The Tompkins County District Attorney is now defending his office’s decision not to prosecute seven Cornell University fraternity members accused of sexually assaulting a woman in 2024, and somehow, the explanation raises almost as many questions as the original decision.
According to ABC News, DA Matthew Van Houten said the allegations were “morally disturbing,” but insisted that the evidence presented to his office at the time did not establish a prosecutable crime. His argument centers heavily on consent, saying the woman’s original statement to police indicated that she voluntarily participated in sexual activity and did not clearly communicate that she had withdrawn consent.
“She clearly consented in the beginning, and there was never any indication that she changed that to the things that she participated in,” he said. “There is a disconnect in the sense of how the community and how social media has understood this to have happened. If at any point Jane Doe had said, ‘I don’t consent to this anymore,’ or in those words, or in any form of communication. If there had been continued sexual activity, contact by these individuals, that would be a crime. But that’s not what was alleged in her statement.”
Van Houten also acknowledged that his office did not independently investigate the allegations and relied on the investigation conducted by Cornell University Police. He said prosecutors never received a group chat that the woman’s attorney now describes as critical evidence. The chat allegedly included messages involving fraternity members discussing the incident.
“But the question that we analyzed was: Did Jane Doe consent to what happened, and was she unable to consent?” he said. “I’m not clear on exactly how that was given to us, or if anyone here looked at it. That was not critical to our analysis, as I mentioned earlier. The issue was her consent, and if you take that Snapchat being vile and crude and vulgar, that did not have any relevance to the issue of whether Jane Doe consented to what was happening,” Van Houten said.
And this is where things get particularly troubling.
The woman’s attorney, Thomas Giuffra, says his client was never properly interviewed by anyone with specialized training in investigating sexual assault. He argues that authorities were given evidence supporting her allegations but failed to follow up with her or pursue it adequately. Now, after the woman filed a civil lawsuit alleging that she was drugged, assaulted and gang raped at the Chi Phi fraternity house, the DA has reopened the case and plans to present it to a grand jury.
Van Houten says New York’s consent laws created a difficult legal hurdle, particularly because voluntarily consuming alcohol or drugs does not automatically mean someone is legally incapable of consenting. Cornell says its own investigation resulted in suspensions and expulsions, while attorneys for some of the accused men deny the allegations entirely.
So now, two years later, prosecutors are going back to examine a case they previously declined to pursue. And the biggest question may be why so much of this alleged evidence and investigation apparently wasn’t fully addressed the first time around.
Somebody got some explaining to do…
