CBS News New York has exclusively obtained additional video of the fraternity's group Snapchat conversation from the night a former Cornell student says she was drugged and raped inside the Chi Phi fraternity house.
Page A7From§Eachthe late evening edition — 28 September 2026
Cornell DA defended not charging seven frat brothers, then reopened the case a week after the lawsuit made news
As it ran on the front
The district attorney's statement announcing this case is reopening is a nicely put-together piece of paper. Clean sentences. No hedging. It reads like an office that has nothing to hide. I've got a copy of it somewhere — hold on — here, I think, this is it. And here's what I can't get past: it's the same office that, days before this statement, was on the record defending the decision not to press charges at all. Same case. Same seven names. One week you're explaining why you didn't file, the next week you're filing again. What happened in between that a press release doesn't say?
Let me back up, because I don't want to lose the order of it, and the order is most of what I've got.…
…(cont) On September 18, a lawsuit against Cornell and seven members of Chi Phi fraternity became public. It described a 2024 assault. It quoted texts sent during the assault reading "Free pussy." And it said the university, afterward, gave the accused men a chance to submit essays about mitigating their conduct — that's the lawsuit's word for the offer, not a letter Cornell sent me, so take it as an allegation and not a syllabus. Before any of that ran as a headline, the Tompkins County district attorney had already decided not to bring criminal charges. Ten days later, that same district attorney was defending that decision publicly, on the record, to NBC. And around the same time, reporting turned up an attorney representing one of the seven fraternity brothers saying his client told him he'd cooperated with investigators — that he'd named the other six. If that's true, what was left to decide?
Now here's this week's part, and it's the part I keep having to sit with.
The accuser's attorney says the DA has now committed to pursuing any additional evidence, and says, plainly, that the school and law enforcement failed this young woman. I don't have a rebuttal to that from Cornell or from the police department. I looked. It isn't in my folder.
But it's the other item from that same week that I can't put down. CBS says it obtained additional video — exclusive, they call it — of the fraternity's group Snapchat conversation from the night of the alleged assault. Video. Of the chat. From that night.
There's a toll plaza on my route home that used to have a coin basket and now has a camera over every lane. If your transponder doesn't read, they don't shrug — they mail you the video a week later, timestamped, plate and all. I once told my insurance company that a repair receipt was gone, tossed out with a stack of paperwork in the garage. I was sure of it. They found a copy in about four minutes, from a vendor I'd forgotten existed. Gone, it turns out, is a word people use about records more often than it's a fact about them.
I don't want to leave without saying — and I know this is the third time I've turned this thing over, I apologize, I really do — that somewhere in the last few weeks, an attorney representing one of the accused fraternity brothers told reporters that the evidence from that Snapchat chat was gone for good. Lost. Unrecoverable. That was the position. That was on the record.
And now CBS has video of that same chat, from that same night, that they say they obtained.
So which is it — was the evidence gone for good, or did CBS just get a copy of it?
“A frat brother tells his own lawyer he ratted out his buddies, the DA who defended sitting on this case suddenly finds religion the week a lawsuit goes viral, and the "evidence is gone forever" line dies the same week CBS airs video of the exact chat that was supposedly gone. That's not a cover-up falling apart on its own — that's a cover-up that forgot Snapchat isn't the only camera in the room. Cornell offered kids who allegedly texted "Free pussy" during a rape a chance to write an essay about it; the DA offered them two years of nothing until the cameras showed up.”
“Look, the DA's original decision was based on the evidence available at the time, and reopening a case when new information surfaces isn't a reversal, it's — okay, it's a little bit of a reversal. But prosecutors update their view constantly, that's not — why would they defend it on the record ten days before reopening it if — I didn't say that part out loud, did I. The point is, essays about "mitigating conduct" are a standard restorative-justice tool. Did I just call that standard? That doesn't sound like me.”
Earlier in this story
- District attorney reopens Cornell frat rape case they defended a week earlier; the evidence is gone. By Sal · the supper edition, 28 September 2026
The receipts
The investigation into an alleged rape at Cornell University in 2024 will be reopened, authorities said Monday.
The DA vows to pursue any additional evidence after the woman’s lawsuit prompted him to reopen the case.
Nearly two years after a young woman first told authorities that she'd been raped inside a fraternity house at Cornell University, the local district attorney, who had initially declined to pursue criminal charges, says he is reopening the investigation. Lilia Luciano reports on what's changed.
· Cornell frat bros gang-rape student, texting, ‘Free p—y’ during sick assault: shocking lawsuit from the morgue, 18 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.