At a campus police department on Nov. 14, 2024, a Cornell University sophomore detailed how she found herself naked in a fraternity house nearly a month before, with a “ring of men” around her. She was drunk and had been given ketamine, she said. Her phone was across the room.
“There was really no escape,” she said.
The woman spoke for hours with an officer, telling him how what began as a consensual sexual encounter with a man she liked spiraled into a prolonged drug-fueled attack by seven men inside the Chi Phi fraternity house.
“I don’t remember the very end of the event where I was raped,” she told them. “I can say with 100 percent confidence I was raped.”
The officer then condensed the interview into a six-page “voluntary statement” written from her perspective, according to documents obtained by The New York Times. The student, after leaving about 20 handwritten corrections on a draft, signed a final version the next day.
While the shorter statement explained that she felt some of that night’s events were a crime, it omitted some of the more forceful and definitive language she used. And it was missing her unequivocal statement that she had been raped. The omission, which for a time seemed to end the case, instead now appears to have only delayed a case that has roiled the campus and renewed the national debate how colleges handle claims of sexual assault.
That condensed statement was shared with the district attorney, Matthew Van Houten, who decided there was not enough evidence to bring criminal charges against the seven men. It looked like the case was over.
Mr. Van Houten’s decision in 2024 largely transpired quietly, through a process that is often shielded from public scrutiny. Cornell, though, conducted its own investigation. That investigation, which The Times has reviewed, concluded months after the woman dropped out of Cornell because of the incident.
Then last month the woman, as Jane Doe, filed a lawsuit against Cornell, the seven men, the fraternity and her sorority. The lawsuit ricocheted online, plunging the university into a crisis and landing Mr. Van Houten’s office in a maelstrom of criticism. Many in the public, including politicians and celebrities, began questioning what law enforcement officials knew about the woman’s allegations two years ago and why a criminal case was never pursued.
Mr. Van Houten has defended his office’s decision, and said he wants to meet with the woman this week as he considers bringing new evidence to a grand jury.
In a nine-page public statement on Monday, Mr. Van Houten said that the statement the woman provided at the time did not “allege she was drugged against her will or gang raped.”
“On the contrary, Jane Doe’s statement described her participation in drug and sexual conduct as voluntary, conscious, and consensual,” he wrote.
But in the documents reviewed by The Times, the Cornell police did not inform Mr. Van Houten’s office that Jane Doe had said she had been raped. It’s unclear what other conversations the police and district attorney’s office had about the case.
In her interview with the police officer, Jane Doe described how Oct. 19, 2024, began with her filing an unrelated police report that her car keys and wallet had been stolen. After discovering one of her credit cards had been used, she said, she canceled all of them.
When members of her sorority heard about the theft, they decided she would no longer be the designated sober sister tasked with keeping an eye on sorority sisters at a bar that evening, she recalled.
She went to the bar, where the sorority was hosting an event, and she was served drinks even though she was underage, she said. She then briefly stopped at another bar before eventually trekking 20 minutes on foot to a fraternity house to meet a guy she was interested in. At around 10:30 p.m. to 11 p.m., she felt she was inebriated, she told the officer.
She spotted the man she was looking for, she said, and they talked, drank and danced. Soon after, she went to a room and had a consensual sexual encounter with the man, and another man she knew from the fraternity, both of whom she thought were her friends, she said.
But as the night progressed, there were more than the two men in the room and she began to feel used, she recalled. She could hear the men talking about taking turns with her, she said.
“I will never know who all touched me,” she told the officer. “I will not know.”
At one point a group of men walked into the room where she was naked, she said.
“I was horrified, and I squealed and ran” and hid under the covers of a bed, she said. She described how she had to swat one man’s hands away throughout the night as he tried to grope her. The men snorted ketamine off her body, she said. It was the most intoxicated she had ever been in her life, she told the officer.
At around 5:45 a.m., she said wanted to go to bed and told two of the men, “I gotta turn in.” They stopped, she said.
She said she woke up at 10 a.m., then was driven home shortly after.
In the days after Jane Doe provided her statement to the police, officers tried to contact the men she accused, with varying degrees of success, according to the administrative documents.
On Nov. 25, the officer who took Jane Doe’s statement filed a document and said he contacted an investigator in the district attorney’s office to talk.
The officer reported that he was told, based on a review of Jane Doe’s statement, that the prosecutor’s office had decided that “criminal charges would not be pursued in this case.”
“Nothing further at this time,” he wrote.
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