The Cornell University student who alleged in a lawsuit that she was gang-raped and plied with drugs at a fraternity house in 2024 described the hourslong incident to police in a sworn statement, according to the document, which was obtained by NBC News.
Jane Doe told police in part that she had agreed to an initial sexual encounter with two of the men, described being encouraged to take drugs and said she did not remember some parts of the night.
“I would say that it was the most intoxicated I’ve ever been in my life,” she told police about how she was feeling later in the evening. “I felt like I was unable to make any decisions because of how intoxicated I was.”
Jane Doe voluntarily gave the sworn statement to Cornell University police on Nov. 14, 2024, 26 days after the alleged assault. In it, she detailed the night of Oct. 19 to 20, when she initially agreed to a threesome, but she said that she felt increasingly incapacitated as the night went on, that she had gaps in her memory and that at one point she was “extremely uncomfortable.”
“Adding to my feelings of isolation was the fact that my phone was across the room and I felt like I couldn’t get to it, as well as I didn’t have any form of payment to order an Uber to get out of the situation I was in,” she told police.
The former student’s lawsuit, filed Sept. 16, has sparked national furor over the university’s and the district attorney’s handling of the case. It has prompted the DA to take a fresh look after his office previously determined there was “insufficient evidence to support criminal charges” when the case was reviewed in 2024.
Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten released a lengthy statement Monday, which included parts of Doe’s sworn statement to Cornell police in November 2024, and defended his initial decision not to pursue criminal charges.
His statement did not include details in which Doe referred to how, at one point, she felt the most incapacitated she had ever felt in her life, nor how she felt she could not leave the room.
Doe’s statement
The lawsuit alleges she was sexually assaulted, raped and pressured to snort ketamine after a night of heavy drinking. Her complaint names seven Chi Phi fraternity brothers who she claims sexually assaulted her.
Her statement to police mirrored many of the allegations in the lawsuit. She described drinking sometime after 6:30 p.m., going to two different Ithaca bars and finally going to the Chi Phi fraternity house around 10:30 or 11 p.m. to meet a friend.
There, a friend asked whether she was interested in a threesome, which she said she agreed to.
Later, another man knocked on the door of the room they were in, and she let him in because, she said, she was told it was probably the man whose room they were in. She engaged in a sexual encounter with the third man, the statement said.
“I don’t remember much of this threesome,” she told police. “I was pretty incapacitated.”
While Doe did not remember having sex with the third man, she recalled hearing two men “say something about ‘having a turn.’” That, she told police, made her realize the men were “using me without caring about what I was getting out of the situation.”
At one point, “multiple men walked into the room,” and, she told police, “I was instantly horrified.” She ran across the room to hide under the covers of another bed, the statement said, which she said felt like the only option because they were standing between her and the exit.
The lawsuit says multiple other men entered the room after one fraternity member sent a message to a group chat, a screenshot of which was included in the suit, that said there was “free p----” available upstairs where Doe was.
Doe described her level of intoxication after four more men entered the room and said the night “really becomes a blur for me at that point.”
After one of the men started to kiss her, she told police, she quickly backed away, and she described feeling dissociation.
“I was starting to become completely numb to the whole situation,” she said in the statement.
She said she had taken ketamine earlier in the evening and was offered it again. Doe had never taken the drug before, according to the lawsuit. Her thought, she told police, was that “if I do Ketamine again maybe I will pass out. My thought was that if I passed out and these men had sex with me, then they could be charged with Rape.”
Doe described realizing the next day that what happened to her the previous evening was being talked about on campus. “It was made clear to me by several friends that the members of Chi Phi were bragging,” she told police. She added that “it was now obvious that everyone knew it was me that this had happened to.”
In her statement, she stressed instances of turning men down repeatedly, expressing discomfort and feeling coerced.
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Doe also spoke about an alleged encounter after she was ushered upstairs to what she believed was the fraternity president’s office, where, she said, two men “were asking me to have sex so many times that I finally gave in.”
“To me, that felt like coercion,” she said. “Also, I felt like due to my intoxication, they should have known how intoxicated I was based on how I was slurring my words.”
In a transcript of her interview with campus police on Nov. 14, Doe is also alleged to have said, “I can say with 100% confidence I was raped,” CBS News reported Wednesday. NBC News has not seen the full transcript of that interview.
Van Houten told NBC News on Wednesday that the specific allegation was not in the written statement his office received from Cornell police in November 2024 when they were assessing whether or not to bring charges. Cornell has said its campus police department “shared all investigatory information” with the DA’s office.
What the district attorney says
Van Houten said in his statement Monday that Doe did not allege that she was drugged against her will or gang-raped in her sworn statement to police.
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“On the contrary, Jane Doe’s statement described her participation in drug use and sexual conduct as voluntary, conscious, and consensual,” his statement said.
He also noted that she wrote about having difficulty remembering parts of the night as the evening went on.
Doe’s statement, he said, did not meet the legal bar of proof beyond a reasonable doubt that there was lack of consent under New York State Penal Law. He added that her statement did not allege that she was incapable of controlling her conduct, that drugs were administered without her consent, that she was unconscious or that she did not clearly express that she did not consent.
Van Houten said “multiple prosecutors and criminal investigators reviewed Jane Doe’s statement and correctly determined the alleged facts as set forth in the statement do not constitute a crime.”
“According to the statement, each time Jane Doe asked to stop the sexual conduct, the sexual conduct stopped,” he said.
Doe’s attorney, Thomas P. Giuffra, said he was “very disappointed” in Van Houten’s claim Monday that Doe’s interactions that night were consensual.
“If my client consented, why did you make a complaint to the police and say I’ve been assaulted? Why would she say that a crime occurred? Why would she go to the police in the first place? It makes no sense,” he told NBC News in an interview Monday.
He said in an email Monday that his client was never contacted by the DA’s office nor any investigator other than the officer who took her original complaint, and he called the decision to reconsider prosecution “a step in the right direction, albeit a late one.”
None of the seven fraternity members named in the suit were criminally charged. The fraternity was suspended from campus, and it remains barred.
Cornell said Monday it conducted a thorough, monthslong Title IX investigation, which is distinct from criminal law, that handed down “a range of sanctions which included expulsions and suspensions” from the university. Cornell did not disclose who received what disciplinary outcome, citing federal privacy law. The suit claimed the men were allowed to write essays to “mitigate their conduct” — a claim the university also denied Monday.
An attorney for Scott Kretzschmar, one of the Cornell students accused in Doe’s lawsuit of pouring ketamine on her body and snorting it, called the allegations against him “dishonest” and “morally repugnant.”
“While Scott responded to and made an immature comment on Snapchat, he did nothing else. Nothing. For the few minutes he was in the room with the plaintiff, Scott did not see her in duress or undress, was involved in no sexual activity nor touched the plaintiff in any way and ingested no ketamine,” said his attorney, Jeremy Saland.
An attorney for another one of the Cornell student defendants said his client “denies that he sexually assaulted the plaintiff.”
The attorney, Andrew Miltenberg, cited Cornell’s “extensive” investigation.
“In fact, several dozen people were questioned, there [were] multiple days of hearings and testimony, and an investigative report that contains hundreds of pages — all over an extended period of time,” he said in a written statement. “It is these statements, contemporaneous communications, and other evidence that provide important context that is absent from the current public account. Those differences, and the evidence bearing on them, will severely compromise Jane Doe’s narrative.”
NBC News has tried to contact the five other fraternity members named in the lawsuit but was not able to reach them or did not receive responses.
In addition to the seven men and the university, the lawsuit also names one of the bars Doe visited that night, Cornell’s Chi Phi Chapter, Chi Phi National and the university chapter of the sorority Doe was a member of and its national organization.
The Chi Phi National fraternity said in a statement Sept. 18 that it could not discuss specific allegations during pending litigation but called the allegations “deeply concerning.”
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said in a video statement Wednesday that she spoke with Cornell’s president Wednesday and that the university agreed to bring in outside counsel for an independent investigation into its handling of Doe’s case. The university confirmed the decision.
If you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted, call the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-4673. The hotline, run by the Rape, Abuse, & Incest National Network (RAINN), can put you in contact with your local rape crisis center. You can also access RAINN’s online chat service at rainn.org/get-help.
