The Firestorm Over a Rape Allegation at Cornell

In the New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily. An alleged sexual assault at Cornell has gripped the country and ignited a national debate over consent and how universities respond to allegations of rape. And now, documents revealed by The New York Times helped to explain what happened at the university and why the district attorney initially decided not to pursue any charges against the men at the center of the allegations. And so today, Deborah Cayman explains what we know about what happened at Cornell and whether the systems in place are equipped to handle these sorts of complicated cases. It's Friday, October 2nd. Deborah Cayman, welcome to The Daily. Thank you for having me. So Deborah, all week, there's been this news building and building about a case out of Cornell. A woman has alleged that multiple men raped her at a frat party. And I just want to tell listeners that this conversation is going to get graphic. It could be upsetting to some people. So just to start walk us through what happened to cause what has become this huge national story. You know, Rachel, I've been covering sexual assault and sexual harassment for many years. And I can't recall a story that has really gripped the national conversation like this one. Before Wednesday, what we knew about this story was pretty bare bones. We knew that there was a woman, she's just going by Jane Doe. And she says in October 24, she was raped out of frat house by several men. She filed a complaint with the school and campus police and the DA declined to prosecute. The school did decide to expel a few of the men, some had to write essays. But the case really fell out of view. There was no criminal case. And then in September, Jane Doe filed a civil lawsuit against seven men as well as a number of additional defendants. Those are the fraternity, the sorority, and even the bar that gave her alcohol that night. Some of the men have denied the charges, but others haven't said anything in public yet. And then all of a sudden the Cornell son, which is the paper at her school, made this controversial decision, they published the names of the seven men on their front page. And remember, these guys have not been charged with a crime yet. And shortly after they published those names, there was a massive uproar. And the DA on Monday, in the wake of all of this, decided to reopen the criminal case. So immediately, there were so many questions about what happened here. Did Cornell fail somewhere? And most importantly, was there a crime? What exactly compelled the DA to reopen the case if we know, like, was there new information presented that maybe he didn't have two years ago? The DA was under a lot of pressure because the lawsuit has a lot of inflammatory allegations. There's a Snapchat thread in the lawsuit. And some of the men involved in the incident announced to the chat, and they're using really crude language. I'm not going to repeat it here. But essentially, they're saying, there's a woman upstairs, and it's inviting them up to join. Kind of like they're saying, the shop is open. And the lawsuit alleges things like she was pressured to take drugs in alcohol. And a lot of things that they just really raise questions as to whether or not she was raped. And taken on its face, the allegations, at the very least, they begged the question, was this properly investigated and was something missed? By reopening this case, is the DA effectively saying these details are all new to me? Like, what did he actually say about that decision? The DA has said two things that are very interesting. The first is that he has noted that there are key pieces of evidence that were initially provided by Jane Doe in her interviews with Cornell after the alleged rape that he was not provided, that may potentially change the story of what happened here. He has also conceded that her sworn statement in 2024, it is different than what she's saying in the lawsuit, which was valid in 2026. And he's signaling that that doesn't mean that her story has changed. That means that a victim's understanding of something as traumatic as a sexual assault can change over time, and that this may merit a second look at this point. So he's basically acknowledging that this woman's perception of the events in question could be enough justification for them to reexamine things. Yes, precisely. And that's one of the most interesting things about this case. And I really think why it has captured so much national attention. Right. And the reaction has been really fierce very quickly. The reaction has been fierce. And they said she shouldn't have been drinking and that wouldn't have happened to her. What? Literally. What the f*** is wrong with you? You had people saying that she was definitely raped. Cornell, you not only failed a student that was drugged and s**t assaulted by seven Cornell students, but you also failed every other woman on campus. Denied justice. This is an abomination. The victim had to attend the school with the same people who raped her. I hope you have some good explanations when the time comes to explain why you closed this case early. And then you got people saying that she is a liar who changed her story. But she made an accusation because she was ashamed. What she's saying now in her civil suit is completely different from what she wrote in a very detailed statement to us. So many people have so many takes and are examining the story on every angle. What happened was legal. Even within the woman's own account, she consents over and over and when she revokes consent, the action stops. But I do think so. And so much of it is coming from people who really barely even know the facts of the case. But there are these key questions that were not answered when this lawsuit was filed. We didn't know what happened in the days between when she said she was raped and when she went to campus police. We didn't know what happened between going to campus police and going to the DA. We didn't know why charges weren't filed and what information was handed off. And in all those questions, it was just filled like so many things are with hot takes and commentary on Twitter and people taking sides without having a lot of information about any of the people involved in this story. Until Wednesday, when here at The New York Times, we were able to review over a thousand pages of documents and transcripts showing details, immense details from the school's internal investigation into this alleged assault. And suddenly we had answers to almost all of those questions. But Deborah, tell us what you learned from all of these documents. What I learned and what I think all the reporters who spent all of Wednesday night into Thursday morning coming through these hundreds of pages is they give you a lot more insight into not just what happened that night in October at Cornell, but also how Jane Doe's feelings about what happened changed over time. We have interviews with Jane Doe and we also have interviews with people who are around her. Her big sister, her sorority, and also in interviews with six of the seven men who were accused. You take all these different angles and all these different conversations about the same event together. And it paints a picture of someone who took time to process an event and had to come to terms with her own understanding of what it was. I want to talk about how her feelings changed and how she processed this. But first, can you just take us back to the day that all of this allegedly occurred? What happened according to the materials that you reviewed? Yeah, so according to these documents, on October 19th, 2024, this woman, Jane Doe, she had a really bad day. She was actually robbed in the morning, and she filed a police report. She lost her wallet. She didn't have her ID. That night Jane Doe was supposed to be the sober monitor with her sorority. It's a handful of students who stay sober and keep track of all the other students to make sure they're okay when they're drinking. You get home safe. That's so. And because of the fact that she was robbed and she'd had a difficult day, she ended up thinking she wasn't going to go out. So she didn't take on this role as sober monitor. And then later in the day around at her time, she decides to go out. She's underage, but she still manages to drink anyway. And late in the evening, early in the morning of October 20th, she ends up at this frat house. And she says, in her interview with investigators, she's very forthright. There was a guy there she wanted to see. She liked him. She went to go see him and they start having sex, which is consensual and eventually someone else joins in. And at that point, it is according to the investigation, also consensual. But she says she is under the influence of a lot of alcohol. And she talks about how there's a lot of drugs going around. There's ketamine being used as well and ketamine is a very powerful substance. And as she tells her story, she explains to investigators that there comes to be a point where she's no longer really clear on whether or not she's in control. Other men come into the room. The documents show that she told school administrators that at this point, she didn't want to be there. At one point, she even went under the covers. There was one line that I found particularly striking that I read where she noted that because she felt uncomfortable, she took more ketamine because she wanted to numb herself from the situation that she felt she was stuck in. So at that point, she says she's really too intoxicated to consent. She's also too intoxicated to know that she should say no to becoming more intoxicated. She says she's given more drugs, she's given more alcohol. She says in the documents that she's probably the drunkest she's ever been in her entire life. So the morning of October 20th, around 11am, Jando's roommate notes that she came home. And Jando's testimony corroborates this. Her roommate notes that Jando is still wearing her big boots and her small dress the night before. And if you read her roommate's testimony, it's clear that the roommate understood that something had happened the night before that was not okay. Why does she say that, like, what did Jane Doe tell her roommates in these early hours after the incident happened? Right. So the two roommates described Jane Doe's demeanor as being wired or fuzzy. She was talking fast. She was laughing. She told them that she had gotten drunk. She had sex with multiple men, but she was making it out to be a joke. They both tell investigators they could understand that she had not processed what had happened. But her roommates note that they immediately flagged it, if not as an assault, but as something that was bad. Later on in the testimony, one of Jane Doe's close friends notes that Jane Doe had previous sexual trauma. She's a previous victim of sexual assault, and she believes that that attributed to her inability to process what had happened to her in the immediate moment. It made it harder and took her longer to come to terms with wanting to call this second incident also a sexual assault. So just to be clear, in the first few days after this incident at the Frad House, she's not using the word rape, right, in the way that she's talking about what had happened to her. She does not use the word rape or assault initially at all, and one of her roommates notes that specifically. She did not use that word. And she's also texting with two or three of the guys. And there are a lot of text messages from the days right after the incident. And in many of them, Jane Doe seems to be telling at least a few of the guys involved that she's fine with what happened. And in these messages, which are really just days after this alleged assault, there's one of them where one of the guys, he wrote her first, and he said, I actually want to apologize for the way things went down. And she writes him back and she says, listen, it's okay. She actually says none of the sexual stuff was illegal. That's what her quote was. And then she also adds that she really liked being with him and one of the other guys. These are messages that have been seized upon by people who are accusing her of changing her story or potentially fabricating her story as alleged proof of the fact that nothing bad happened to her. But even while Jane Doe is telling her two roommates and her friend in these documents that she is okay with what happened, there are glimmers that at least part of her doesn't feel that way. Two days after the incident, she goes to campus health because she has a UTI. And she also wants to get tested for sexually transmitted diseases. And she says in her testimony that when she went to campus health and told them about the UTI, she told the doctor at campus health that she contracted the UTI in a traumatic way. She used the word trauma. She also notes that the doctor at campus health didn't respond in a way that was particularly constructive. According to the interview, she just told Jane Doe that she should go to therapy and didn't take it any further. But it appears that at that moment there was a window where she was at least trying to explain to someone in authority that something bigger had happened than perhaps she had set out loud at this point. But to her friends and to his people on campus, she is not showing any signs of that at this point. Yeah, exactly. So what prompts her to actually start thinking about this incident differently and talking about it differently? In the days after the alleged incident, there are all these rumors that start swirling about her. She's being described as a slut and a whore. People are talking about the fact that she had sex with seven men. She's really being torn apart, not just by guys, but also by other women on campus. And this is deeply troubling to her. As much as she's trying to keep a clamp on the story, it keeps growing. But she goes onto this farm for Greek life and she sees something that really stops her cold. And what is this message that she sees? So it's this post and someone had written, are the Chi-Pi Brothers, Crips, or Bloods because I hear they have been doing hell gang-banging. And then someone wrote underneath it, they commented on this and they said they do drugs and they gang-raped a sophomore, report them. Wow. And so what does she think in that moment? So she sees this and she knows that she is the sophomore. So she sees someone else who isn't part of her story, describe what happened to her as a gang-rape. And it looks very clearly from these documents. And this is the first time she says to herself, was that gang-raped? And so how does she react to this? What does she do next? So she sees the post and she texts one of the guys and she goes, what is this? Have you seen this? She basically sent him a bunch of question marks in text and he wrote back and he said this is ridiculous, I'm going to report it. But it's clear and her roommate said this in the testimony to investigators that she kind of came to realize at this moment and in these days it's something bad had happened and she had not enjoyed her time. This was the roommates words that her friend Jane Doe wanted it to be consensual, not that she was consenting but she wanted her understanding. She wanted her telling of that night that it was consensual but she was coming to terms with the fact that according to these documents it may not have been consensual. The roommates basically saying the impression I got from my roommate was that she really wanted this to be consensual because she wanted to be okay. Yes, she wanted to tell herself a story about what happened but she came to realize that that simply wasn't according to her what had happened. It appears like this is a light bulb moment. It does seem from what we see in the documents that her thinking at this point and the conversations about what she was saying have shifted and they continue to shift according to these transcripts. So what does she do next? Well, she's still trying to proceed as normal and she's trying to tell herself that she can just go on with her life as if this didn't happen and she's very excited about the Halloween party at Kaipai at the fraternity and you can tell from the text messages that she wants to go to the party, she's getting ready for it and then just before the party there's another moment that moves her thinking in this new direction. She gets a phone call from the president of the fraternity. This is not one of the seven guys who is accused of raping her at someone else and he tells her you can't come to the party, you're not invited. And he adds that it's for her own good because there are so many rumors swirling about what happened by both women and men and there's so much judgment about her, she shouldn't come to the party. She sends a text message to one of the seven guys, the same one who would apologize to her a couple days prior and she's clearly now shifted from shame and denial to anger. You can see it in the text message and she says to him, I knew this was going to happen. The women will always get this short out of the stick and she adds that you all, meaning all these guys, are not my friends, you're just covering for yourself. This anger continues in the text messages that you can see and also her telling of the events have now really changed. So by member third, there's another text message, this was sent to a different guy. And at this point, it's the first time we see in text where she's really saying out loud clearly that what happened could possibly be considered as rape. What does she say? She says, let's be clear that 90% of what happened that night was not consensual. I was given more key than I can remember. She's referring to Academy, the drug. And then she says to this guy, I know that I told you I felt uncomfortable and I didn't know anyone in the room. And when you lay out this timeline of all the text messages that we have in these documents, all the testimony, it really shows a progression with an understanding of the event. And that's very clear that at this point, she's come to terms with it in a different way. And then on November 7th, she goes to the ER, she requests a rape kit. We should say Deborah, both you and I have done a lot of reporting on sexual assault and misconduct for the New York Times. And I think two things are broadly understood to be true. Those are number one, victims of sexual assault, they often have a shifting understanding of what happened to them over time, could be weeks, could be months. I've seen it being years before. And the second is that victims of sexual assault often maintain friendly relations with the people they accuse of assault or misconduct. They might even want to see them again. And obviously what we know and what we can talk about on the show comes strictly from these documents that you and our colleagues have reported on. But I just want to say that the picture you've painted so far broadly comports with what we know to be true in many cases where there is sexual assault. Yes, because sexual assault is trauma. And trauma by definition is something that takes time to work through and come to understanding of what happened, how you felt about it. And particularly in many other cases that I've reported on, that my colleagues have reported on when there's drugs and alcohol involved as well, which cloud your memory. I can tell you that as a reporter reading these documents, the way that Jane Doe's thinking appears to have shifted in these critical weeks felt very familiar from what many other women who have been through similar things and describes the things to me also experience in the days and weeks after their alleged assaults. It takes time to process these events. So at this point in the story, I think a lot of us understand what happens next, which is that Jane Doe tells investigators everything that you've just told us. How did we get to this moment where the district attorney declines to press charges? So when you make an allegation of rape or sexual assault on a college campus, it kicks off this process called Title IX, which is the formal process on university campuses for investigating allegations like this. So Jane Doe went to campus police on November 14th. And according to these documents that we reviewed, she spoke for hours with an officer and it ends up being almost 120 pages of a transcript of her telling in graphic detail, her understanding of what happened in those critical hours and how she felt that she was not fully consensual to the events. And the really key point that she said to them that is in this transcript that we've reviewed is she said, I can say with 100% confidence that I was raped. And this is hours and hours of testimony. But those hours and hours of testimony are not what went to the DA. Instead, after giving all of those hours of testimony, that statement was condensed into a six page document. It was written in Jane Doe's voice, but she didn't write it. This is just the process. It's standard. They said, OK, let's condense down what you said. She made lots of handwritten notes. She reviewed it. She came back the next day. And at the very end, she sighed. the statement and said, "Okay, I'm good with this," and that's what went to the DA. But now, since we have the original interview, we can see the difference, and key points were left out, including that critical statement, "I can say what the 100 percent confidence I was raped." The DA says he never saw that. So how did those six pages describe what she had told investigators? The six pages were really focused on the fact that she went to this party. She drank a lot. She had sex with several men. There were moments when she asked them to stop, and they did stop temporarily, and then they proceeded. The six pages are also really focused on how the events of the night would line up with the New York State law about what the definition of rape is. And this is a very tricky law that says, "If you are voluntarily taking drugs in alcohol, you have to be at a very specific bar of intoxication to not be able to consent." And it was because of the six-page document, according to the DA, that they initially decided there simply was not grounds for any levying of criminal charges. Did the six pages include anything about how she felt about what had happened to her? They do. There are definitely lines in there that explain that she was conflicted about what happened. She was uncomfortable. She tells them at one point that she was at an intoxication level of eight out of ten. That's in the document. They're just not as explicit as her longer 120-page interview. It seems to me that the six pages might not have included the most inflammatory, explicit language that bit about 100% certain that I was raped. But there's enough in there that indicate that she believed something non-consensual had happened. That's why she went to the police to begin with. And so I'm curious, you've covered this area before you are familiar with New York's law. When you read what was in those six pages, what did you make of the decision by the DA at the time not to prosecute? So remember, the bar for prosecuting rape and bringing criminal charges is extremely high. So yes, Rachel, you are right. It does feel in these six pages that they were clear that this was a woman who believed she had had something non-consensual happened to her body. But that does not the same as there being enough evidence based on these six pages that charges could be brought and then successfully prosecuted. I see. There is a huge gap in a woman thinking she is raped. Even if the DA is confident that she might be right, it doesn't mean she can prove it in a court of law. Do we know whether anybody involved in sort of the school side investigation, campus police, or anybody from Title IX make the case to the DA like, hey, wait, we have way more information, she told us all these other things. Was there any further effort made to get the DA to reconsider or to pursue anything? So that's one of the questions that we still don't know that we're continuing to try to report out. But we do know that after these six pages went to the DA, she filed a complaint in the Title IX investigation that Cornell continued. And in it, the investigators did actually interview six of the seven men accused. We don't know why one of them wasn't interviewed, but we have the transcripts from their interviews as well. And those are also very, very striking. What are these men? So four of the men acknowledged they had had sexual contact with this Jane Doe, but they did say in their interviews that all of the sexual contact was consensual. One said he asked for her consent for he had a threesome with her and he told investigators that he told her, if you're uncomfortable with any of this, you don't want to do this, that's fine. And he says, per his investigation, that Jane Doe replied that we're all consenting adults here. The others said that they didn't have sex at all. They denied it. One of the men actually said that he was a victim of sexual misconduct because he was also very drunk. He points out that Jane Doe gave him oral sex and he, perhaps according to the same standard she's applying, also, was not able to consent at that point. So all of their accounts were different. Most of them don't line up with Jane Doe's version of events, but what was most striking to me was not the very specific questions these guys were asked. It was the questions that they weren't asked. They were not asked point blank. Did she consent? Did you feel that she was too intoxicated to proceed? The question is alluded to and it's mentioned, but these are not police interrogations. And the Title IX process is not the same as a criminal justice process. It is supposed to run next to it alongside it and be helpful. And it's meant to be an internal investigation for the campus. The people running it, they're administrators, they're people who work for the school. They have some training, but these are not trained law enforcement officers and these are not people with years and years of deep experience with sexual assault and sexual trauma. You can see in the documents that these are people who were coming in to be helpful, they have full time jobs. One of the people involved in Title IX, you can see in the transcript, was driving while he was doing the interview, he was multitasking. And there are accusations now that things might have been missed in this process because of these factors we have to wait and see. So it sounds like it's not really a question of whether the school failed to follow the process. It sounds like it's more of a question of whether the process itself is adequate. Yeah, and it's a really good point because the school did follow the process. We have 1100 pages we've reviewed that show the school for hours and hours following the process. The question is, does the process work? And I sort of wondered to that point, if that is the thing sparking so much outrage at Cornell and frankly, sort of around the country. Rachel, I don't know if that's the thing that's sparking so much outrage. I think there's a lot of outrage in general. I think the fact that Jane Doe is very familiar as an image to anyone who's ever been a woman who's gone to college, like 26% of women who go to college go on to say that they've been raped or assaulted at some point. This is a story that continues to feel like it keeps happening. And much of the outrage that at least we're seeing in our inboxes here as reporters, as we report on this, is from people who feel frustrated that there were bits of her story that didn't seem to get to the people who were in the position to do something about it to help her. It also feels like this entire story is a bit of a Rorschach test Deborah because I can imagine that there are people who are going to look at Jane Doe's story, look at these text messages and see a young woman who is so desperate to feel okay. But I think that there are a lot of people who will look at all that same information and think to themselves, this is a woman who only accuses men of rape because she was being called a slut and a whore and she was trying to salvage her reputation. Yeah, this is about as messy as it gets and we can see from these documents that even she was confused. This is the opposite of clear cut. And the men who were accused, they also say this is unfair and this is a system that didn't work for us either. We haven't been charged with anything criminally. Our version of events that they all say in these investigations is that they felt that everything was consensual. Their lives have also been upended by this and whether you think that's fair or not depends a lot on your mindset before you even learn about this story. The bottom line is we don't have a system with Title IX or in this country that really accounts for the messiness that is many, many cases of sexual assault, particularly on campus, particularly with Greek life, particularly with drugs and alcohol are involved. What we know is that she made her statement to police and then she filed this lawsuit. She has made a very strong allegation, the criminal case is live again, she is no longer in school. And the question now as the saga continues to play out is really going to be whether all of this, all the conversation, all the takes, all the opinions, whether this prompts any kind of reconsideration of how we view sexual assault, how we view campus life in America, how we view the fraternity system, Greek life, the Title IX process, all of it. We don't know what's going to happen, but we do know that this case is making a lot of people pay attention. Debra Cayman, thank you so much, thank you for having me. Governor Kathy Hockle named the New York Attorney General the Teacher James as a special prosecutor to investigate Jane Doe's allegations that she was raped at Cornell. In a statement on Thursday, Hockle said that she would be assigning James, who had already begun a review of how law enforcement handled the claim to oversee the investigation in Tompkins County. Here's what else you need to know today. The death row inmate Christopher Pike was in critical condition and receiving medical care one day after Tennessee's failed attempt to execute her by lethal injection. They called for governor Bill Lee to reduce her sentence to life in prison, calling the botched execution attempt cruel and torturous. The failed attempt on Wednesday night with the state's second-fungal death penalty attempt this year. And the governor said on Thursday that he was suspending all executions, including bikes, to allow for an independent review. And investigators on Thursday were still trying to determine what motivated the co-pilot on a flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv to stab the pilot, an attack that nearly resulted in catastrophe. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel suggested in a televised interview on Thursday that the co-pilot, who is really officials, have identified as an Omani citizen, was ideologically motivated. Today's episode was produced by Caitlin O'Keefe, Jack Dezadoro, Shannon Lynn, and Eric Krumke. It was edited by Lizzo Bailan in Page Cowat with help from Vivian Yee. Research help was provided by Susan Lee. Contains music by Dan Powell, Marion Zano, and Pat McCusker, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Wunderley, and special thanks to Emma Goldberg and her Ruby Meco. The daily studio support team is Maddie Masciello, Nick Pittman, Kyle Grandillo, Epheme Shapiro, and Samantha Winter. Our radio team is Jody Becker, Rowan Nemisto, Diane Wong, and Catherine Anderson. Alexandra Lee Young is our deputy executive producer, Michael Benoit is our deputy editor, Paige Cowitt is the editor of the daily, and special thanks to Sam Dolnick and to the founding editor of the show, Lisa Tobin. That's it for the daily. I'm Rachel Abrams. See you on Sunday. [Music]