The investigation into the report of a gang rape at Cornell University has reopened a national discussion on sexual assault — in particular raising questions about how authorities respond to allegations and how well those who go to investigators remember details of their assault.
The Tompkins County District Attorney’s Office said it decided not to pursue criminal charges in 2024 when a woman reported being raped by seven members of the Chi Phi fraternity in part because of how she described the incident initially in a sworn statement to campus police.
Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten said in a statement that the victim did not allege in her statement to campus police that she was drugged against her will or gang-raped. The allegation that she was raped was detailed in a civil lawsuit Jane Doe filed in September against Cornell and members of the fraternity.
The case is now under investigation again, and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has appointed Attorney General Letitia James to take over the investigation as a special prosecutor.
Experts said perceptions of such cases — and investigations of them by law enforcement — can sometimes overlook the challenges of processing trauma like a sexual assault. Research has shown that people struggle to recall details from traumatic events and that cortisol, the hormone associated with stress, affects the memory.
Amid that stress, victims may not immediately be able to understand, describe or even fully recognize what happened to them, said Kamila Alexander, an assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing who studies trauma and violence.
“Trauma will often show up when it is ready and people arrive to the point when their brain is catching up,” Alexander said,
The Washington Post spoke to experts who, like Alexander, spoke broadly on traumatic stress and sexual assault, not the Cornell case specifically.
A traumatic event is a “complete sensory overload” that the brain usually interprets as a life-threatening situation, said Rebecca Campbell, a professor of psychology at Michigan State University who studies sexual assault. In such a situation, it’s common for victims to not remember peripheral details about their experience.
“The brain cannot process literally all of the stimuli, everything that’s happening in that kind of attack,” Campbell said.
Campbell and Alexander added that the involvement of university investigators, police, attorneys, health care providers and peers, as well as feelings of stigma and discomfort around sex or the use of alcohol or drugs, can affect how a person processes an experience of sexual assault and what they choose to share.
“It’s important to differentiate,” Campbell said. “Sometimes what looks like a memory issue might be a memory issue, but it might also be that survivors are not feeling safe and comfortable to share what they do remember.”
Van Houten 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” but said Jane Doe’s initial statement “described her participation in drug use and sexual conduct as voluntary, conscious, and consensual.”
“My office obviously did not and could not have based our November 2024 decision on the allegations in a civil lawsuit that would not be filed until nearly two years later,” Van Houten wrote.
Extensive research has been conducted into trauma and memory, and the discussion of it was also raised when Christine Blasey Ford testified during Brett M. Kavanaugh’s confirmation to serve on the Supreme Court.
In an article titled “Why Can’t Christine Blasey Ford Remember How She Got Home?,” Jim Hopper, anationally recognized expert on psychological trauma, wrote that in certain moments of stress, “the hippocampus enters a minimal-encoding mode, in which the encoding and especially the storage of details — even central ones — are severely limited or not happening at all.”
Understanding the time-dependent effects of stress on memory “is essential for evaluating the memories and credibility of people who have experienced trauma,” said Hopper, who writes the Sexual Assault and the Brain blog.
Much of the initial processing of trauma can happen relatively quickly, often within the first month, but recovery is rarely orderly, said George Bonanno, a professor of clinical psychology at Columbia University’s Teachers College.
The human stress response is an evolutionarily ancient biological system that kicks into gear almost immediately, Bonanno said, and reactions such as shock, numbness, intrusive thoughts and hypervigilance can ebb and flow over time.
Memory, too, can change as recovery unfolds.
In a study of people directly exposed to the Sept. 11 attacks, for example, researchers found that memories weakened over time regardless of how people fared psychologically. But those who remained traumatized continued to remember the event as intensely horrific, while others “downgraded” their memories and made the events more benign over time.
“If a person recovers from an event, they are not going to remember it quite as harmful as it was initially,” Bonanno said.
Changing or unreliable memories can have important implications in legal cases, experts said. Investigators should be aware of the impacts of trauma on memory when interviewing victims, Campbell said. Bonanno added that a person’s later recollection of how harmful an experience was may be shaped by how well they have recovered from it.
Campbell said that ultimately, inconsistencies in a victim’s account or a victim taking time to process their experience does not necessarily mean a crime didn’t occur.
“Nobody wants to apply the term ‘rape’ or ‘sexual assault’ to their experiences,” Campbell said. “And over time, as the feelings settle, as the memories settle, and as more information comes in, for many survivors, it becomes clearer and clearer that that is the right term.”
Experts say because initial accounts from those reporting assault are likely to have missing information, those involved in responding need take that into account.
“All responders from health care providers to advocates and law enforcement should ensure their systems facilitate a smooth connection to experienced and skilled professionals that can provide support and resources that are ongoing throughout the trauma process — which we know really has no definite timeline,” Alexander said.
Judith Alpert, a faculty and clinical consultant at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, said it could take days or years for people to process traumatic events.
“It is important that people [such as attorneys] who are involved in responding to an event understand that it takes time for a victim of trauma to process a traumatic event,” Alpert said. “We university professors, police officers, fellow students, etc., play a role too. Our impulse may be to believe the victimizers. We do not want to believe that human beings could do such terrible things.”
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