The legal system is creaking into motion, said former federal prosecutor Mimi Rocah in MS.now, but for Jane Doe it’s “too little, too late.” Amid a “firestorm of outrage,” Matthew Van Houten, district attorney for New York’s Tompkins County, agreed recently to reopen a criminal investigation into the alleged 2024 sexual assault and rape of a Cornell University sophomore by seven fraternity members. Van Houten said he initially dropped the probe because the then-20-year-old complainant— referred to only as Jane Doe—had described her drug use and sexual activity at the Chi Phi frat house “as voluntary, conscious, and consensual” in a statement. But that statement was a six-page summary of longer interviews by Cornell campus police, the transcripts of which tell a very different story. In them, Doe says the encounter began consensually with two men, but that five others later joined in, by which point she was too intoxicated on alcohol and ketamine to consent, and that she was “100% confident” she’d been raped. Van Houten never read those transcripts, or the Snapchat messages in which one of the accused allegedly told his frat brothers there was “free pussy” upstairs. Another frat member later asked, “Shop still open?” New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has now handed the case to state Attorney General Letitia James. But rape is notoriously hard to prosecute, let alone years after the fact. The case against the “Cornell 7” seems “set up for failure.”
Hasn’t justice already been done? asked Byron York in the Washington Examiner. Cornell did its own investigation in 2024, after which it “shut down the Chi Phi fraternity house,” expelled two men, suspended two more, and banned another from campus. The final two men, found not to have played a significant role in events, were ordered to write “reflection papers.” The names of the seven—all of whom deny rape—have also been published, and they’re facing damages from Doe’s civil suit. Van Houten “had to go,” said former federal prosecutor Elie Honig in New York. Reports of how he failed to interview witnesses or gather evidence have eroded public confidence in the justice system. But just as “corrosive” is the appointment of James, a showboating prosecutor who has already “publicly prejudged” the Cornell 7 in social media posts pledging to “stand with” Doe.
The legal cases will rise and fall on the “technical question of consent,” said Natalia Bower in her Substack newsletter. But what’s legal and what’s moral are two different things, and society gets to impose “consequences” for legal but immoral behavior. The Cornell 7 knew they’d hurt Jane Doe. This is apparent from their group chat, which finds them discussing how to dissuade her from pressing charges, and from messages to Doe herself, in which one apologizes for letting things get out of hand. Whatever else may come to light, we already know “more than enough to drag these men’s reputations through the mud,” as they gleefully dragged Jane Doe’s.
All the ketamine and Snapchatting makes this case seem very modern, said Caitlin Flanagan in The Free Press, but generations of American college women have learned the hard way to “never go upstairs in a fraternity house.” Why do women keep venturing, “decade after decade,” into these “fortresses” of violence and stunted masculinity? Many go in search of good men—but they are in pitifully short supply. Of all this story’s awful details, perhaps the saddest and most enraging is that when those messages went out, inviting dozens of Chi Phi brothers to join in the unfolding horror, not one of them “was man enough to shut it down.