Cornell Fraternity Rape Case Reopened by Prosecutor After Civil Suit Filing

The Tompkins County district attorney has reopened a criminal investigation into an alleged gang rape at a Cornell University fraternity house two years after his office declined to bring charges, a reversal that followed a civil lawsuit filed this month by the woman who says she was drugged and assaulted for hours by multiple fraternity members.

District Attorney Matthew Van Houten said Monday he intends to present the case to a Tompkins County grand jury, reopening a matter his office closed in November 2024 after concluding that the woman's initial statement to investigators did not describe conduct that met the legal definition of a crime. The new inquiry will examine whether evidence contained in the civil complaint, including an alleged group-chat message inviting other fraternity members to join the assault, changes that calculus.

What happened

The woman, identified in court filings as Jane Doe, alleges she was a 20-year-old student when she went to the Chi Phi fraternity house in Ithaca on October 19, 2024. According to the lawsuit, two fraternity members pressured her into taking what she was told was ketamine, after which she was raped over a period of more than four hours by multiple men who had been summoned to the house through a group message sent on Snapchat.

She reported the incident to Cornell University Police roughly three weeks later, in November 2024. Van Houten's office reviewed that statement at the time and declined to press charges, a decision the district attorney said reflected the account she gave then, which he described as depicting sexual activity that was "voluntary, conscious, and consensual" rather than coerced. The civil complaint filed this month in state court describes a markedly different sequence of events, alleging she was incapacitated and unable to consent.

Van Houten said the discrepancy between the two accounts, along with the group-chat evidence cited in the lawsuit that he said his office was not aware of during the original review, is what prompted him to revisit the case. "We want to reexamine whether there's additional evidence that we were not aware of in November of 2024, that exists now that would change our assessment of the case and would result in the grand jury finding that there was criminal conduct," he said.

The numbers

• Seven current and former Chi Phi fraternity members are named as defendants in the civil lawsuit against Cornell University and the fraternity's Alpha Beta chapter corporation.
• Two of those individuals were expelled from Cornell following the university's internal Title IX proceedings; others received suspensions or lesser sanctions.
• The alleged assault is said to have lasted more than four hours, according to the civil complaint.
• It has been roughly 23 months since the October 2024 incident and 22 months since prosecutors first declined to file charges.

A 2023 campus climate survey cited by Cornell's Presidential Task Force on Campus Sexual Assault found that 23 percent of undergraduate women and 9 percent of undergraduate men reported experiencing a sexual assault at some point during their time at the university.

How we got here

Cornell's Office of Civil Rights and Office of Student Conduct opened a Title IX investigation separate from the criminal review shortly after the woman's report in late 2024. That process, governed by federal campus-conduct rules enforced through Cornell's Title IX office, resulted in disciplinary sanctions against several fraternity members and the permanent closure of the Chi Phi chapter, which university officials confirmed remains barred from campus.

The case also became a catalyst for a broader institutional review. In February 2025 Cornell established a Presidential Task Force on Campus Sexual Assault, charging it with studying the university's culture and policies around sexual violence. That task force delivered its final recommendations in March 2026, and the university said several of them have already been put into practice while others remain in development.

What changed the trajectory of the criminal case was the civil lawsuit, filed in state court in mid-September, which laid out allegations in far more explicit detail than the woman's original statement to Cornell police. Van Houten's office reviewed the complaint and concluded that the account of drugging and coordinated assault, combined with the alleged Snapchat messages, warranted a fresh look by a grand jury rather than another prosecutorial decision made unilaterally by his office.

Who is affected

The seven men named in the lawsuit face the prospect of criminal charges for the first time since the incident, having previously gone through only the university's internal disciplinary process. None has been criminally charged as of Monday; a grand jury would need to review evidence and testimony before determining whether an indictment is warranted.

Cornell, which is also a defendant in the civil suit along with the Chi Phi house corporation, said in a written statement that it "conducted a thorough Title IX investigation" and disputed any suggestion that it failed to discipline those involved. The university added that "any suggestion that the University did not impose consequential punishments for those involved is false," while declining to detail individual students' sanctions, citing federal student-privacy law.

More broadly, the case has drawn national attention from advocates for survivors of campus sexual assault and from fraternity and sorority members, given the group-chat allegation and the fact that the original criminal complaint went nowhere for nearly two years.

Reaction

Van Houten was blunt in characterizing the underlying conduct while defending his original decision not to prosecute based on the information available to him in 2024.

"While the behavior of certain Chi Phi fraternity members was without question disgusting and morally reprehensible, the foundation of the criminal justice system is that criminal prosecutions must be based upon evidence and not emotion," Van Houten said in a statement.

He said he has already begun conversations with the woman and her attorneys about proceeding to the grand jury and said he recognizes that survivors of sexual assault can take years to fully process and disclose the details of what happened to them, which he said helps explain the difference between her 2024 statement and the allegations in the lawsuit.

Cornell, in its own statement responding to the lawsuit, said it "supports the decision of the Tompkins County District Attorney to provide an opportunity for the victim's story to be heard by a criminal grand jury" and said it would otherwise respond to the specific allegations through the litigation process rather than in public statements.

What happens next

Van Houten's office said it has begun assembling evidence for presentation to the Tompkins County grand jury, a process that typically unfolds over weeks rather than days and that will determine whether any of the seven men face indictment. Because grand jury proceedings are conducted in secret under New York law, it is unlikely additional details will emerge publicly until the panel reaches a decision or an indictment is unsealed.

The civil lawsuit, which seeks monetary damages from Cornell, the fraternity's house corporation and the individual defendants, will proceed on a separate track in state court regardless of the outcome of the criminal review. Discovery in that case could surface additional evidence, including the group-chat records described in the complaint, that prosecutors have said they will also examine as part of their renewed inquiry.

For Cornell, the case arrives as the university implements recommendations from its sexual-assault task force and as it continues to face scrutiny over how fraternities are supervised on campus. University officials have not said whether the Chi Phi chapter's closure will be revisited or whether additional policy changes are planned specific to this case.