The woman who would come to be known as Jane Doe walked into her sorority house in a daze, feeling bruises starting to ache on her body. When her sorority sisters asked what had happened, she remembered responding with one word: “Ketamine.”
The recollection, detailed among the more than 1,000 pages of Cornell University files obtained by The New York Times, underscores the central role played by the powerful anesthetic in an alleged gang rape that has spurred outrage and debate about sexual assault and consent on college campuses nationwide.
The drug, which has surged in popularity in recent years, appeared time and again on the night in question, at a Chi Phi fraternity party in October 2024, according to the documents and a lawsuit filed last month by the former Cornell student who identified herself as Jane Doe.
She said in her lawsuit that during the party, she felt pressured by some members of the fraternity to take ketamine with them — her first time doing the drug — before seven of them sexually assaulted her.
Before the night was over, she said in her lawsuit, all seven of the men would also snort lines of ketamine off her body.
All of the men have denied any wrongdoing, saying that any sexual contact that night was consensual. None has been charged with a crime.
In her initial interview with campus investigators in November 2024, Jane Doe said a combination of drugs and alcohol — she had been drinking heavily before arriving at the fraternity and continued drinking once there — made it impossible for her to consent to sexual activity that night.
She said she did not remember taking the first hit of ketamine, only realizing that she had done so later in the night when a Chi Phi brother asked if she wanted “more” ketamine.
“Whenever the ketamine went down, I would say, is when things really start becoming a problem,” she told investigators.
In the investigative files obtained by The Times, the word ketamine appears hundreds of times, and the witness statements allude to a drug culture on campus where ketamine was easily accessible in certain social circles.
In August alone, the Cornell University police responded to two reports of ketamine potentially being stolen from the university’s veterinary medical center, according to agency’s crime log.
In interviews with 11 current and recently graduated Cornell students, many of them told The Times that cocaine and marijuana were common at regular campus parties, while ketamine was more typically found within the heavy partying crowd, including in certain fraternities.
“It was not hard to get your hands on it if you wanted it,” said Hasham Khan, 22, a former fraternity member who was not in Chi Phi and graduated from the university this year.
Jane Doe told campus investigators that the first time she had ever seen ketamine was about two weeks before the night of her alleged assault.
She was hanging out with some of the Chi Phi members she would later accuse of rape, she said, when one of them took out a plastic bag filled with white powder.
She said she turned down an offer to try it then.
But when she asked the man how he could be sure that it wasn’t laced with something dangerous, like fentanyl, he replied that his drug dealer worked in a Cornell lab, she told investigators.
(The man subsequently said he does not remember saying this and denied having a ketamine dealer from a Cornell lab, the investigative files show.)
At one point on the night of the alleged assault, Jane Doe said she was upstairs in a room at the Chi Phi fraternity, surrounded by men. She told one of the Chi Phi members that she felt uncomfortable.
She said he laughed and poured a line of ketamine onto his erect penis, and she said she felt coerced into snorting it, according to her interview in November 2024 with campus police. (He later told investigators he had “no recollection” of this.)
“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,” she told investigators, according to the files. “My thought was that if I passed out and these men had sex with me, then they could be charged with rape.”
Another fraternity member then asked if all the men in the room could do drugs off her body, and she replied “Sure,” she told investigators.
As she snorted more ketamine throughout the night, “it made my eyes feel like they were spinning in opposite directions,” she said.
She said she felt coerced into having sex with the men — and that they should have known how intoxicated she was based on how she was slurring her words.
The investigative records suggest that the men in the room were also feeling the effects of the ketamine.
One fraternity brother wrote in a statement to investigators that within 10 minutes of taking ketamine, he was gasping for breath, lost consciousness for several seconds and told Jane Doe he thought he was about to die. Another said the mix of ketamine, liquor and marijuana made him vomit violently for about 15 minutes.
The accused male students gave conflicting accounts to investigators of the ketamine use that night. One of the fraternity members said he never took ketamine that night, nor did he see anyone taking it — directly contradicting another member who recalled seeing this person inhale ketamine off Jane Doe’s body.
A third fraternity brother acknowledged inhaling ketamine off Jane Doe’s body but said he did so only after she gave him verbal permission.
Around 6 a.m., as Jane Doe was drifting in and out of sleep inside a fraternity member’s bedroom, she heard a group of men knock at the door, she told investigators. They wanted to snort cocaine off her body, but one of the men who had assaulted her earlier told them to leave, she alleged.
In Jane Doe’s lawsuit last month, she said Cornell should have known that the fraternity had a history of ketamine use, citing a response from police officers to a drug-related incident at the fraternity house a week before the alleged assault.
The Tompkins County district attorney who reviewed Jane Doe’s initial statement and declined to bring criminal charges, Matthew Van Houten, said he was unaware of that police visit.
Cornell’s crime log shows that the campus police made a drug-related arrest at the Chi Phi fraternity less than 24 hours before Jane Doe’s alleged assault, an arrest first reported by The Cornell Sun.
The timing of the arrest matched a reference in court records to a ketamine overdose that took place at the house “on or about” Oct. 18, 2024.
The investigative files also show that on the night of the alleged assault, Jane Doe ran into a fraternity member she knew who was the D.J. of the party. Later on, she said another student told her that the D.J. had overdosed on ketamine and other substances the night before, the records show.
“I feel like OD’ing is a pretty big deal,” she told investigators. “But to be back at it again the next day? It’s crazy.”
Cornell is far from the only place where ketamine has recently gained a foothold, both as legitimate treatment and as a party drug.
Legal with a prescription and often used to anesthetize both humans and animals, ketamine has become an alternative treatment for depression and anxiety. That has made it more widely available — but has also created more opportunities for abuse.
Joseph Palamar, a professor at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine who has researched ketamine for decades, found that from 2017 to 2024, the percentage of New York City nightclub attendees who reported having used ketamine has nearly doubled.
He warned that the disassociating and numbing effects of the drug can be especially dangerous if mixed with alcohol, as alleged in the lawsuit by Jane Doe.
“Even on relatively small doses, you’re very detached from things,” Professor Palamar said. “You’re not as in touch with your emotions. It’s very hard to communicate, especially as you hit larger doses.”
Although Jane Doe said ketamine played a role in making her vulnerable to assault — it can have hallucinogenic effects and impair memory — its use is also likely to complicate the revived criminal investigation into her accusations, legal experts have said. New York State’s rape law makes it difficult for a person who knowingly became intoxicated to prove that they did not consent to a sexual encounter.
That investigation will now be led by the New York State attorney general, Letitia James, whom Gov. Kathy Hochul appointed as special prosecutor after saying she had lost faith in Mr. Van Houten.
Henry Fernandez, Emma Goldberg and Hurubie Meko contributed reporting. Susan Beachy contributed research.
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