Cornell Gang Rape Accused Told Different Stories To Cops: Report

New York Governor Kathy Hochul has signed an executive order appointing State Attorney General Letitia James as special prosecutor to oversee the investigation into a former student's allegations that she was gang-raped at a Cornell University fraternity house. In a civil lawsuit filed last month, the woman, identified only as Jane Doe, alleged that several members of a campus fraternity drugged and assaulted her in October 2024. 

Hochul said the newly released information raised questions about the investigation conducted by the Cornell Police Department and the decision by Tompkins County prosecutors not to pursue charges against the seven accused, dubbed 'Cornell 7' in the lawsuit. 

"I've lost faith in the Tompkins County DA's ability to fairly oversee it (the case)," Hochul said in a statement.

James said her office would "fully and fairly" investigate the allegations. "The Governor has entrusted my office with this investigation, and we do not take that responsibility lightly," James said in a statement.

The Contradicting Accounts

The case raised questions about how law enforcement and the university initially responded after the woman, then 20, made a report to police a few weeks after the alleged incident occurred. In recent days, several new reports have revealed more about what law enforcement knew in 2024.

According to a New York Times report, when Cornell investigators asked the fraternity members accused of raping the then-sophomore student at a 2024 fraternity party about what happened that night, they rarely asked directly about rape. 

Instead, according to hundreds of pages of confidential records obtained by the publication, they asked where the men had been, what they had said and why they were in the bedroom at all. The report also pointed out that accounts of nearly all men varied, frequently contradicted each other and generally ran counter to the testimony given by the woman to the Cornell police in 2024.

The woman, who was 20 years old at the time of the assault, has since left Cornell. She has sued the school, the fraternity and its seven members, along with her sorority, for failing to protect her. 

The NYT investigation found that in hours of interviews and a statement collected during Cornell's administrative investigation over the winter of 2024, four acknowledged having sexual contact with the woman but said that their interactions had been consensual. 

The others denied participating in sexual encounters, but one went ahead and claimed he was "a victim of sexual misconduct" because the woman had given him oral sex when he was "too incapacitated" to consent.

Most men reportedly claimed that they did not think the woman appeared intoxicated. Men said their interactions with the accuser began when one of the men, Matthew Ingalls, asked if she wanted to have a threesome with him and another fraternity member, Jonathan Newell -- a request that soon spiralled into a night of intoxication and a series of sexual encounters. 

It was Newell who sent the Snapchat message to other fraternity members advertising "free p***y" in the bedroom, according to Jane Doe's lawsuit.

Newell reportedly told investigators that he participated in the sexual acts, assuming Ingalls had asked for permission. He claimed he and "Ingalls had drunk a lot and consumed marijuana and ketamine, causing both to throw up."

Other men who were present in the room that night claimed neither Jane Doe nor those around her seemed overly inebriated and that they themselves had not had too much to drink.

"They weren't slurring their speech. They seemed perfectly normal," another accused, Winston Lee said.

Gillio Lopes, also an accused, who shared the room with Newell where the sexual encounters took place, said that he had "a pretty solid recollection" of the night because, according to him, he was not drunk that much. He claimed that Jane Doe initiated their sexual contact and did not ask for his consent, a statement flatly at odds with her account of the night.

Lee also claimed the woman initiated the sexual activity without asking. He reportedly said he snorted ketamine off her body, and she tried to initiate sex.

Another of the men, Scott Kretzschma, claimed he and his friend Scott Norris entered the room after reading Newell's text, which, according to the NYT report, left him "befuddled".

He also claimed that the woman did not appear drunk when he entered the room. He said he asked her "if she was all right just because the nature of the text, and there was one female in the room with a couple of dudes."

"We were just checking out to see if everything was OK, and it was," he said, adding, "And if she wasn't, I'd like to think that I would have helped out and did something about it."

Norris also claimed he was "somewhat concerned" when he received Newell's message but assumed it was "crude humour". He said he did not do any drugs in the room and did not have sex with Jane Doe.

"She was conversational with people, and that alleviated whatever concerns I had from the text before," Norris said, claiming he stayed in the room for only five minutes, during which all men in the room were "completely or partially clothed."

The lawsuit against seven fraternity brothers, the university, the Chi Phi fraternity and others alleges that she was plied with drugs and alcohol, then subjected to sex acts by a group of men while she was partially or entirely incapacitated.