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.
Page A5From§Eachthe sunrise edition — 29 September 2026
Prosecutor found no case in 2024, reopens it after a lawyer found the evidence they missed.
As it ran on the front
A woman told the Tompkins County prosecutor in 2024 that seven men raped her inside the Chi Phi fraternity house at Cornell. The prosecutor reviewed what was in front of them and declined to charge anyone. The file stayed closed for nearly two years.
Then she sued. The lawsuit did what the original review had not: it produced a group Snapchat text chain and video from that night, material that, CBS reports, did not appear in the DA's first look at the case. This week the same prosecutor who closed the file reopened it, and the office says it will pursue whatever the new evidence shows.…
…(cont) Notice the order those two things happened in. The evidence that reopened a criminal case came out of a civil lawsuit, not out of the criminal investigation that was supposed to find it first. The prosecutor's office had two years, a police report, and a fraternity house full of witnesses; the material that changed the office's mind arrived attached to a plaintiff's complaint. The woman's attorney says the university and law enforcement failed her. The reopening is the closest thing to an answer that question is going to get from the office that once closed the door on it.
This is not the first fraternity case where an institution's account moved only after someone outside it did work the institution hadn't. The retraction did not start inside the magazine. It started after outside fact-checkers went back over the reporting and found discrepancies the original story had missed. Four months later, in April 2015, Phi Kappa Psi announced it would pursue "all available options" against the magazine. The account only changed once somebody outside the newsroom checked what the newsroom hadn't.
Two fraternity cases, a decade apart, both turning on the same mechanical fact: the institution's first version of events held until an outsider brought something the institution didn't have. In Charlottesville the outside check unraveled an account. In Ithaca it is reopening one. Either way, the party built to test the story first — a magazine's fact-checkers, a district attorney's office — was not the party that ended up doing the testing.
The prosecutor has the text chain and the video now. The office had two years to find them first.
“Two years, a police report, and a fraternity full of witnesses didn't turn up a text chain that a lawsuit found in months. That's not bad luck, that's a prosecutor who didn't look, and it took somebody suing him to make him look again.”
“Declining to charge isn't the same as covering something up — a prosecutor needs evidence that holds up in court, and when new material shows up, that's the system working exactly the way it's supposed to. Reopening a case isn't an admission the first review failed, it's — okay, it kind of is, but that's not what I meant.”
The receipts
Prosecutors say they are reopening an investigation into an alleged 2024 gang rape at Cornell University. CBS News' Anna Schecter reports.
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.
The DA vows to pursue any additional evidence after the woman’s lawsuit prompted him to reopen the case.
· University of Virginia fraternity Phi Kappa Psi announces that it will "pursue all available options" against Rolling Stone magazine a day after the magazine withdraws "A Rape on Campus", a story alle from the morgue, 6 Apr 2015
· Rolling Stone Magazine issues a partial retraction on Sabrina Erdely's "A Rape on Campus" story after additional fact checking identifies "discrepancies" in the account of the University of Virginia y from the morgue, 5 Dec 2014
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.