THE POLITICAL PATH OF THE CORNELL RAPE ALLEGATION. At one point, the ugly incident on the night of Oct. 19-20, 2024, at the Cornell University Chi Phi fraternity house seemed to be settled. A 20-year-old female student had accused several fraternity members of raping her in a long night of drinking, drugs, and group sex. Local police in Ithaca, New York, along with the district attorney’s office, investigated and, after interviewing the female student, concluded that her statement, supported by other accounts, “described her participation in drug use and sexual conduct as voluntary, conscious, and consensual.” No criminal charges were filed.
For its part, Cornell University investigated on its own, conducting extensive interviews with everyone involved. It was not, of course, a criminal investigation, but university officials found the students had violated school policies. The school then meted out some serious punishment.
Two of the seven students involved were expelled, according to a New York Times account of the disciplinary measures. One other student was suspended for two years, with “several semesters of disciplinary probation upon his return,” the New York Times reported. Another student was suspended for three semesters and “two years of probation.”
One other student had already graduated when the punishment was handed down; he was barred from campus for three years. The last two students, who were found not to have played a significant role in events, “were ordered not to contact [the woman], to study sexual harassment, social media use, and bystander intervention, and to write ‘reflection papers,’” the New York Times said.
On top of all that, Cornell shut down the Chi Phi fraternity house and banned the organization from campus. It is gone. So as its final move, the university punished all the members of Chi Phi, whether or not they had anything to do with the events in question.
If the alleged victim, whose behavior that night precluded criminal charges against the men, wanted some retribution, or justice, for what took place, she got it: two expulsions, two suspensions, an entire fraternity chapter put out of business, and more. If she had stopped there, she might conceivably have been able to move on to living her life, with less alcohol and ketamine.
But after two years of silence, on Sept. 16, she filed a massive lawsuit against each of the seven fraternity members; against the local chapter of Chi Phi; against the local chapter’s faculty adviser; against the local chapter’s alumni adviser; against the local chapter’s executive board; against the fraternity’s national organization; against the fraternity’s national nonprofit governing body; against Cornell University; and against a local bar that the woman said served her a single drink on the night she went to the fraternity house.
The woman also sued her own sorority, Delta Delta Delta, both the local chapter and the national organization. The lawsuit says that before she arrived at the Chi Phi fraternity house that night, she had “consumed about 10 standard drinks within the past 3 hours.” Looking at the lawsuit’s timeline, it appears nearly all of that drinking took place at the Delta Delta Delta sorority house.
The lawsuit said that Delta Delta Delta “held itself out to the public, and more particularly to [the woman] herein, as possessing the proper degree of safety measure to adequately protect its members and to use reasonable care and diligence in its monitoring and policing of the [local chapter’s] house and those living in and utilizing said house.” In other words, the woman is suing her sorority for allegedly not putting a stop to her heavy drinking.
Now the lawsuit has made the Cornell incident national news. The suit includes the names of all seven of the fraternity members involved; their identities had previously been kept confidential since they were not accused of any crimes. In addition, the lawsuit tells a highly selective version of the story. Its overarching theme is that the woman was “incapable of consent” in the “gang rape” that took place at the Chi Phi house.
The lawsuit instantly turned the case into a political cause. First, Tompkins County, New York, District Attorney Matthew Van Houten — the man who had originally decided no criminal charges were warranted — announced that he is reopening the case. The accuser has changed her story, Van Houten said, and the “community” asked that the case get another look. “Once we determine the appropriate charges,” he continued, “the case will be prosecuted in the most objective and impartial means available — by testimony to the Tompkins County Grand Jury.” Van Houten’s wording seemed to send the message that this time there will definitely be criminal charges.
The governor of New York, Kathy Hochul, then named state Attorney General Letitia James as a special prosecutor for the case. James, of course, is legendary for campaigning for office on a platform of pursuing President Donald Trump, and then, once elected, concocting an elaborate but embarrassingly thin fraud lawsuit against Trump. James structured the case so that Trump would not have the right to a jury trial, allowing a compliant judge, Arthur Engoron, to find Trump guilty and sentence him to pay $355 million in penalties. With interest, that quickly grew to nearly half a billion dollars. An appeals court later threw out the penalty as excessive.
The lesson of the Trump case is that if Letitia James wants to get someone, she will figure out a way to get someone, whether or not it’s a case that will hold up in court. The Chi Phi members will need to prepare for that.
When the accuser’s lawyers released her lawsuit, a number of observers pointed to the evidence that authorities originally gathered in the days and weeks after the 2024 incident. It seemed clear that the woman had consented to what took place, a conclusion supported both by the county district attorney and the Cornell Office of Civil Rights, which conducted the university’s investigation. Some predicted the case would go nowhere.
But now the matter is in a new realm — the realm of politics. In announcing that he is reopening the case, Van Houten said that he made his original decision based on the evidence and the laws, with a heavy reliance on the woman’s account of events. Now, though, he has to “recognize the reality that it can take years of therapy and healing for victims of sexual assaults to fully process and understand what happened to them.”
“Seeking justice sometimes requires us to reconsider or reopen cases when we are provided with additional evidence,” Van Houten continued. Is there additional evidence? Van Houten did not point to any. But even if there isn’t any — remember, the woman said what she said in the two investigations that have already been done in this case, and nothing will change that — today’s political atmosphere will create tremendous pressure to charge the fraternity members involved with something, no matter what the evidence says.
It seems likely the case will become even more political in coming days and weeks. And, as with everything else in our society, it will become to some degree about Trump. A media narrative, and a social media debate, will emerge in which the fraternity members become associated with Trump, and the woman becomes associated with the forces of good and decency standing up to Trump.
On ABC News’s This Week on Sunday, the New York Times’s Michelle Cottle pointed to a series of noxious social media messages the fraternity members sent about the woman. “You can’t send those messages, no matter how drunk you are, as a frat boy without having some kind of misunderstanding about what women are there for and whether this is a real person you’re dealing with,” Cottle said. And who might be to blame for that? Cottle pointed to Trump. “And that, I think, starts, you know, we can go to the president for this one,” Cottle continued. “I mean, we are in a moment in this culture where the glorification of being thuggish and swaggering and mistreating women is kind of making you a cool kid.”
It took just a couple of weeks from the lawsuit being filed to a newscast explaining that Trump was somehow involved. And it’s likely that the politicization of this case is just getting started.