Hochul calls for independent probe of Cornell's 2024 assault response

Tompkins County DA reopens 2024 case for grand jury

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul on Tuesday called for Cornell’s board of trustees to appoint outside attorneys to scrutinize the university’s response and its campus culture. Hochul’s demand followed a call by the mayor of Ithaca, Cornell’s hometown, for a moratorium on student-event permits over the school’s “appalling response” to the allegations. On Sunday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) denounced the school’s “culture of rape.”

“We want to know what happened in this case and what went wrong,” said Eeshaan Chaudhuri, Cornell’s student body president.

Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten said Monday that his office had reopened the case. His office would present the case against seven fraternity members to a grand jury for potential criminal charges, he said. Van Houten said his office decided not to press charges in 2024 because the woman’s initial sworn statement “did not allege that she was drugged against her will or gang raped. On the contrary, Jane Doe’s statement described her participation in drug use and sexual conduct as voluntary, conscious, and consensual.”

The pressure stems from a civil suit filed in September alleging that Cornell failed to protect the woman. For months, the 2024 case had lain dormant until news of the civil suit broke, sparking a wave of outcry on social media. The suit, filed by an attorney for the woman, alleges she was gang-raped by seven Chi Phi fraternity members in 2024 and that the school failed to properly investigate her allegations. It also alleges that members of the fraternity messaged each other during the assault with invitations to join.

After learning that rumors of the incident were spreading across the school, the woman went to campus police and in November 2024 signed a six-page statement to the Cornell University Police Department, according to Van Houten.

Cornell conducted its own investigation after the alleged assault. It suspended the fraternity chapter and sanctioned the students involved. Discipline included expulsions and suspensions as well as assigned essays.

Cornell also launched a task force aimed at preventing sexual assault on campus. Its surveys and focus groups found that 15% of Cornell students said they had been victims of “nonconsensual sexual contact,” up from 11% in 2023. That figure included 35% of undergraduate women, up from 20% in 2021. Residence halls were the most common location of nonconsensual sexual contact among undergraduate women, followed by off-campus residences and then fraternity houses.

Tuesday night, Cornell’s president, provost and chair of the board of trustees wrote a letter to the Cornell community addressing the uproar. “The events that took place on our campus in 2024 were appalling then and remain so now,” the message said. “Everyone in the Cornell community must be able … to live, work, and study without fear of sexual assault or abuse.”

The backlash comes at a school that, like its Ivy League peers, spent much of last year battling the Trump administration over what the administration characterized as liberal excess. Cornell agreed to a $60 million settlement with the administration in order to get research funding back.

Cornell University President Michael Kotlikoff took office two years ago following months of turmoil and demonstrations over the Gaza war. Last week, the school issued a more-than-200-page internal report confronting what it called an unprecedented crisis in higher education, citing unstable federal funding, falling public trust and the rise of artificial intelligence.

Among the public critics was Oscar-nominated British actress Florence Pugh, who appealed to men to take a greater role in addressing sexual violence. Her post, which implored men to be “as horrified and sickened” as women about the alleged rape, accrued more than 1.7 million likes and has been shared hundreds of thousands of times.

An attorney for Scott Kretzschmar, one of the fraternity members named in the civil suit, described the action as a “money grab” and “not only intentionally dishonest but morally repugnant.”

“While Scott responded to and made an immature comment on Snapchat, he did nothing else,” attorney Jeremy Saland said in an email to The Wall Street Journal. “For the few minutes he was in the room with the plaintiff and confirmed she was all right, Scott did not see her in duress or undress, was involved in no sexual activity nor touched the plaintiff in any way.”