Newly reported records of what a Cornell University student told campus police in 2024, including a transcript in which she said she was “100%” certain she had been raped, have raised fresh questions about what prosecutors knew when they decided not to bring charges in a case they have now reopened.
The student, identified as Jane Doe in a civil lawsuit filed this month, gave Cornell University police a signed six-page statement about the night of Oct. 19, 2024, when, she alleges, several members of the university’s Chi Phi fraternity sexually assaulted her. CNN’s Pamela Brown obtained the statement from a source familiar with the investigation; ABC News first reported it.
In it, she said she had been heavily intoxicated that night. She said she was comfortable with an initial encounter but did not consent to what happened later, and she described being physically hit. She had consented to some acts, including a threesome, she said, but repeatedly refused a foursome proposed by one of the men and said she “finally gave in” after being asked “to have sex so many times.” “To me that felt like coercion,” she said, adding that the men “should have known how intoxicated I was based on how I was slurring my words.”
A separate document, a transcript of a November 2024 interview with campus police obtained by the CNN affiliate WCBS, contains a blunter allegation. “I can say with 100% confidence I was raped,” she told investigators. A campus police investigator led the questioning over two days, Nov. 14 and 15, with a Title IX investigator, a victim advocate and the student’s adviser present on the first day, according to WCBS.
It is not clear whether Cornell gave the transcript to the Tompkins County district attorney. The district attorney, Matthew Van Houten, told CNN, “We never received it and still don’t have it. It was not part of what Cornell provided to us.” He said he learned of the allegation from WCBS on Tuesday evening and that, with the benefit of the transcript, his office “will be investigating this fully and determining the truth.”
A Cornell spokeswoman did not address the transcript directly but said the university “shared all investigatory information” with the district attorney’s office, “the established protocol if the department believes it is possible a crime has occurred.” Pressed on what was turned over, she said campus police had shared “a lengthy police investigation report” and referred other questions to Mr. Van Houten.
Until this week, Mr. Van Houten had defended the decision not to prosecute on the basis of the 2024 statement alone. He released excerpts on Monday, declining to publish the full statement and citing privacy concerns, and said it “described her participation in drug use and sexual conduct as voluntary, conscious, and consensual.” “Multiple prosecutors and criminal investigators reviewed Jane Doe’s statement and correctly determined the alleged facts as set forth in the statement do not constitute a crime,” he said.
Her lawyer, Thomas P. Giuffra, told CNN the police report written after her statement “is not materially different” from her account in the lawsuit, and he called the original investigation inadequate. “It is challenging for me to understand how a thorough criminal investigation could have been conducted when she never spoke with anyone other than the officer who took her original complaint,” he said. Beyond that first contact, he said, no one from the district attorney’s office, and no investigator trained in interviewing rape survivors, ever interviewed her.
Mr. Van Houten, pressed on CNN by Jake Tapper on Monday about the scope of the 2024 inquiry, said his team had not initially seen screenshots of a Snapchat group chat among Chi Phi members, which he called “completely vulgar and disgusting, but they had nothing to do with her consent.” “We can’t change what happened in the past as much as the community is outraged,” he said.
The case burst into public view on Sept. 16, when a 101-page lawsuit accused seven fraternity members of taking part in a drug-fueled assault lasting hours. It included a Snapchat screenshot in which one man wrote “free p*ssy” and others responded “CHI PHIII.” Lawyers for two of the men have denied the allegations. Within days, Mr. Van Houten announced he would reopen the investigation, citing “the reality that it can take years of therapy and healing for victims of sexual assaults to fully process and understand what happened to them.”
The outcry, amplified online by the actresses Florence Pugh and Mariska Hargitay and by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who criticized Cornell at a student town hall, landed the same week the Trump administration restored 2020-era Title IX rules that narrowed the definition of sexual harassment and added protections for accused students. Emma Grasso Levine of the group Advocates for Youth said the move “sends a message that it’s not safe to speak out.” False allegations are estimated at 2 to 10 percent of sexual assault reports, according to one analysis.