One of the saddest facts about the alleged sexual assault rocking Cornell is the departure from campus of the young woman at the center of it, known as Jane Doe. She left school some time after she reported that she was raped at a fraternity party in October 2024, when she was a 20-year-old sophomore.
In the two decades I’ve been writing about campus sexual assault, it has been all too common for students to drop out of school after experiencing or reporting such an assault. It’s one reason that at various points I’ve questioned requiring schools to investigate sexual assault based on Title IX, the statute that prohibits sex-based discrimination in federally funded education. Are universities really equipped to do this? Students who make accusations often come away unsatisfied with the process or the outcome, and students who are the subjects of those accusations often complain of being railroaded.
But cases like this one lead me to conclude that, for all its flaws, Title IX and the disciplinary procedures it requires colleges to undertake are necessary. Without them, allegations like Jane Doe’s would be entirely in the hands of police and prosecutors to address, and that option is often worse. A mountain of evidence over the years shows how the criminal justice system struggles to address sexual assault effectively and fairly — or doesn’t really try at all, as in the Cornell case. Title IX fills a void: If sexual misconduct prevents a victim from taking full advantage of her education, then the institution has to address it. That responsibility is an awkward fit in some ways, but it reflects the reality that colleges are not just classrooms; they are a very particular kind of community in which all members have a duty of care toward one another. The Cornell case shows how hard it can be for universities to enforce Title IX well and also why they have to keep trying.
Congress enacted Title IX in 1972. Twenty years later, the Supreme Court ruled that students whose Title IX rights were violated could sue for compensation. I was in college then. I remember going to Take Back the Night marches, hearing women’s stories of what we called date rape and not imagining the university would do anything about it.
The civil rights office of the federal Department of Education has long instructed schools to establish a grievance procedure for students who said they were assaulted and harassed. But people who made reports often found themselves brushed off. In 2009, the Center for Public Integrity investigated Title IX discipline nationally and found that many campus processes were slow, confusing and secretive, and often resulted in little or no punishment. Survivors organized to demand more from schools. They wanted accountability for perpetrators, and they wanted services like counseling and academic accommodations.
The Obama administration stepped in on behalf of victims. By 2014, the Office for Civil Rights in the Department of Education was investigating 55 colleges and universities over their handling of sexual misconduct complaints. The department also issued new guidance, discouraging schools from allowing accused students to directly question their accusers, a process the office said could be traumatizing or intimidating, and emphasized that schools should use a lower standard of proof for finding an accused student “responsible,” the term schools use to mean guilt. Universities hired more staff for Title IX investigations and support services. They started operating what amounted to sex crimes units.
Was there less rape and more justice? I couldn’t tell. In surveys, students continued to report high rates of assault. And the cases that captured public attention presented dueling narratives of injustice. In November 2014, Rolling Stone published a false story of gang rape at a fraternity at the University of Virginia, showing that the press could rush to judgment without verifying the facts.
Two months later, a Stanford student named Brock Turner drew public outrage over what men still apparently thought they could get away with on campus. Mr. Turner had been found on top of an unconscious woman after they’d each been drinking at a party. Prosecutors brought criminal charges, and he was tried and convicted. But the judge sentenced him to only six months in jail.
The Turner case was not, though, a failure of Title IX enforcement. Within two weeks of the assault, Stanford had investigated the allegations and barred Mr. Turner from campus. He withdrew before he could be expelled.
In May 2015, I wrote about a Title IX investigation at Columbia University that split the public in ways that are similar to the Jane Doe case. When Emma Sulkowicz reported that her fellow undergraduate Paul Nungesser raped her, the university investigated and found he was not responsible for assault — in other words, not guilty. Columbia also gave Ms. Sulkowicz credit in an art course for a monthslong performance project in which she carried a mattress around campus to symbolize her trauma. Her performance art made her a symbol of the wronged survivor. Mr. Nungesser, however, argued that he was the victim, and sued Columbia for gender discrimination.
Lots of people saw the Columbia case in black and white, as either a rape or a lie. But talking to Ms. Sulkowicz, Mr. Nungesser and other students filled me only with uncertainty. I couldn’t even settle the factual disputes about what had happened during Columbia’s Title IX process, because those proceedings were confidential.
It’s true that student privacy laws limit the information schools can disclose, but schools sometimes have gone further than the law requires. The lack of information about the conclusions they reach, and why, breeds mistrust — as we are seeing again at Cornell.
Also in the mid-2010s, feminists, some of whom were the mothers of college-aged children, started dividing over what Title IX had become. Some thought the Obama administration’s rules were pushing schools to railroad accused students, who were almost always men. Others believed that women were still being shortchanged. I wrote about that debate. As frustrations mounted, critics on the right and left called for sidelining or abandoning campus investigations, and instead requiring schools to report accusations of sexual assault to the police. Despite often being among the biggest critics of the universities, survivors and their supporters resisted. They argued that forcing students to go to law enforcement would make them less likely to report assaults at all, eliminating a mechanism with which to hold perpetrators accountable and to provide survivors with accommodations and mental health services. “The fact that two institutions” — universities and the police — “mistreat survivors is not an argument for forcing students to choose between reporting to both or to neither,” argued Alexandra Brodsky, a co-founder of the advocacy group Know Your IX.
More recently, the first Trump administration, saying the Title IX process had become unfair to accused students, rolled back some of the Obama-era guidance. The new standards allow schools to use a higher standard of proof for a finding of responsibility and require live hearings with the opportunity for cross-examination.
When Jane Doe filed a lawsuit against Cornell in September, the university became the target of outrage and protest. One of the complaints was about Cornell’s lack of transparency in the two years since the alleged assault took place. In the wake of the suit, many facts have spilled out. Hundreds of pages of the university’s investigation in 2024 and 2025 have been disclosed to The Times and other news outlets. But I don’t think we know enough to fully judge Cornell’s response.
Here’s what stands out to me in the record. As in many cases like this one, the judgment of the students involved was clouded by drugs and alcohol. In her interview with a Cornell police officer and a Title IX investigator in November 2024, three weeks after the alleged assault, Jane Doe says she drank a lot over three hours at her sorority and a bar before walking to a party at the Chi Phi fraternity to meet a frat brother she was interested in, Matthew Ingalls. After they danced, Mr. Ingalls asked her to have a three-way with him and another fraternity brother, Jonathan Newell. Jane Doe said yes. The three students went upstairs to a shared bedroom and social space called the alumni room. The men drank and snorted ketamine. Jane Doe said she had ketamine and alcohol, too.
The night took a much more extreme turn at 1:42 a.m. That’s when Mr. Newell sent a message on Snapchat to dozens of Chi Phi brothers advertising “free pussy” in the alumni room. As men began responding, Mr. Ingalls wrote, “Like you can walk in and whip it out.”
The Snapchat exchange was grotesquely dehumanizing. Jane Doe didn’t know about it. She didn’t understand that Mr. Newell and Mr. Ingalls had apparently set her up as a group of men entered the alumni room. In her lawsuit, she says she was incapacitated by alcohol and ketamine. I think it’s equally important that she did not know she was essentially being prostituted on Snapchat — 53 minutes after Mr. Newell’s message, one man on the thread asked, “shop still open?”
Afterward, when Jane Doe heard that frat brothers were bragging about an “eightsome,” she was shattered. “My reputation is destroyed and i’m utterly ashamed,” she wrote to Mr. Ingalls. “All i do is sleep and cry all day.” When she heard rumors about the Snapchat messages, she asked the investigators to subpoena them.
There’s one more dark part of this story that matters for assessing the institutional response. After leaving the alumni room, Jane Doe went to a small room with Mr. Ingalls and another fraternity member, Winston Lee. Jane Doe said that they asked her for another three-way. She told the investigators she said she was too tired and didn’t have it in her. The men had sex with her anyway. “I can say with 100 percent confidence I was raped,” she said.
Is Jane Doe’s account enough to press rape charges in the criminal justice system? Aspects of it make the case difficult to prosecute. That does not, however, prevent a district attorney from asking a grand jury for an indictment. At the least, these facts should have triggered a serious criminal investigation. But the Cornell police officer left Jane Doe’s definitive statement about being raped out of the six-page summary that was given to the county’s district attorney, Matthew Van Houten. Prosecutors took no action. After the lawsuit was filed in September, Mr. Van Houten said Jane Doe’s statement “described her participation in drug use and sexual conduct as voluntary, conscious and consensual.” That’s not what she told the police, and it shows why survivors have so little faith in local law enforcement. Early this month, Gov. Kathy Hochul appointed the New York attorney general, Letitia James, as a special prosecutor in the case. Two of the accused men have asked the judge to remove Ms. James because before her appointment, she issued a statement expressing sympathy for Jane Doe.
In contrast to the district attorney, Cornell took significant action. The university closed Chi Phi in November 2024, and put the students Jane Doe had accused on interim suspensions, according to the lawsuit. Over the next few months, Cornell investigators conducted over 50 interviews and collected evidence, including the Snapchat messages and dozens of texts among students.
In May 2025, a disciplinary panel at Cornell met over 12 days to review the evidence against the seven men, all of whom denied any wrongdoing. Based on the panel’s findings, Mr. Ingalls and Mr. Newell were expelled, Mr. Lee was suspended for two years and a fourth student who Jane Doe said had nonconsensual sex with her in the alumni room was suspended for three semesters. The other three men received relatively light punishments. (One had already graduated, and two played lesser roles, though they did go to the alumni room after receiving the Snapchat invitation and participate in the messaging rather than expressing concern about it.)
In her lawsuit, Jane Doe said the penalties were insufficient. In the record, the reasons for the panel’s findings are heavily redacted, which means that, once again, a secretive process makes it hard to evaluate a university’s decision-making in an explosive case. Cornell has named a former acting U.S. attorney general, Sally Yates, to lead an independent review of its response. Whatever Ms. Yates finds, I hope she makes the information public in a way that allows us all to assess comprehensively the outcomes Cornell reached, and allows other schools to learn from this disastrous case. This week, the university said it would work with trauma-informed investigators from the state police and suspended frat parties for the rest of the academic year, a step toward prevention — another facet of Title IX.
In a case like this, publicity is its own form of punishment. “I’m being labelled as an assaulter in the public eye,” Matthew Ingalls texted Jane Doe in the days after the frat party. Because of Title IX, Cornell found that he deserved the label. That’s some form, at least, of deterrence.
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