The system worked in the Cornell 7 case
We’ve heard it from politicians, celebrities and influencers — the system failed the accuser in the Cornell 7 case.
This near-universal view is advanced with great certainty and a sense of outraged righteousness, but mistaken nonetheless. Based on the information available to them at the time, the authorities handled the matter in keeping with the facts and the law.
This isn’t to defend anything that occurred during that debauched night at the Chi Phi fraternity, which was “Lord of the Flies” meets “Eyes Wide Shut.” Nor does it foreclose the possibility that Jane Doe was the victim of crimes.
But the critics of the school and the district attorney who declined to prosecute the case fail to account for a central element of the case — a sworn statement by Jane Doe herself in November 2024 that appears to fail to allege any crime.
After getting slammed for his handling of the case, Tompkins County district attorney Matthew Van Houten publicly defended his office. He quoted extensively from Jane Doe’s statement. These excerpts do indeed describe her actions that night, in the words of the DA, as “voluntary, conscious and consensual.”
By her own account, she drank heavily before heading to the fraternity. She danced flirtatiously with a friend she was interested in, and then agreed to a threesome because of “how attracted” she was to him and “drunken curiousness.”
This was before she ingested any drugs. The assignation stopped when her friend dropped out because of drowsiness, while the other male began to dry heave. She periodically checked on her sleeping friend, while “consoling” the other male. This was a squalid scene, but not one where she was unconscious or refusing.
Another male entered the room, and he began making out with her, with Jane Doe apparently lodging no objection. Her friend then woke up and made another lewd proposal that she declined. More males piled into the room. It was suggested she take “more ketamine,” and vaguely recalling she had already snorted some at some point, she figured “why not do it a second time.”
When the guys, who behaved abysmally, asked if they could snort the drug off her body, she said, “Sure.”
Finally, another young man entered the room and said he was shutting down “whatever the f*** this is.”
Still, her so-called friend persisted and took her to another room with another male to begin having group sex again. She said she was tired and plaintively asked her friend, “What happened to just you and me?” But she apparently didn’t say “no.” Finally, around 5:45 a.m., she said she “was tired and needed to turn in.”
This isn’t a hostile version of events concocted by a defense attorney — it’s what she attested to weeks after the night of Oct. 19. The DA didn’t disbelieve her, or decide he couldn’t prove her allegations; he correctly determined that she described no actual crime.
It’s not the job of a DA, obviously, to get an alleged victim to change her story after she’s sworn to it in writing, or to make prosecutions based on vibes.
For its part, Cornell didn’t sweep the matter under the rug. The school carried out 50 interviews involving 32 witnesses. It expelled two of the students; suspended two others; banned from campus one who had already graduated; and allowed two others to remain, provided that they completed various trainings, including writing “reflective essays” (this is the source of the erroneous idea that essay-writing was the only consequence for the young men).
Both the DA and Cornell did their job. It’s not that the system failed Jane Doe but, rather, that she changed her version of events two years after the fact in a civil lawsuit against the men and the university, among others.
The risk now is that the system, with New York Attorney General Letitia James leading a politicized investigation, will be perverted to produce a predetermined outcome.
Rich Lowry is on X @RichLowry