appointed Attorney General Letitia James<\/a> as a special prosecutor to lead a renewed criminal investigation, saying she had lost faith in Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten.<\/p>\nAccording to the Title IX documents filed in court, which are only a portion of the entire investigation, the woman and several of the men gave investigators similar accounts of drug use and sexual activity that took place at the Chi Phi fraternity house \u2014 but differed sharply in how much of it was consensual. <\/p>\n
The woman had been invited there by a fraternity member for whom she had long held strong romantic feelings and sexual interest, according to the disciplinary panel\u2019s findings. The panel found that she initially consented to sex with that man and one of his friends, though she later alleged in her lawsuit that she had been pressured into taking ketamine, marijuana and alcohol and was too intoxicated to consent.<\/p>\n
Then other men began showing up in the room, some drawn by a message one of the fraternity brothers sent to a Snapchat group at 1:42 a.m. using a vulgar term to advertise that a woman’s body was freely available. Later, another person in the chat asked if the \u201cshop\u201d was still open.<\/p>\n
The woman told investigators that her intoxication had rendered her partly defenseless. She said she remembered smoking marijuana and said she knew she took ketamine, her first time doing so, but didn\u2019t have an independent memory of it. The drug, she said, left her in a state of \u201cvague consciousness.”<\/p>\n
\u201cYou look like an operating human being,” she told school investigators at a hearing in May of 2025. “You don\u2019t look dead or asleep necessarily. So, lights are on, but nobody\u2019s home. Your brain is not functioning at its proper level.\u201d<\/p>\n
She said some of the men inhaled drugs off her unclothed body.<\/p>\n
\u201cI felt like bait. I felt like lions around me. It just was a totally debilitating place to be in,” she told investigators.<\/p>\n
One of the men the woman accused of snorting drugs off her body \u2014 but not participating in other elements of the assault \u2014 denied her account. <\/p>\n
He told investigators he was in the room for no more than five minutes, and didn\u2019t go there for sex.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat was not our intentions at all. We were just checking out to see if everything\u201d was OK, he said.<\/p>\n
He insisted that he did not see the woman naked at any time \u2014 she was under bed coverings, he said \u2014 and did not partake in drug use. He said he sat on a couch and chatted for a few minutes, then left after the woman and another man there both indicated they were all right.<\/p>\n
A Cornell disciplinary panel later cleared him of sexual assault or exploitation allegations, but found him responsible for attempted sexual exploitation because it didn’t believe his claim to have gone to the room for altruistic reasons.<\/p>\n
The fraternity member, who is challenging Cornell\u2019s disciplinary process in court, also posted in the Snapchat conversation, saying what was happening in the room was not a joke, adding: \u201cFirsthand pov not a bit.\u201d The student later told investigators he did not remember sending the message, according to Cornell\u2019s account.<\/p>\n
In her lawsuit, Jane Doe accused two of the other men who entered the room of performing sex acts on her without her consent, while she was partially incapacitated. She accused another man of kissing her without her consent. According to the Title IX documents, Jane Doe told investigators two other men stood at the foot of the bed acting \u201cmore like voyeurs than anything.”<\/p>\n
The lawsuit seeks to hold all seven men liable for rape. She is asking for unspecified damages.<\/p>\n
Cornell hasn\u2019t detailed the results of its investigation, but said it resulted in some students being expelled.<\/p>\n
The man who filed the lawsuit challenging his punishment was allowed to stay at Cornell, but he was ordered to stay away from the woman, take a class on sexual harassment and bystander intervention, and write a paper reflecting on the circumstances for which he was found responsible and include a proposal to train other students on preventing sexual harassment.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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