Gov. Kathy Hochul has named Letitia James, the New York State attorney general, to serve as special prosecutor to investigate a woman\u2019s allegation that she was raped in a fraternity house near Cornell University\u2019s campus in October 2024.<\/p>\n
In a post on X on Thursday night, Ms. Hochul said that she would be assigning Ms. James, who had already begun a review<\/a> of the way law enforcement handled the matter, to oversee the investigation in Tompkins County.<\/p>\n \u201cNew information has raised serious questions about how this case was handled, and I\u2019ve lost faith in the Tompkins County D.A.\u2019s ability to fairly oversee it,\u201d Ms. Hochul said.<\/p>\n She added, \u201cThe young woman at the center of this case deserves to know that every fact will be examined and justice pursued.\u201d<\/p>\n The announcement marked a dramatic development in a case that has horrified many Americans and renewed a long-running national conversation about sexual assault on college campuses.<\/p>\n The authorities in Ithaca, N.Y., have faced intense backlash over how they investigated the Oct. 19, 2024, encounter between a woman known as Jane Doe and a number of men at the Chi Phi fraternity house. Facing a public outcry, Matthew Van Houten, the Tompkins County district attorney, said on Monday that his office would reopen the investigation into Jane Doe\u2019s allegations.<\/p>\n In a lawsuit filed last month, the woman said that when she was a 20-year-old sophomore, she was plied with alcohol and drugs and then raped by several men at the fraternity house. She reported the incident to the Cornell University Police Department several weeks later, but no criminal charges were filed.<\/p>\n At the heart of the criticism has been the revelation that the woman, in her statements to the police, said that she could say \u201cwith 100 percent confidence I was raped.\u201d Mr. Van Houten has said that his office primarily reviewed a six-page report provided by Cornell police, which omitted the definitive language detailed in an transcription of her interview with investigators.<\/p>\n Lawyers for at least three of the seven men named in Jane Doe\u2019s lawsuit have issued statements denying criminal wrongdoing. In hours of interviews during a university investigation in the winter of 2024, the seven men denied wrongdoing. Four said they had consensual sexual interactions with Jane Doe; three denied participating in sexual encounters altogether.<\/p>\n On Thursday morning, The New York Times, after obtaining more than 1,000 pages from the university\u2019s internal inquiry, published a detailed account of the woman\u2019s weeks of struggle before she reported the episode.<\/p>\n