Outlets brand Cornell a hoax days after a bank firing and a grand jury date.

…(cont) Eleven days later, on 29 September, District Attorney Matthew Van Houten announced the case was reopening. CBS News reported it had obtained video of the fraternity's own group Snapchat conversation from that night, a second, separate piece of evidence from the lawsuit's text. NBC reported prosecutors intend to bring the case before a grand jury, with the woman set to testify.

Wells Fargo did not wait for the grand jury. Within days of the DA's announcement, the bank fired Diego Sarabia, one of the seven men, the Post reported.

That was the week two outlets chose to make their case that the whole thing might be invented. The Daily Caller ran its own the same day, headlined "Serious Duke Lacrosse Vibes," asking whether this is the next campus rape hoax.

Duke is a real comparison, just not the one those outlets are making. In December 2006, prosecutors dropped the rape charges against the three Duke players; the case ended there, on the evidence.

Both of those cases ended when the accusation met the evidence and the evidence didn't hold up the story. The Cornell case is still open, moving the opposite direction: a second piece of video corroborating the filing, a prosecutor reopening a file he'd once closed, a bank firing an employee, and a grand jury date ahead of it. The outlets running the hoax headline this week are running the same headline that ran in 2006 and 2015. The difference is what happens after the headline runs — a dropped charge and a magazine retraction then, an open prosecution and a fired employee now.