University tells investigators to say nothing on one case; its own survey says something happened to 35 percent

…(cont) I had the toll bill in the glovebox, with the registration and a flashlight that hasn't worked since I owned the car, and I was digging through that pile for something else when this week's paper caught up with a story that's been sitting in Tompkins County since the end of September.

On Sept. 28 a woman who used to go to Cornell filed a lawsuit. She said seven brothers of a fraternity called Chi Phi drugged her with ketamine in 2024 and assaulted her. The university's answer, on the record, was that its police investigated and consulted the district attorney's office, which it calls established protocol.

Then this week: Fox reported the attorney general, Letitia James, opened what her office calls an "active criminal investigation," after the governor named her special prosecutor. ABC got hold of texts in which one of the accused apologized to the woman afterward. The Times talked to people who try these cases for a living, who said winning a conviction here won't be simple. And the governor, that same week, said she wants New York to close a law that lets a rape charge fail if the person was willingly intoxicated — a law written for whoever comes after this case, not for this one.

All of that — the lawsuit, the reopened file, the special prosecutor, the apology in writing, the proposed law — attached to a single name on a single docket.

Then The Hill ran the other number. Cornell surveyed its own undergraduates last year. The results are only getting attention now, because of the lawsuit, but the survey itself is a year old. More than a third of the university's undergraduate women — 35 percent — told Cornell they'd experienced nonconsensual sexual contact sometime on that campus.

Thirty-five percent isn't a transponder number. A transponder only logs what announces itself — what gets a lawsuit, a reopened case, a text message surfacing, somebody telling somebody else not to say anything. Thirty-five percent is a loop-counter number. It counts what crossed whether or not anybody filed, whether or not a camera happened to be pointed at it that day.

One case got a special prosecutor, a proposed statute, a grand jury date. The loop under the road says 35 percent crossed.

Oh — hold on, before you go, one more thing. That loop doesn't ask whether you meant to. It only asks whether you crossed. The survey asked the same way — not who reported it, just who it happened to. So how many of that 35 percent has the state assigned a special prosecutor?