When a woman sued Cornell University last month over an alleged sexual assault at a fraternity, the case reverberated across the nation, igniting shock and anger about the persistent phenomenon of sexual misconduct on campuses.
Those involved have fought for control of the narrative, with the woman’s lawyer, lawyers for the accused men and a district attorney making assertions that often appeared at odds.
Now, The New York Times has obtained more than 1,000 pages of material from Cornell’s internal investigation into the 2024 rape allegations that are at the center of the bombshell lawsuit against the university.
The files, compiled for Cornell’s Title IX administrative hearing process and distributed in early 2025, include an extensive transcript of the original police interviews with the 20-year-old undergraduate, who accused the men of sexually assaulting her at the Chi Phi fraternity on Oct. 19, 2024.
They also include the original six-page statement that the Cornell Police Department submitted to the Tompkins County, N.Y., district attorney; investigatory interviews with six of the seven men whom the woman accused of being involved in the sexual assault; and interviews with 20 additional witnesses. A trove of emails, text messages and screenshots of message boards are included, some showing how rumors about what had happened that night raced around campus.
While it will take reporters several days to fully comb through the material, here are some of the main early takeaways.
Jane Doe’s statement sent to the district attorney left out key context.
On Nov. 14, 2024, about three weeks after the incident, the woman who filed the suit, known as Jane Doe, spoke for hours to a Cornell police investigator and an investigator from Cornell’s Title IX office, which makes sure the university complies with federal regulations related to sex discrimination. She had with her a support person — someone who provides emotional support during the hearing process — and an adviser to explain her rights.
The transcript of their conversation stretches about 120 pages. It was condensed by the police investigator into a six-page official statement that the woman signed.
This statement was crucial because the Tompkins County district attorney says it was the main piece of evidence he considered when deciding not to bring a criminal case.
But the official statement omits much of the context about Jane Doe’s state of mind, her history as a sexual assault survivor and her thoughts as she was processing what was happening to her. It is these details, in addition to the actions she alleges, that help explain how a series of sexual encounters that started off “pretty OK” had devolved into a situation that was “just raping,” in her words.
“I can say with 100 percent confidence I was raped,” she told the police investigator about what happened by the end of that night, in a statement that did not make it into the six-page summary report.
The omissions may help explain why the district attorney did not think he could bring a criminal case based on her allegations.
The summary made clear, however, that she felt that some of what was happening to her was a crime, and had thought about taking the drug ketamine to escape it.
“I had become extremely uncomfortable with how this night was turning out, so my thought was, if I do ketamine again, maybe I will pass out,” it quotes her saying. “My thought was that if I passed out and these men had sex with me, then they could be charged with rape.”
Her thinking about the incident evolved.
Jane Doe considered two of the men friends. She and the men involved that night had taken ketamine. Things had started off consensual — though she was drunk — and some of her memories were hazy, the transcript shows. She had lost control. Her initial impulse was to keep quiet about what had happened.
But within a day or two, “everyone involved in sorority and fraternity life knew what had happened,” she told investigators. Most of the gossip blamed her, calling her “a whore that had an eightsome with the Chi Phi guys.”
She had not known how or why so many men had showed up in the room that night. But then she heard that a Snapchat message had been sent to the fraternity, inviting members to join what was happening. And when she saw on a message board that someone had said that Chi Phi members were “gang banging,” the pieces started coming together.
She told investigators that she had a revelation when reading an online comment that called Chi Phi brothers “terrible people, they gang raped a sophomore.”
“And that’s kind of when I came to the realization that I had been gang raped, gang assaulted, whatever you want to call it; that’s what happened,” she said.
The accounts of the men emerge.
Transcripts of Title IX interviews that were conducted with six of the seven men provide the first glimpse of the defendants’ accounts of the assault. In interviews with the school’s investigators, the men almost universally denied the accusations against them and said any sex that took place was consensual. Several of the men suggested that Jane Doe had not only initiated the sexual encounters, but in some cases, had done so without asking.
Many of the men paused their interrogations repeatedly to seek legal guidance from advisers who accompanied them, including law students and lawyers. At least one of the accused men appeared with a “support person” in the form of his father.
Despite their insistence that they were innocent, the men in some of their comments appeared to acknowledge the unsettling nature of the interaction that they had witnessed and joined.
“I was genuinely concerned and wanted to investigate what’s going on,” one of the men, identified by his initials S.N., said of entering the room where Jane Doe said the assault occurred. When the man was pressed later by the investigator on what he thought would happen after leaving the room, he said: “I thought they were just going to continue conversating.”
She documented her injuries and evidence.
The woman’s main source of pain after the incident was from what she thought was a urinary tract infection. In her account to investigators, she said that when she went to a Cornell health clinic two days after the incident to get medication, she told the doctor that she had contracted the infection in “a traumatic way.” They advised her to seek therapy.
Before Jane Doe decided that she would go to the campus police department, she gathered additional documentation.
She took a photograph of a hickey on her neck. More than a week after the incident, she took a picture of fading bruises on her buttocks that she alleged were caused by one of the men hitting her. She didn’t wash the dress she had been wearing that night, to save potential evidence. Two weeks after the incident, and the day before she went to police, she went to an emergency room for a pelvic exam, the documents state.
Her view on whether she consented to sex appears to shift.
The allegations found in Jane Doe’s September lawsuit recount the same events as those described in her original statements to police investigators. But what is different is how she characterizes her ability to consent at different moments in the encounter, particularly at its start.
In the November 2024 account, she had told investigators that she was “pretty OK” with the initial sexual encounter she had with the two men whom she considered friends. But she said that as more men showed up seeking sex, she had felt that she could not stop them and came to clearly regard what was happening as rape.
She had told investigators in November 2024 that she didn’t remember exactly when she first took ketamine that night, though she remembers that, in general, she felt coerced to do it. “I felt like they were just kind of giving me substances until I said ‘yes,’ ” she said. In the 2026 lawsuit, she states that the two men with whom she first had sex that night “pressured” her into snorting ketamine with them.
In 2024, she put her initial level of inebriation at about a “5 or 6” out of 10 when that first encounter began. By the end of the night, she said, it was near a 10 and that she was practically hallucinating, feeling like her eyes were going in different directions. She told investigators that she had never taken ketamine before.
In her lawsuit, she said that she was “incapable of consenting” to even that initial sexual encounter because of severe inebriation. She asserted that the two men had forced sex on her and called it an assault.
In the transcript of the police interview, she had a more complicated reaction. She said that she was upset and hurt that a man she liked was using her.
She added: “I was a sex doll for all intents and purposes, which is sad.”
Maia Coleman contributed reporting.
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