jane Doe reportedly consumed the alcohol and ketamine voluntarily did not dispose of the question. It made determining her actual condition during the alleged assaults rather important.
So the fact that Jane Doe reportedly consumed the alcohol and ketamine voluntarily did not dispose of the question. It made determining her actual condition during the alleged assaults rather important.
And the sheer complexity and gravity of the allegation should have demanded an independent criminal investigation. We are talking about one woman alleging that seven men sexually assaulted her over several hours, under circumstances involving intoxicants and potential coordination among multiple people. That is not a minor factual dispute to be resolved by reading another police department’s file. It is precisely the kind of allegation that demands interviews, corroboration, preservation of electronic evidence, examination of communications among the accused, and direct questioning of the woman making the accusation.
Which brings us to Snapchat.
The civil complaint includes an image purportedly showing a Chi Phi Snapchat group chat from the night of the alleged assault. Jane Doe’s attorney, Thomas Giuffra, says that evidence was provided to authorities in 2024. Van Houten says his office never received it.
That discrepancy alone raises an extraordinary question: How does potentially significant evidence allegedly provided during an investigation of a gang rape fail to reach the prosecutor deciding whether that gang rape can be prosecuted?
Perhaps an independent investigation would have answered that question two years ago. Perhaps something as elementary as the District Attorney’s Office interviewing Jane Doe would have revealed that the evidence existed.
Instead, nearly two years later, a civil lawsuit appears to have done what the original criminal process did not: force the Tompkins County District Attorney’s Office to look again. Van Houten has now reopened the criminal investigation and assigned a senior prosecutor experienced in sex crimes to prepare the case for presentation to a grand jury.
There is another part of Van Houten’s explanation that leaves me equally bewildered. He has said that Jane Doe did not tell Cornell University Police that she had been forced into sexual activity.
Are you as confused as I am?
Jane Doe went to the police. She reported what she says was a sexual assault involving seven men. Did the Tompkins County District Attorney’s Office believe she had gone to the police for a casual conversation about having sex with seven fraternity members?
Certainly, reporting a sexual assault does not, by itself, prove that one occurred. That is precisely why we have criminal investigations.
But somehow, in this case, the absence of certain words in the account delivered to prosecutors appears to have mattered enormously. She did not say she was “forced.” She did not say she was unconscious or physically helpless.
Fine.
Then ask her.
Ask what she remembers. Ask what she meant when she reported the encounter. Ask whether she consented. Ask whether she could walk. Ask whether she could speak coherently. Ask how impaired she was. Ask what happened before, during, and after. Ask the questions one might reasonably expect someone to ask while investigating an alleged gang rape.
The astonishing part isn’t that prosecutors required evidence of nonconsent before bringing criminal charges. Of course they did.
The astonishing part is that, faced with an allegation this grave, the Tompkins County District Attorney’s Office apparently relied on someone else’s investigation to decide that the evidence wasn’t there—without ever sitting across from the woman making the allegation and asking her themselves.
And that leaves me with a question I cannot quite shake.
If a brutally beaten, unconscious male student had been found on Cornell’s campus, do we really believe the Tompkins County District Attorney’s Office would have simply left the investigation to campus police?
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