D.A. in Cornell Rape Inquiry Declined to Review Additional Evidence

Records show that campus police officers informed Tompkins County prosecutors that they had conducted additional interviews beyond taking a statement from the woman who said she was raped.

The Tompkins County district attorney said recently that the evidence he reviewed in 2024 made it impossible for him to bring charges in the Cornell University rape inquiry.

But records obtained by The New York Times show that the same district attorney's office declined to review any additional evidence gathered by the campus police department beyond a six-page statement signed by the former student, now known as Jane Doe.

The decision not to review the additional evidence has not been previously reported.

On Nov. 25, 2024, a Cornell police investigator, Jeffrey Northrop, spoke to a member of the district attorney's staff, Jeff Huddle, about additional interviews the police had done, the records show.

Prosecutors did not express interest, saying they agreed that based on the woman's statement, "criminal charges would not be pursued in this case," Mr. Northrop wrote in a note documenting their call.

By that point, the police had conducted numerous interviews, reviewed chat messages, logged anonymous tips, reached out to lawyers for the some of the accused men and spoken to at least two others, the records show.

On Friday, Gov. Kathy Hochul harshly criticized the district attorney and the Cornell police for the way they handled the investigation and appointed Attorney General Letitia James as a special prosecutor, giving her power to bring criminal charges.

All of the men named in the lawsuit have denied any wrongdoing, and none has been charged with a crime.

Reached on Thursday, the Tompkins County district attorney, Matthew Van Houten, said by email that any additional records gathered by the Cornell police were "not pertinent to our analysis because we had Jane Doe's comprehensive account of the events."

Mr. Huddle referred questions to the district attorney.

The interaction between Mr. Northrop and Mr. Van Houten's office was one example of what experts said appeared to be numerous law enforcement shortcomings in the investigation of Jane Doe's account.

Mr. Van Houten has said that based on Jane Doe's lawsuit he would reopen the investigation.

But his office's decision at the time not to examine additional evidence that had been gathered, or to seek any additional inquiry beyond a single -- and as it turns out, incomplete -- campus police statement, was a stark departure from how complicated sex crimes investigations should be handled, said former prosecutors and other experts.

Mr. Van Houten has defended his original decision not to prosecute, saying Jane Doe's account in her police statement "described her participation in drug use and sexual conduct as voluntary, conscious and consensual."

He said the facts in her initial statement did not constitute a crime under New York law, and that he had never been contacted by Jane Doe or her lawyers before her lawsuit.

The former prosecutors, however, said the district attorney's approach fell short in multiple ways, including his failure to bring Jane Doe in to be interviewed by his office and his apparent total reliance on a statement recorded -- and, more broadly, an investigation conducted -- by the university police.

"We would never rely on a campus police investigation," said Rick Trunfio, a former sex crimes prosecutor in upstate New York and now an adjunct law professor at Syracuse University. "There's too many problems with that."

Mr. Trunfio and other experts said the investigation should have been handed off to a specialized police or prosecution team like the special victims bureau he founded at the Onondaga County District Attorney's Office. Also problematic, he added, is that the Cornell University Police Department was "beholden" to the school, which would have had to report under federal law if a gang rape on campus was prosecuted by civilian authorities.

"You think Cornell University wants to report something like that?" Mr. Trunfio said.

A Cornell representative who speaks on behalf of the campus police declined to comment, citing the pending litigation.

In the police statement reviewed by Mr. Van Houten, Jane Doe said she had been drinking before she went to a party at the Chi Phi fraternity house on the evening of Oct. 19, 2024, and before agreeing to a threesome with two of the men, and snorting ketamine, which she said she had never done before.

She then described being in a bedroom as the evening escalated, with up to seven men entering and leaving as the night wore on -- some having sexual contact with her and some snorting ketamine off her body, she said. She described feeling coerced, being "pretty incapacitated" and "numb" and feeling trapped.

"I felt like hiding under the covers of the bed was the only option for me at that point, because the individuals who had just entered the room were standing between me and the only exit from the room," her statement said.

The transcript of a Nov. 14 interview she gave also contained more definitive language that the police omitted from her statement: "I can say with 100 percent confidence I was raped."

The language in her recent lawsuit was stronger still: It said she was "incapable of consenting" when she arrived at the party, was "forced" to have vaginal and oral sex, and that one of the men "commanded" her to snort ketamine off his penis. (Her police statement said he was "implying" she should snort it.)

Deborah Tuerkheimer, a Northwestern University law professor who has written about sexual violence cases, said the complexities of such cases require taking enough time to build trust with the person reporting a sexual trauma to ultimately bring out the fullest account possible -- while simultaneously interviewing other witnesses and gathering any electronic evidence.

"You would really want to spend some time doing all of that before you arrive at any conclusions about whether this was a case that you could move forward on," she said.

Ms. Tuerkheimer said there is a pattern of law enforcement "short-circuiting" sexual violence investigations by the police prematurely compiling a statement that did not capture important parts of an interview, and the prosecutor then using that statement to conclude a criminal case was not viable.

"I wouldn't call what the police did in this case, or what the prosecutor did, an investigation," Ms. Tuerkheimer said. "It wasn't."

The campus police investigation, which continued until January 2025, included interviews with other students who belonged to or had socialized at the fraternity, and people who had called in with information. The police also sought and collected records for some social media and phone records of the accused men.

But the experts questioned why the Cornell police had not obtained warrants to search and seize the men's phones in the days after the woman reported being assaulted.

The police also made relatively light-handed attempts to arrange interviews with the men, who dodged those efforts until most retained lawyers who advised them not to cooperate, records from the investigation show. More seasoned investigators might have been better able to elicit statements from a group of male college students, one ex-prosecutor said.

The men received varying punishments after a civil rights investigation by Cornell's Title IX office.

On Jan. 31, 2025, the Cornell police investigator, Mr. Northrop, informed Jane Doe at the campus police headquarters that the district attorney had declined to pursue criminal charges. She "was upset, but she stated that she understood," Mr. Northrop wrote in notes about their meeting.

He gave her his business card. The case was closed "pending any further developments," he wrote. Mr. Northrop did not respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Van Houten has subsequently acknowledged also reviewing Snapchat messages from the night of the encounter in which one of the fraternity members seemed to invite others to come into the room with Jane Doe.

Mr. Van Houten has also said that his office does not do its own investigation and relied entirely on the police. But as he readied to re-examine the case, he said he had assigned a senior female prosecutor who has experience with sex crimes to prepare the case for a grand jury.

His office may not get the chance given Ms. Hochul's decision to appoint Ms. James as special prosecutor.

Jane Doe's attorney, Thomas Giuffra, applauded that move.

"My client has been failed by government and educational institutions throughout her efforts to obtain accountability," he said.

William K. Rashbaum contributed reporting.