‘Still open for business?’: Snapchat, text exchanges and other chilling details of Cornell University rape investigation | Today’s news

New York state prosecutors have reopened an investigation into the alleged gang-rape of a woman at Cornell University in 2024. Authorities reopened the investigation Monday as outrage fueled a woman’s lawsuit filed Sept. 16 against the Chi Phi fraternity, the university and seven students she says assaulted her.

In a civil lawsuit filed against the Ivy League university on Sept. 16, a woman alleged that she was drugged and assaulted at a fraternity house at the university.

Here’s everything you need to know about the case:

1. According to the Associated Press, the woman, identified in the lawsuit only by the pseudonym Jane Doe, filed the complaint on Sept. 16 alleging she was sexually assaulted at a Chi Phi fraternity house after she was forced to snort ketamine, smoke marijuana and drink alcohol.

The civil suit alleged that seven men, named as Matthew Ingalls, Johnathan Newell, Winston Lee, Gillio Lopes, Diego Sarabia, Scott Norris and Scott Kretzschmar, assaulted her at Cornell’s Chi Phi fraternity house.

2. Weeks after the incident, she told police she could “say with 100% certainty that I was raped,” according to a report by CBS New York, which said it obtained a transcript of her interview with investigators.

The transcript, which has not been made public, raises new questions about the local district attorney’s decision not to prosecute anyone at the time.

3. The woman admitted to drinking alcohol and using drugs the night she visited the Chi Phi fraternity house in October 2024 and that she had memory lapses.

She also told officers she was fine with the initial sexual encounter with two of the men, but not what happened later when other men began entering the room.

She became completely incapacitated when fraternity members sexually assaulted her, she said.

“And then of course at the same time they beat me. Physically very, very hard,” she told police, according to the transcript. “I can say with 100% certainty that I was raped,” she reportedly told investigators.

4. The woman first went to Cornell campus police about three weeks after the alleged assault, which began on Oct. 19, 2024, then returned on Nov. 14 and 15, 2024, to be interviewed.

“Yes. It was coercion, yes,” she told a campus police officer, according to a transcript obtained by CBS. According to the report, she said she was “completely and completely incapacitated” before some of the sexual abuse.

In November 2024, she told police she had been assaulted at a fraternity house a month earlier, and prosecutors decided not to prosecute at that time.

5. In recent days, Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten said the woman’s initial police report did not include allegations that she was drugged, incapacitated or forced to have sex.

Still, he also said he reopened the investigation based on new information in the woman’s lawsuit filed this month. He said his office did so in light of the allegations, which he said were “dramatically different” from those originally made by the alleged victim.

“Jane Doe’s November 2024 affidavit did not allege she was drugged against her will or gang-raped,” Van Houten was quoted as saying by the Guardian.

“To the contrary, (her) statement described her participation in drug use and sexual conduct as voluntary, knowing and consensual. My office clearly did not and could not base our November 2024 decision on the allegations in the civil action that would be filed almost two years later,” he added.

Meanwhile, Cornell has agreed to bring in outside lawyers to independently investigate how the university handled the woman’s allegations, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul announced Wednesday.

6. CBS also claimed to have a video of Snapchat messages exchanged the night of the alleged assault by multiple Chi Phi Actives.

According to the suit, at around 1:42 a.m. on the night in question, a fraternity member sent a rude message to the Chi Phi Snapchat group chat that the woman upstairs was available for sex. The woman claimed that more men entered the room and the attacks continued until 5:45 am.

One of the messages, sent while the woman was in the already closed frat house, allegedly said there was a “loose p***y” upstairs. According to CBS, a later message sent by a member of the group asked, “Is the store still open? The answer was, ‘Yes.’

7. Attorney Thomas Giuffra, who represents the woman, confirmed to CBS that his client — named Jane Doe in court documents — exchanged text messages with one of the defendants after the alleged assault. But Giuffra said he could not be sure the screenshots seen by CBS News were authentic.

Screenshots of a separate text exchange, also reported exclusively by CBS News New York, show what the source describes as messages sent two days later between Jane Doe and one of the defendants now charged in the suit.

In one of the reports, screenshots of which were obtained by CBS New York, the unnamed male defendant appears to apologize to the woman for “how things went wrong” — and said his memory of the events of the past two nights was “a little fuzzy.”

He said he and another man who was present regretted being too drunk to “shut it down and kick people out before it got out of hand.”

The woman, who was in her 20s at the time of the alleged assault and has since left Cornell, responded that her memory is “super cloudy too” and that everyone was drunk.

8. Cornell University first publicly disclosed that it was investigating the woman’s allegations on November 8, 2024, the same day she first went to the police.

The school sent out an email to students warning that a person reported being sexually assaulted at a fraternity house and forced to take drugs. Cornell suspended the Chi Phi fraternity that same day.

In another public statement to students in late November 2024, Cornell University President Michael Kotlikoff said campus police were investigating “deeply troubling allegations of drug abuse and sexual violence” at the fraternity house.

Later, Cornell appointed a task force to address sexual assault on campus. But with the district attorney’s decision not to pursue charges and the university’s internal disciplinary investigation shielded from the public, attention to the matter has waned.

Cornell said in a statement this week that it supports the decision to reopen the criminal investigation, adding that its own investigation has led to the discipline or expulsion of some students.

The Chi Phi chapter remains closed from campus, but the university declined to release more information about individual student discipline, citing privacy rules.