Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York appointed Attorney General Letitia James as special prosecutor on Friday to investigate a woman’s allegation that she was gang raped at a Cornell University fraternity house, saying she had lost faith in the local district attorney’s handling of the case and vowing to close what she called a loophole in the state’s rape law.

Ms. James’s office will oversee the investigation and, if warranted, present evidence to a grand jury, Ms. Hochul said at a news conference in Albany. The case had been closed without charges in 2024; the Tompkins County district attorney, Matthew Van Houten, reopened it last month after the woman, identified as Jane Doe, filed a lawsuit against seven fraternity brothers, the university, the Chi Phi fraternity and others.

“Voluntary intoxication is not a licence for sexual assault or gang rape. Period,” Ms. Hochul said. “If someone is too intoxicated to consent, it should not matter whether they chose to use drugs or alcohol.”

New York law treats intoxicated victims differently depending on how they consumed alcohol or drugs: someone who willingly became intoxicated is generally not considered mentally incapacitated, and thus unable to consent, under the statute. Mr. Van Houten cited the law in explaining why his office did not independently investigate the woman’s November 2024 report to campus police, before reversing course. Messages left for him late Thursday were not immediately returned.

Ms. Hochul said newly released information deepened her doubts. “According to news reports, she could not have been clearer that she was 100 percent confident that she had been raped,” she said. “Shockingly, those words didn’t make it into the account that police sent to prosecutors.”

“In what world would police learn from a victim that she had been literally gang raped and not elevate that to the district attorney?” the governor said. “At every turn, she was failed by people and institutions with an obligation to protect her.” The institutions she named were the Cornell University Police and the district attorney’s office.

The lawsuit alleges the woman was plied with drugs and alcohol, then subjected to sex acts by a group of men while partially or entirely incapacitated. One of the men sent a social media message inviting other fraternity members to take part, according to the suit. Lawyers for two of the men have denied they participated in an assault; The Associated Press said attempts to reach the others or their representatives were unsuccessful.

CBS News New York obtained transcripts of Cornell’s internal Title IX investigation, which include interviews with the woman, six of the seven accused men and 20 witnesses. Her roommate said she heard her tell one of the accused, “You had penetrative sex with me. I had so much ketamine, my eyes were crossed, and you still had sex with me.” Cornell has said privacy rules bar it from discussing the investigation. Asked about that on Friday, Ms. Hochul called the law “deeply flawed.”

For more than two hours on Thursday, students and others on the Ithaca campus voiced anger and grief over the university’s handling of sexual assault cases, with several recounting their own experiences and demanding changes to fraternity life.

The outcry has revived a long-stalled effort in the State Legislature to revise the rape statute, first backed in 2019 by Assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz. “Getting drunk should not be an invitation to getting raped but in the current law, it pretty much is,” Mr. Dinowitz told The New York Post, which first reported that a version of his bill passed the Senate 60-0 in June but never reached a floor vote in the Assembly.

The Post also reported that an advocate, Chris Lake, said Assemblyman Pat Burke had told him his colleagues called the measure the “ruining drunk sex bill.” A spokesman for Mr. Burke said the assemblyman had relayed how the bill was “colloquially known” and how opponents might characterize it, and that he plans to vote yes. On Wednesday, the Assembly speaker, Carl Heastie, announced a working group on legislation responding to the Cornell case.

Jane Manning, a former sex-crimes prosecutor who directs the Women’s Equal Justice Project, said state law defines rape so narrowly that expected legal change has become a focus of the case. Erin Murphy, a professor at New York University School of Law, said the proposed standard would have given prosecutors a clear case for charges in 2024, though she called its language “a pretty elastic standard.”