Cornell’s grand jury reset exposes a familiar campus problem

A university can suspend students, launch a Title IX inquiry and still end up back where it started: with prosecutors, lawyers and a grand jury. Cornell is now living that rather ordinary American nightmare, the one in which procedure multiplies but certainty does not.

Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten said on Monday that his office will send the matter before a grand jury after new scrutiny of a case involving Jane Doe, the woman who says she was attacked at Cornell University in 2024. He said the case would be handled, once the charges are determined, in the most objective and impartial manner possible.

The criminal review was revived after Jane Doe filed a civil lawsuit on 16 September. In it, she alleges that on 19 October 2024 she was drugged and raped by multiple people at the university’s Chi Phi fraternity house. She says seven men were involved, that alcohol and ketamine were part of the incident, and that she was too intoxicated to consent. She reported the alleged assault to Cornell University Police on 8 November 2024.

Van Houten said his office had previously concluded that the statement Jane Doe gave authorities in 2024 did not meet the legal threshold for charges. He also said her sworn account at the time did not allege that she had been drugged against her will or gang raped, and instead described her participation in drug use and sexual conduct as voluntary, conscious and consensual. He said he had contacted Jane Doe and her lawyers for more information before moving the case to a grand jury.

Her lawyer, Thomas Giuffra, has given a very different account. Speaking in a statement obtained by CBS, the BBC’s US partner, he said Jane Doe was traumatised in the days after the alleged assault, numb and unable to function. He argued that she spoke only to the officer who took her initial complaint and said he would have expected repeated interviews, evidence collection and a proper case file — the sort of basic sequence one might imagine before a serious crime becomes a public argument.

Cornell, for its part, says it did not sit on its hands. The university said on Monday that the matter had been referred to a panel of trained faculty and staff that imposed sanctions including expulsions and suspensions. It also rejected Jane Doe’s claim that anyone was allowed to escape with essays as the sole consequence. The Xi chapter of Chi Phi remains barred from campus.

The university had already said in November 2024 that its campus police were investigating what it described as serious and deeply disturbing allegations of drug abuse and sexual violence at the Chi Phi fraternity house. It suspended the local chapter and a number of students, and opened both an internal investigation and a civil rights inquiry under Title IX, the federal law that bars sex discrimination in schools receiving government funding.

The civil lawsuit goes much further, saying Cornell failed to protect Jane Doe and did not adequately punish the men involved. It says the incident spread quickly through the school and caused severe emotional and psychological distress, as well as physical injury. Cornell disputes that account, and one attorney for a man named in the suit denied the allegations, while acknowledging that his client made an immature Snapchat comment and did nothing else.

The case has now spilled well beyond the courtroom. Public figures including actress Florence Pugh and US lawmaker Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have spoken about it, and the student newspaper, The Cornell Daily Sun, says anger on campus has mixed with a broad wave of solidarity from across the US. Its editorial board has published the names of the men named in the lawsuit and called for an independent third-party review of the reporting and resolution process.

That frustration is not hard to understand. Sophia Dasser, the paper’s editor-in-chief, said students were told very little over the past two years and that Cornell’s Title IX process remains opaque. She also noted that some universities publish anonymous outcome, sanction and process results in sexual-assault cases, while Cornell does not.

Pressure has also reached City Hall in Ithaca, where the mayor has called for a moratorium on student event and special event permits until the university conducts an accounting of its protocols to prevent and prosecute sexual violence. Cornell said a campus sexual-assault task force formed in 2025 has made recommendations that have either been implemented or are still being developed.

Then there are the numbers, which are the sort institutions usually prefer to keep in the appendix. Cornell’s 2025 survey found that 35% of undergraduate women and 8% of undergraduate men reported experiencing sexual assault during their time at the university. The report said that despite a long history of action, the rates remain persistently high. For Cornell, that is not a footnote. It is the setting in which every new statement now lands.

Written by Thorben Thiede thorben.thiede@alpineweekly.com