What Newly Obtained Documents Show About the Cornell Case, and Inside the Bloody Midair Cockpit Attack

From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today's Thursday, October 1st. Here's what we're covering. Recently, the details of a sexual assault case at Cornell University have ignited shock and anger across the country, raising questions about how both the school and law enforcement responded. Now, the Times has obtained more than 1,000 pages of material from Cornell's internal investigation into the allegations. Briefly, the case centers on a woman identified only as Jane Doe, who says that in the fall of 2024, she was raped repeatedly by multiple men at a fraternity house after they gave her alcohol and ketamine. When she reported it to police about three weeks later, prosecutors advised they did not think they could bring charges. Her allegations have resurfaced now in a lawsuit she just filed against Cornell and seven men. The suit includes a screenshot of a group chat from that night where one of the men sent a message to his fraternity brothers inviting others to join in, a detail that has drawn intense outrage as the story has spread. Digging into the documents, the Times obtained. They were all compiled for the Title IX Administrative Hearing Process, Cornell conducted back in 2024 and 2025. They include a transcript of the original police interviews with Jane Doe, the statement that the Cornell Police Department submitted to the local DA, and interviews with six of the seven men accused of being involved in the assault. My colleagues are still combing through all the materials, but one early takeaway is that the woman's statement that the police sent to the DA left out key context. Her hours of interviews were condensed into a six-page document the police had her sign, and it omitted a lot of the details about her state of mind and how she was processing what had happened to her. How an encounter she described as starting off pretty okay with people she considered friends devolved into what she said was assault as more men showed up. Though she said to police, "I can say with 100% confidence I was raped, that did not make it into the summary," which the DA has said was the main piece of evidence he considered when deciding not to bring a criminal case. This week, he said he is now reconsidering that decision and has reopened the investigation. Lawyers, for at least three of the accused men have broadly denied criminal wrongdoing. Others have not yet made public statements. Meanwhile, part of what has amplified the conversation around this case has been the coverage by Cornell's student newspaper, The Sun. Just after Jane Doe filed her lawsuit last month, The Sun published its own investigation into what happened at the Frat House and then followed that up with an editorial in which it made the decision to publish the names of the men accused in the case right on the front page of the paper. My colleague Emma Goldberg recently sat down with a reporter and an editor from The Sun to talk about that decision and how the paper followed the case for two years. - I think one of the things that is worried a lot of students here on campus is that they know that there are campus sexual assaults that happen sometimes and there's this brief moment of outrage and frustration, but then that fades and the attention moved on and there isn't a lasting change that results. And I think the sense I got from talking with journal is that The Sun is that they didn't want to let this go. I think they understood that sometimes campus attention stays on something very briefly, but then people try and move done and they didn't want to let that happen. - Suddenly, the ambulance started to drop down very, very sharply, like a massive turbulence and we didn't know what happened. - Passengers who were on board a flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv yesterday say there was an all-out fight to take control of the plane after one pilot stabbed the other, sending the jet into a sudden, terrifying nose dive. - How long did that last? - 20, 30 seconds, maybe. And then it bounced and again started falling on. - People the time spoke with described how the sudden drop as much as 17,000 feet sent luggage flying out of the overhead bins and had them feeling pinned to their seats before they realized what was happening. - And then we saw that there is a people running to the cockpit and they were understood that there were some stabbing over there. A group of passengers raced to the front of the plane. One of them who'd been sitting in the front row described watching in horror as one of the pilots tumbled out of the cockpit with the other pilot on top of him stabbing him. He said he and other passengers jumped on the attacker and were able to restrain him with headphone cables. Then witnesses said others on the flight who had flying experience took control of the aircraft and made an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia. Airline officials say the roughly 170 passengers are safe and accounted for. The motive for the attack is still unknown but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the attacker had, quote, "apparently attempted to crash the plane with its passengers on board, most of whom were from Israel." Netanyahu credited the other pilot with fighting back and managing to get the cockpit door open so the passengers and crew could intervene. (upbeat music) - In Tennessee, nothing about today was normal, typical at all. - A woman convicted of murder survived two doses of lethal injection in what's become the state's second botched execution this year. - They went through two rounds and she was still breathing at the end. It was very ragged. She lifted her head up and was looking around at one point. At a news conference, members of the media who witnessed the scene say the woman, Christopher Pike, was still breathing and conscious after being given two syringes of pentobarbital, a lethal drug used in executions. It's unclear what went wrong. Pike's lawyers say she was later taken to a hospital. The state's Department of Correction said in a statement that it had, quote, "followed every step of the state's lawful, established execution protocol." But the executive director of the death penalty information center said that among failed execution attempts, Pike's case last night was, quote, "the worst we've seen and unlike any other botched execution in the modern era." Pike's lawyers had argued that the procedure could be torturous for her because she has small veins and other medical conditions and they had argued that a federal court should halt the execution, saying more time was needed to consider her case. Pike was convicted of murdering her classmate in 1995 and would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years. Her current medical status is unknown. (upbeat music) And finally, in the next few days, sea levels off the coast of Southern California are expected to begin rising by half a foot or more and then to stay that high for months. The phenomenon is called a Kelvin wave, an enormous pulse of wave energy that's generated by El Nino, lifting the water as it goes. Sea levels have already been abnormally high for months because of how warm the Pacific has been. Warm water occupies more volume than cool water, which is one way that climate change is raising the ocean's height all around the world. For the Kelvin wave, it's not waves like the ones you'd see on the shoreline crashing there. It's not a tsunami either. Instead, think of it as a vast rolling procession of water affecting the seas down at a depth of 600 feet or more. The name comes from Lord Kelvin, the 19th century British physicist who first described such waves and was later immortalized as a unit of temperature. With the Kelvin wave headed to California and other factors driving up ocean heights, one expert told the Times that it's quote, "highly probable California will soon witness its highest sea levels ever recorded." Those are the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. We will be back tomorrow with the latest and the Friday news quiz.