You can be certain that nobody involved in the Cornell U fraternity gang-bang circus is going to come out looking good, not the frat boys, not the girl, not the county DA, not New York AG Letitia James, and not NY Governor Kathy Hochul. The latter two have decided to showboat what has become a rape case in an election year when both are up for another four-year term.
First, the incident itself: October 19, 2024, a Saturday night when upstate New York is at its fall color peak and the campus is jumpin’, 20-year-old “Jane Doe” starts drinking at her sorority, Delta Delta Delta (Δ Δ Δ, “Tri-Delt”) whose motto is Let Us Steadfastly Love One Another. Around eleven o’clock Jane goes into downtown Ithaca to do more drinking at a bar. She’s legally underage, but manages to get served.
Meanwhile, messages are zinging around on social media, Snapchat, etc. There’s a party going on at the Chi Phi fraternity (ΧΦ). Jane communicates with one of the members there. He cordially invites her over for “a threesome.” Jane apparently has a reputation as a lively girl around campus. She accepts and heads over to Chi Phi with a load on, “five out of ten” on the intoxication scale, she later writes in a nine-page statement she gave to campus police.
She arrives at Chi Phi around midnight. More drinks. Pretty soon she’s in that threesome in a bedroom. The frat boys are also pretty hammered. Things get even wilder. Four other frat boys enter the picture. On top of the alcohol, they start doing ketamine, known to produce a dissociative “floaty, out-of-the-body feeling.” One’s judgment is not too good on it, even worse when mixed with booze. The scene at Chi Phi is Animal House plus. Various shenanigans ensue. Eventually, Jane Doe gets home.
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Jane makes a whole lot of statements to her friends and sorority sisters after the incident. Law analyst Jonathan Turley tells The New York Post, “Friends recounted that Doe later laughed about the incident and said, ‘Oh my goodness, isn’t that crazy?’” She also “later told her sorority ‘Big sister’ that ‘You may hear some rumors about me, and unfortunately they are true.’”
Three days later she exchanged messages with one of the frat boys who expressed regret over “how things went down.” Jane reportedly texted back, “I really liked being with you,” and “non(e) of the sexual stuff was illegal.” She added that she wanted to come over and smoke more “but, like, leave out the extra 5 billion men and ketamine.”
Five days after that, she got wind that Ch Phi was throwing a Halloween party, and asked to be invited. The threesome boy replied, “Chi Phi is your house and you are welcome here.” She texted back “thank u i really appreciate. . . i’ll bring my cigs tomorrow.” Did she mean cannabis? Shortly, the president of Chi Phi chapter texted her to cancel the invitation. Jane, pissed off, texted back, “I knew this was going to happen. The woman will always get the short end of the stick. Yall aren’t my friends. Yall are covering your asses.” A woman scorned. . . .
A week after that — it’s November now — she reported the incident to campus police, but gave a muddled statement saying, she consented to the initial threesome, “Yeah, as much as I can because, again, I was super drunk when I got there. . . But I was pretty OK with all of this,” adding, “I can say with one hundred percent confidence I was raped.” You can suppose this was so, too, insofar as the ketamine she took probably launched her into a semi-hallucinatory state. Due to that muddle of intention and action in Jane Doe’s statements, the Tompkins County (NY) District Attorney Matthew Van Houten declined to prosecute the frat boys.
Anyway, that was then, 2024. Since then, Chi Phi’s chapter at Cornell was shut down. Fast forward two years. Jane Doe has now brought civil lawsuits against Cornell U and the seven Chi Phi frat boys, plus the Chi Phi national org, plus the Tri-Delt sorority, plus the bar in downtown Ithaca where Jane got hammered, plus unnamed faculty, alumni, and executive-board members. She alleges severe physical and psychological injury and says she later left Cornell.
A week ago, Tompkins County DA Van Houten reopened the criminal investigation. Then Governor Hochul stepped in and appointed AG Tish James “special prosecutor” for the state, taking the case away from DA Van Houten. Tish James, you might recall, initially ran for AG in 2022 by promising to go medieval on Donald Trump.
There’s a bit of a problem with the case: under New York State law, voluntary drinking and drug use that impairs judgment does not legally constitute and inability to consent to sexual activity. But leave it to Tish to figure out some way to skin this cat. She made good on her promise to haul Donald Trump into court in 2023 on a civil fraud rap (Judge Arthur Engoron presiding in the New York County (Manhattan) Supreme Court. It resulted in a roughly half-billion-dollar judgment. In August, 2025, a five-judge panel of the Appellate Division tossed the half-billion-dollar judgment.
The New York Times has commenced its own inquisition against Cornell U. The coverage is essentially free campaign advertising for the unpopular Governor Hochul and for AG “Big Tish” James, who proudly presides over a New York State legal system that releases indicted violent repeat-offender felons with no bail so they are free to push people in front of on-rushing subway trains. Cornell President Michael I. Kotlikoff has made the requisite, weepy, handwringing statement, promising to do better. Everyone must now play his and her assigned roles in this psychodrama.
You wonder if it will turn out anything like the Duke U Lacrosse team rape case twenty years ago, where the DA who brought the case was disgraced and disbarred, the students implicated were all let off, and the girl who made the rape complaint admitted she lied and was later convicted on a murder rap. But not until after racking up millions in legal fees for the attorneys of all concerned. Our country. . . .
I’ll be speaking at the Prospects for American Renewal Summit in Bozeman, Montana, November 13, 14. The theme of the meeting is: What has America lost? What remains worth preserving? And what must be rebuilt if a healthy common life is to endure?
For info: https://www.arcata.live/2026-summit#register
JHK’s newest novel, a comic romp set during the week of the tragic JFK Assassination, November 1963. Autographed Copies from Battenkill Books.
JHK’s World Made By Hand four-book novel cycle. A small town in the remnant of the USA in the not-distant future. The community struggles to carry on. . . .
NEW! Gallery 17 — Paintings from the 2025 Season. Have a look! (Click here!)
JHK’s work will be in the big group show, the 24th Annual Landscapes for Landsake Art Sale & Exhibition put on by the Washington County Agricultural Stewardship Association this coming weekend, Oct 9, 10, 11. For details (click).
"Show me the man and I'll find you the crime"
The US treats colleges and universities as a four year long party, focused on getting drunk, having lots of casual sex, fraternities, sororities, and semi-professional football and basketball teams playing in giant, lavish, stadiums and arenas. More serious nations treat colleges and universities as serious places for people to focus on their studies. The US model does, in fact lead to actual rapes, and "date rapes" and simple morning after regrets. It also leads to routine deaths in fraternity hazing incidents, to college students being hospitalized for alcohol poisoning and having their stomachs pumped, and other bad stuff. At the end of it, many college grads end up living at home with their parents, deeply in debt, working menial low-paying jobs. Trade school is a far better route. When I attended college, it was quite common for 2/3 to 3/4 of the class not to even show up for lectures on Friday. They were just there to have a good time.