1. The old case became news when a 101-page civil complaint was filed by the alleged victim last month. Nothing has been determined true or false regarding the lawsuit’s allegations, but much of the media coverage has begun with the assumption that its claims are true. It could also be an example of a lawyer seeing an opportunity for a settlement and a 33% contingent fee based on a university wanting to avoid bad publicity.

2. The news media is refusing to publish the name of “Jane Doe,” the alleged victim. She is an adult, and she filed a lawsuit accusing university officials and law enforcement of covering up a rape by seven men whose names are also in the lawsuit. She should not be shielded from taking accountability for her own legal action.

3. On Nov. 14, 2024, about three weeks after the incident, the then-student who filed the suit, spoke for hours to a Cornell police investigator and an investigator from Cornell’s Title IX office, which makes sure the university complies with federal regulations related to sex discrimination. The transcript of their conversation was about 120 pages, condensed by the police investigator into a six-page official statement. The student signed the document. For some reason that fact seems to be glossed over in many of the accounts.

4. The Tompkins County district attorney, Matthew Van Houten, reviewed the statement and concluded that he could not bring a successful criminal case to court. It is unethical for a prosecutor to file charges if he or she does not believe the crime can be proven to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt. Whatever happened, the fact that the alleged rape victim signed a statement that did not include her comment during the interview, “I can say with 100 percent confidence I was raped” constitutes automatic reasonable doubt, in my view. “The omissions may help explain why the district attorney did not think he could bring a criminal case based on her allegations,” the New York Times says. Ya think? Nevertheless, all the social media uproar, the attacks by dormant #MeToo activists and disclosure of investigative records prompted Van Houten to abandon his integrity and reopen the criminal probe for a grand jury review.

5. New York’s Democratic Ethics Villain Governor Kathy Hochul expressed “deep concern over the handling of the case” because she knows little about prosecution ethics and is first and foremost a political hack. She appointed State Attorney General Letitia James as a special prosecutor to take over the investigation. James is the hyper-political AG who announced when she ran for office that she would find some justification for prosecuting Donald Trump. Well, she prosecuted him anyway. Special prosecutors are supposed to be independent and objective. James is incapable of either.

6. Here is how the National Review describes the beginning of the evening in question:

“Jane Doe’s complaint says that she started drinking vodka at her sorority house and was already intoxicated when she got to a bar, which served her at least one drink even though she was underaged and drunk (she is suing the bar). She then went to the fraternity house, where she alleges that one of the men “propositioned her with having a threesome with her and another one of his fraternity brothers.” …Did she agree? The complaint doesn’t say. It instead insists that, “in her drunken state, Plaintiff was incapable of consenting to this proposition.” …The New York Penal Code offers three avenues to prove rape (other than the victim being underage). Third-degree rape under Section 130.25 punishes sex “without such person’s consent where such lack of consent is by reason of some factor other than incapacity to consent.” Second-degree rape under Section 130.30 requires proof that the victim was “incapable of consent by reason of being mentally disabled or mentally incapacitated.” First-degree rape under Section 130.35 requires proof that the victim was “incapable of consent by reason of being physically helpless.” … [So] New York law doesn’t consider a victim to be incapacitated, physically or mentally, simply because she was voluntarily intoxicated and had impaired judgment.”

The New York Times describes the confused and inconsistent narrative of “Jane Doe” and the way it evolved from that point on:

“Jane Doe considered two of the men friends. She and the men involved that night had taken ketamine. Things had started off consensual — though she was drunk — and some of her memories were hazy, the transcript shows. She had lost control. Her initial impulse was to keep quiet about what had happened.

But within a day or two, “everyone involved in sorority and fraternity life knew what had happened,” she told investigators. Most of the gossip blamed her, calling her “a whore that had an eightsome with the Chi Phi guys.”

She had not known how or why so many men had shown up in the room that night. But then she heard that a Snapchat message had been sent to the fraternity, inviting members to join what was happening. And when she saw on a message board that someone had said that Chi Phi members were “gang banging,” the pieces started coming together.

She told investigators that she had a revelation when reading an online comment that called Chi Phi brothers “terrible people, they gang raped a sophomore.”

“And that’s kind of when I came to the realization that I had been gang raped, gang assaulted, whatever you want to call it; that’s what happened,” she said.

I have written here before about what I feel is a fatal ethics flaw with sexual harassment and sexual assault laws: the alleged victim can decide some day months, years or decades later that she was harassed, assaulted or raped when she didn’t believe so at the time. It was that factual assertion that got me blacklisted at NPR as its ethics commentator. Grrrrr…

This is a good place to end Part 1. I’ll get to Part 2 after I calm down…