Two years after a woman alleged a gang rape at Cornell University, renewed attention to the case and the limited consequences faced by the alleged perpetrators has raised questions about what higher education owes students who experience sexual assault on campus as well as how consent and intoxication are understood under New York law.
A woman identified as Jane Doe filed a civil lawsuit on Sept. 16, alleging that she was sexually assaulted, gang-raped, and pressured to take drugs and drink alcohol by seven members of the Chi Phi fraternity on the night of Oct. 19, 2024. The lawsuit is filed against the fraternity, Doe’s sorority chapter, and Cornell University; it names Matthew Ingalls, Johnathan Newell, Winston Lee, Gillio Lopes, Diego Sarabia, Scott Norris, and Scott Kretzschmar as defendants. Prosecutors said this week they were reopening a criminal investigation into the case after declining to press charges originally.
Separate attorneys for Kretzschmar and Lopes denied the allegations in statements to ABC, while Norris, via an attorney, denied engaging in sexual activity or drug use but acknowledged that he sent a message included in the complaint.
When sexual assault allegations of this kind occur on campus, they can be addressed in three distinct ways: through school disciplinary proceedings, criminal proceedings, and civil lawsuits.
Doe’s civil lawsuit alleges that Cornell failed to protect her. Her attorney has separately criticized authorities’ handling of the criminal investigation, although observers say what’s known as the “voluntary intoxication loophole” in state law could limit what prosecutors are able to charge.
Here’s what to know about how the case was handled—by Cornell and the criminal justice system—before, and what could happen next.
How Cornell responded when the alleged assault was reported
Doe reported the alleged assault to campus police in November 2024. According to her complaint, Cornell began its Title IX investigation on Jan. 14, 2025.
Title IX is a law dating back to 1972 that is meant to, among other things, ensure that a college investigates when there is sexual assault on campus. Central to this premise is that Title IX is meant to ensure that sexual violence does not impede a student’s access to education.
Read More: Trump’s Title IX Announcement Is Cruel. But It Does Not Change the Law
Doe’s attorney has said that Cornell expelled two of the seven accused students. Cornell has confirmed that its disciplinary process resulted in expulsions and suspensions, but has not disclosed individual outcomes. The lawsuit alleges negligence, breach of contract, and violations of New York law.
Cornell responded in a statement last week, saying that it could not confirm the individual disciplinary outcomes due to student privacy laws. However, the university clarified on Monday that “none of the individuals charged were offered the opportunity to write essays as a sole consequence of their involvement.”
“We take sexual violence extremely seriously,” the Sept. 21 statement said. “The Presidential Task Force on Campus Sexual Assault was launched shortly after this incident and issued a REPORT in March 2026.”
In a statement Monday, Kyle Kimball, Cornell’s vice president for university relations, said Chi Phi’s Cornell chapter closed in 2024 and the fraternity remains barred from campus.
But women’s rights advocates believe that the school might not have fulfilled its legal obligations in investigating the incident and taking appropriate actions toward those involved.
What does Title IX require universities to do about sexual assault?
Title IX is a federal civil rights law meant to prohibit sex-based discrimination in any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.
Since Title IX was introduced, courts have found that the law requires institutions to ensure that sexual violence does not impede a student’s access to education.
“The reason why Title IX addresses sexual harassment, including sexual assault, is because of the very real impact that has on students’ ability to access education,” Shiwali Patel, a Title IX expert with the National Women’s Law Center, tells TIME.
According to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), students who experience sexual assault are more likely to earn lower GPAs in school and are more likely to drop out of school altogether.
Patel points to Doe’s attorney’s account of her efforts to leave Cornell after the alleged assault. In a Sept. 28 interview with CNN, Thomas Giuffra—Jane Doe’s lawyer—said Cornell refused her family’s tuition-refund request, leaving her to spend another semester on campus.
“She was trying to leave the institution; she didn’t want to be there,” Patel says.
Cornell told People that it works with students seeking to take leave or withdraw and “regularly refunds payments if students are no longer enrolled.”
Giuffra also told CNN that Doe is no longer in college as of 2026.
Universities also have obligations to offer support regardless of a formal complaint or a finding of culpability. These can include counseling, academic adjustments, and housing or schedule changes. Patel says it remains unclear whether Cornell fully complied with its Title IX obligations because the supportive measures it provided Doe are not publicly known.
Regardless, the situation raises questions about what more schools can do for students, Patel says, providing some examples of the types of questions that a university might ask in the aftermath of this kind of incident: “Does she need extensions on exams? Does she need some time off, some leave? Does she need a housing shift if the fraternity house and her sorority house are close together? Does she need counseling? Did they provide a stay away order? What kind of support were they giving her to make sure she wouldn’t have to be retriggered and traumatized by running into them?”
Title IX also requires schools to investigate allegations through a reliable, impartial process—independently of criminal court systems, and using a lower burden of proof to determine if a student violated campus policy.
Cornell University publicly disclosed that it was investigating the allegation on Nov. 8, 2024, the same day Doe went to the police, according to the lawsuit. The university sent an alert to students regarding a report of sexual assault and coercion into taking drugs at a fraternity house. The same day, Cornell suspended the Chi Phi fraternity.
In response to an inquiry from TIME, Cornell said that its “Office of Civil Rights and the Office of Student Conduct and Community Standards investigated the allegations against the individuals and the fraternity consistent with university policies and Title IX.”
“The university’s Title IX investigation was conducted over several months and included hearings where a panel of trained faculty and staff heard evidence over multiple days,” the university’s statement continued. “The complainant and respondents had the opportunity to testify and present evidence in the university’s investigation.”
How did Trump change Title IX rules?
Cornell’s handling of the case unfolded amid shifting federal rules on campus sexual misconduct. A court vacated the Biden Administration’s Title IX rule on Jan. 9, 2025—five days before Cornell began its formal investigation, according to Doe’s complaint. The university held hearings that May, making the rules it applied a key question in assessing its response.
The Biden Administration had expanded Title IX regulations in April 2024—taking effect in August 2024—broadening the definition of sexual harassment and extending federal protections.
On Jan. 9, 2025, however, a federal district court issued a decision vacating the 2024 Biden rule nationwide. This week, the Trump Administration formally restored the 2020 Title IX regulations to the Code of Federal Regulations. Those rules, introduced during President Donald Trump’s first term, had already been enforced since January 2025.
“The Trump rule essentially narrowed the definition of sexual harassment to make it more burdensome for a complainant to actually complain of something that meets a definition,” Patel says of the differences between the Biden-era and Trump-era Title IX rules.
The 2020 rule requires hostile-environment sexual harassment to be “severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive,” a narrower standard than the Biden-era rule. Sexual assault, however, is covered separately and does not have to meet that threshold—and a direct link between recent revisions and the Cornell case has not been established.
“It also sets limits on what schools can respond to under Title IX based on the location of the assault, harassment, and based on the complainant’s status,” she adds. “This is going a huge step backwards because it is allowing schools to do less in the face of sexual assault.”
Another difference between the 2020 and 2024 rules was that the latter required schools to proactively monitor educational programs for sex discrimination, identify and address barriers to reporting, and take prompt, effective steps to prevent discrimination from recurring.
Patel argues that a university’s ability to prevent and respond to sexual assault is hindered by this “ping-ponging of Title IX protections based on the administration that’s in power.”
“We need to have a legislative fix,” she argues. “There needs to be some clarity through legislation to prevent this type of thing from happening.”
Nancy Cantalupo, an assistant professor at Wayne State University Law School, says that this type of case highlights issues within the government itself—what she describes as “failures of those in the current administration and certain previous administrations, as well as the courts—led by the U.S. Supreme Court—to interpret and enforce Title IX in a manner that is consistent with Title IX’s purposes.”
Namely, she says, that involves preventing gender discrimination in education.
How do Title IX investigations differ from criminal cases?
Survivor advocates describe Title IX as an alternative form of recourse to the criminal legal system, emphasizing its capacity to address other harms of sexual violence, including its impact on educational access. In written testimony to a Senate roundtable discussion of Title IX in 2014, the Victim Rights Law Center said the law “is a mechanism to enforce a victim’s civil rights and not a tool of the criminal justice system.”
Where prosecutors are tasked with focusing on the accused’s accountability and the community’s interests, the Victim Rights Law Center said Title IX is meant to address victims’ equal educational rights.
The two processes also apply different standards of proof, at times leading a prosecutor to decline charges because they do not believe the evidence can support a criminal conviction.
“The View” co-host Sunny Hostin, who said she prosecuted sex crimes for a decade, defended the initial decision not to prosecute. On the show’s Tuesday episode, the former assistant U.S. attorney said, “under New York law, voluntary intoxication or drug use that merely impairs judgment does not legally constitute an inability to consent to sexual activity.”
“There is no way,” she added, “according to [Doe’s] statement in 2024, that any prosecutor would have brought charges.”
What does New York law say about intoxication and consent?
Under the state’s rape laws, lack of consent can be established through force, an explicit refusal of sex, physical helplessness such as unconsciousness, or mental incapacitation. The definition of mental incapacitation excludes incapacity caused by voluntarily consuming drugs or alcohol, leading to a restriction that lawmakers and advocates call the “voluntary intoxication loophole.”
“The current law sees it in black and white: Either you’re stone cold sober or you’re totally comatose,” says Ann Olivarius, an attorney who represents victims of sexual misconduct and discrimination in employment. “Life is not like that, and certainly not in college. We all know how easily our faculties are undermined by drugs and alcohol.”
Even if, under the law, you’re too impaired to operate heavy machinery or be responsible for children, Olivarius says, “if you’re slurring, stumbling, or visibly disoriented, you are still considered capable of giving consent for sex.”
The law’s limitations have been a focal point of the debate over whether the prosecutor should, or could, have brought charges in 2024.
Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten reopened the investigation and said the case would be presented to a grand jury for their consideration. But he defended his initial decision not to charge the alleged perpetrators in a statement on Monday, citing New York state laws on intoxication and consent.
According to Van Houten, Doe’s sworn statement in November 2024 “did not allege that she was drugged against her will or gang raped. On the contrary, Jane Doe’s statement described her participation in drug use and sexual conduct as voluntary, conscious, and consensual.”
The civil lawsuit, however, states that she was incapacitated when frat members sexually assaulted her and thus incapable of consenting. It also claims that she was “pressured” and “plied” with drugs, and that certain acts were done “without her consent” as well as some “forced” on her.
Olivarius, who was also a plaintiff in the landmark Alexander v. Yale case nearly half a century ago that established sexual harassment is a form of sex discrimination under Title IX, tells TIME that the nature of the law can also lead to victim-blaming questions: “They say to her, ‘Were you drunk? Why did you drink?’ … It’s all on her.
The New York Times reported in May that people who voluntarily drank or took drugs faced a high burden when pursuing rape charges.
Legal advocates have for years argued that the law’s limitations underscore the need for reform, especially as advocacy efforts have increasingly spotlighted how intoxication can impair a person’s ability to consent to sex.
Have there been efforts to change the law?
The New York State Assembly is forming a working group to review the state’s rape laws in light of the civil lawsuit, State Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, a Democrat, announced on Wednesday. The group, composed of 14 Democratic Assembly members, will be expected to report its findings and legislative recommendations to Heastie and the Assembly Democratic majority conference by the end of the year.
A bill addressing the voluntary intoxication exclusion passed the state Senate unanimously in June, but remains stalled in the Assembly. Earlier versions passed the Senate in 2020, 2021, 2023, 2024, and 2025, but none passed the Assembly. The proposals to change the law date back to legislation introduced by then-Sen. Alessandra Biaggi, a Democrat, in 2019.
New York is one of 19 states whose rape or sexual assault laws recognize intoxication as mental incapacitation only when the person became intoxicated without their knowledge or consent, according to research by the Associated Press and a report published in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law.
Several states have changed their laws in recent years to also protect victims incapacitated by voluntary intoxication.
In 2021, lawmakers in Minnesota expanded the definition of mental incapacitation to include voluntary intoxication, after the state Supreme Court overturned a sexual assault conviction under the narrower definition.
Michigan also revised its laws in 2023 to broaden its definition of mental incapacitation. Last year, Texas expanded its law to cover sexual acts committed when the perpetrator knows the other person is too impaired to consent, regardless of how that person became intoxicated.
California also tightened its sentencing laws in 2016 following the sexual assault case involving Stanford student Brock Turner. The state barred probation and suspended sentences for certain sexual offenses involving victims who were incapable of consenting because of intoxication.
What happens next in the Cornell sexual assault case?
There are three possible ways that this case may move forward.
Van Houten said his office plans to present the criminal case to a grand jury, which would determine whether an indictment is warranted. “Seeking justice sometimes requires us to reconsider or reopen cases when we are provided with additional evidence,” Van Houten said in his Monday statement. He told ABC that his office wanted to determine whether additional evidence, not considered at the time, would change its assessment, potentially including a screenshot included in the civil complaint of an alleged Snapchat message between the fraternity members that referred to Doe as “free p-ssy.”
After the woman’s initial police report, she reportedly told police a week later that she was “completely and totally incapacitated,” and could “say with 100% confidence I was raped.” A transcript obtained by CBS of a police interview on Nov. 14 and 15, 2024, showed that the woman described being “physically hit very, very hard,” and describing the incident as “coercion.” Van Houten told CBS that he had not seen the transcript of the interview, and that his office had relied on the sworn statement when it declined to bring charges.
Separately, Doe’s civil lawsuit seeks monetary damages from the seven men and other defendants, including Cornell University. A court date has not been set.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul on Tuesday also called for an independent investigation into how Cornell University handled the allegations when they arose in 2024.
“The allegations in this case are nothing short of horrifying. For any student to come forward after an experience like this takes extraordinary courage. No student should ever be left wondering whether the institutions meant to protect them will listen and act,” the governor’s statement said. “That is why I am calling for outside counsel to conduct a transparent, independent review of the university’s response to determine whether Cornell met every obligation to protect its students and pursue justice.”
The individuals who might be tasked with such an investigation have yet to be named; however, the outcomes could help shape how similar investigations into sexual assault cases are handled on campuses both in and beyond New York.
“This case,” Olivarius tells TIME, “ may change the conversation.”
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