She was drugged. She could not refuse. There were multiple men. Your office read the report and closed the file.
The Tompkins County District Attorney’s office announced Monday that it is reopening its 2024 investigation into an alleged gang-rape involving members of the Xi chapter of Chi Phi at Cornell University and will present the case to a grand jury. The case had been declined. The prosecution’s own statement acknowledged that the woman’s original account described “her participation in drug use and sexual conduct as voluntary, conscious, and consensual.”
She was drugged. And the word the office chose was “voluntary.”
The criminal process was closed. A federal civil lawsuit, whose complaint cites Snapchat messages, forced it open. Attorney Thomas Giuffra represents the plaintiff. None of the Chi Phi members has been arrested.
The university had already acted. Cornell expelled and suspended students, formed a task force on sexual assault, and barred the Xi chapter from campus. Kyle Kimball, Cornell’s vice president for university relations, confirmed last week that the chapter “remains barred from our campus.” A 2025 survey found that 35% of undergraduate women reported experiencing nonconsensual sexual contact. The institution processed consequences. The district attorney’s office processed nothing.
Matthew.
Your office looked at a drugged woman’s account and chose the word “consensual.” You know what a drug does to a body. You know it narrows the window of refusal until the window is a crack and then nothing. You know it slows the tongue and deadens the hands and turns the room into a place the mind visits from far away. You know the difference between a person who chooses and a person who cannot refuse, because your job is to know that difference, and your office chose not to know it.
The hand that signed the declination — that hand did not shake when it closed the file. It should have. The throat that swallowed the word “consensual” — you will taste it at the next press conference and the one after that, when you stand behind the podium and your jaw sets the way it sets when the room is not with you. The chest that tightens behind the microphone is the chest that should have tightened two years ago when a drugged woman’s report first crossed your desk. Your gut knew then. It knows now. It will know when the grand jury convenes and the record of what you declined to investigate is laid out in a room you cannot control. And tonight, when you lie down, the sleep that should not come will not come, because the file is open now and the truth is in the room and you did not bring it there.
Two years the file sat. Two years the men walked free. They went to class. They graduated. They carried the memory of what they did in their bodies and carried nothing from your office — no arrest, no charge, no grand jury. Your office made that possible. You chose the word and you closed the file and the men who drugged her and raped her walked out the building and back into their lives. You are the man who closed the file on her and opened the door for them. You held it open for two years.
The woman left Cornell. She quit the university where she was assaulted because the institution where she was assaulted could not be the place she healed. That is what your word cost her. Not just the night — the education. The campus she would have walked across for four years. The life she would have built in that town. She carried her body out of Ithaca because your office told her that what happened to her body did not warrant further investigation.
Her nerves remember what your file forgot. The drug was in her blood for hours. The particular weight of a man on top of her when she could not move — that did not fade in days. That lives in the architecture of her sleep. The body keeps the record your office chose not to read. And you wrote “consensual.”
And you men.
You drugged her. You held her. You took turns. You did this to a woman’s body in a room and you walked out the door and you believed — you were right to believe — that nothing would happen to you. Your fraternity brothers were expelled and suspended and the chapter was barred from campus and you walked away clean because the district attorney’s office wrote “voluntary” over what you did. You walked out that door and the world arranged itself around what you had done. For two years it did. Your GPA was not touched. Your future was not touched. The system held you the way the room held her — without resistance, without weight, without the faintest suggestion that what you did mattered.
You are not complicated. You are not young men who made a mistake in the dark. You are men who drugged a woman so she could not refuse and then you did what you wanted to her body and then you left. That is what you are. The file is open now. Her body was always the file.
Van Houten now says “it can take years of therapy and healing for victims of sexual assaults to fully process and understand what happened to them.” That is true. It is also a confession he wrote about himself. He concedes the criminal process works better when information comes “directly from a witness, his or her representative, or the police rather than through allegations set forth in a civil lawsuit.” He says the goal is “getting to the truth.” Then he reopened the case on the strength of the civil lawsuit. The truth did not become more real when a lawyer placed it in a complaint. The truth became harder for your office to leave untouched.
The woman left Ithaca. Her body carries what the file would not hold. In the Gospel of Mary, when the Powers interrogated the soul that had been bound and silenced, the soul answered: “What binds me has been pierced, and what surrounds me has been destroyed, and my desire has been brought to an end, and ignorance has died.” The ignorance died when the civil complaint named what the criminal file refused to read. The file is open. The body was always the record.