How did the Cornell rape case go so wrong?
Vox · L · trust 33/100
A former sex crimes prosecutor explains where the Cornell case should go next.
Gift New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and New York Attorney General Letitia James at a news conference in New York City on October 2, 2026. Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images In October 2024, students at Cornell University received a campus crime alert about a reported sexual assault. At the time, it was just a campus story. Nearly two years later, on September 16, the victim, known only as “Jane Doe,” filed a civil lawsuit that brought national attention to her story. People across the country are asking what happened and why criminal charges never followed.
Doe alleges that seven men drugged and sexually assaulted her at the Chi Phi fraternity house two years ago. Her lawsuit also accuses the university, fraternity and sorority organizations, and a local bar of failing to protect her.
The lawyers for several of the men have denied the allegations and any wrongdoing. Cornell says its disciplinary actions led to suspensions and expulsions for some of the young men, and that the Chi Phi fraternity remains barred from campus.
Doe went to campus police in November 2024, and the district attorney’s office reviewed her account and declined to bring charges. Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten has said that what she described to Cornell police didn’t meet the state’s requirements for criminal charges .
Van Houten reopened the investigation late last month while continuing to defend his original decision to not pursue charges , but it’s now out of his hands: On Thursday, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul named the state attorney general, Letitia James, as special prosecutor to investigate the allegations, saying she had “lost faith” in Van Houten.
To break down why Van Houten didn’t pursue the case at the time and what should have happened instead, Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke with Lauren Hersh , a former Brooklyn prosecutor who led the office’s sex trafficking unit and CEO of World Without Exploitation , about how authorities handled Jane Doe’s allegations, the limits of New York’s consent laws, and what needs to change.
Hersh also explains where she believes the case should go next and what a special prosecutor can do to investigate (the interview took place prior to James’s appointment).
Below is an excerpt of Hersh’s conversation with Noel edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts , Pandora , and Spotify .
I want to start with what we know in 2024. A young woman who we know as “Jane Doe” goes to the Cornell campus police and says she had gone to a frat house while under the influence of alcohol.
At the frat house, she was given more alcohol and ketamine. Several men had sex with her while she was intoxicated. This is what she tells Cornell campus police. What, in your view, is supposed to happen next?
There are a number of things that could happen. What I would say about these cases is there is no perfect scenario of what is supposed to happen, because what is critically important is we listen to the desire of the survivor.
We want to take this at her pace. We want to be guided by her wishes. We want her to decide if she is ready to go forward, if she wants to speak to campus police, the Title IX office, if she wants to speak to the local law enforcement. There are a lot of variables here, but for me, what is critically important is that we’re listening to the survivor and what she ultimately wants to happen.
In the present day, the district attorney who was involved has said that his office reviewed Jane Doe’s statement at the time and found at the time that what she described didn’t meet the legal definition of a crime.
I think people want to understand, Lauren, how is that possible?
To be really candid with you, Noel, this is an area that seems super unclear to me because the role of the district attorney in that moment is to investigate.
When you first get a case file, you first get a victim statement, and especially with facts as horrific as these facts are, or our understanding of this six-page document that the DA read — I would never say that this is a clear-cut case where there’ll be a conviction at the end. We never know that.
What I can say with 100 percent certainty is if you get a document like that, as a prosecutor, that is a significant investigative lead. And so, as a prosecutor, what I believe to be good practice is starting to pull the layers back, trying to understand what transpired here. Interviewing the victim. That feels critical. That never happened. We now know that there are all these text messages that were shared between these boys, and the prosecutor’s now saying, “I didn’t know about the text messages.”
It’s my understanding that there were a lot of boys on that particular text thread. And so a good investigator would have gone to that fraternity house and tried to interview some of those boys, tried to understand what were the contemporaneous statements made at that time. Were there any text messages? Was there any social media activity? And I believe that had they done that in a timely fashion, they likely would have come up with these text messages at that time and not two years later.
What you’re saying is interesting because the DA has come out publicly and defended himself by saying, essentially, the details of this lawsuit, which was filed in September of this year, are different from the details in the young woman’s 2024 statement to the police.
He has used that in his defense, right? “Here’s what I knew at the time versus what this young woman is saying today.” I think I hear you saying that maybe that’s not an excuse?
You’re asking about the inconsistent statements, and I find it troubling that the DA is leading with this notion that the victim has inconsistent statements because that feels to me like here we are making…
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