On Monday, Sept. 28, both the Tompkins County District Attorney’s office, run by Matthew Van Houten, published a press release regarding the Cornell University case where a female sorority student was allegedly gang raped at a Chi Phi fraternity house, run by the nationally recognized Xi Chapter, in Oct. 2024. The female student reportedly dropped out of the university after this incident. 

This case is one in which Houten’s DA office refused to pursue criminal charges following the opening of a police investigation and submission of a sworn statement made by the victim to Cornell University’s private police force and resulting police investigation in Nov. 2024.

Houten explained that in “November of 2024, the Cornell University Police Department (CUPD) informed the DA’s Office of their investigation in this case and asked us to review a statement provided by Jane Doe to determine if her allegations constituted a crime under New York law.” 

Houten impressed the importance of the fact that instances of law enforcement agencies consulting with prosecution offices on various criminal cases are common, although in the previous paragraph Houten also stated that while “the District Attorney’s Office is often called upon to provide investigation support to police agencies, we do not conduct parallel independent investigations of cases alongside police investigations.” After a review of the evidence presented by the Cornell Police department, the DA’s office decided that “criminal charges were not appropriate based on Jane Doe’s statement.” 

Houten continued to discuss that he had considered releasing a copy of Jane Doe’s original statement to the public, but states that he decided against it since it would take up too much time and could end up “exposing identifying information of the people involved.” Houten opted to release a detailed and majorly paraphrased version of her statement within the press release instead. 

The statement presented by the DA’s office differs from the one listed in the civil lawsuit filed by the victim on several instances, mainly the ones regarding the consent aspect. In the paraphrased statement noted in the DA’s press release, the victim is noted to have walked to the Chi Phi fraternity house and to have “agreed” to the initial sexual interaction with the first two male defendants and to engage in subsequent drug usage, but there is a following mention of the victim having “difficulty remembering parts of what happened next,” which is when the other five male defendants entered the scene. 

In the statement released in the civil lawsuit filed by lawyers representing the victim named all of the defendants (Matthew Ingalls, Johnathan Newell, Winston Lee, Gillio Lopes, Diego Sarabia, Scott Norris and Scott Kretzschma) then stated that in “her drunken state, Plaintiff was incapable of consenting” to sex.

The civil lawsuit framed the drug usage as being “pressured” onto the victim, a starkly different representation from the paraphrased statement released by the DA’s office. Within the civil lawsuit there was a screenshot of a Snapchat group chat named “Chi Phi Actives” which showed timestamped messages sent by one of the Chi Phi fraternity brothers named in the lawsuit inviting more people to join the assault of the victim.

More information regarding the full details of the 101 page civil lawsuit are available through the public document host FingerLakes1. In spite of these findings, Houten continued to say that the “decision made in November of 2024 that the evidence did not support the filing of criminal charges was legally correct.” 

The case has been reopened and the responsibility of deciding to prosecute this case will fall onto a Grand Jury. The Cornell University statement, which was released on the same day as the DA’s press release, notes that any “suggestion that the university did not impose consequential punishments for those involved is false.

A continuation of the false narrative that there were minimal consequences in this case is irresponsible, will make survivors feel less safe and supported and will perpetuate the underreporting of sexual assault.” Other news outlets, such as the New York Times, have reported that the fraternity brothers involved in this incident did face suspensions and expulsion from the university following the Title IX investigation, but these consequences did not include criminal charges.