James appointed to fix a system that failed her, called unfair to the accused the same day.

…(cont) The case is the one at Cornell. A young woman reported to campus police in 2024 that seven men at a fraternity house had raped her; the county district attorney looked at what he had and declined to bring charges. That sat for close to two years until a lawsuit this past September alleged she'd been drugged with ketamine, and screenshots of text messages surfaced, and somewhere in the middle of that an aide connected to the county prosecutor's office sent a message telling someone not to say anything. The state took the case away from that office over the text. Governor Hochul put the state attorney general, Letitia James, in as special prosecutor instead.

Friday — same day as the text I'm telling you about now — the Governor stood in her Midtown office and said, I wrote this down, "how was this woman denied justice." She said the woman had been failed by the people obligated to protect her, the campus police, the county prosecutor, all of them. She said voluntary intoxication is not a license for sexual assault or gang rape, and she's asking the legislature to close the loophole that lets a defense lawyer argue a woman who'd been drinking consented. The woman's attorney, a man named Giuffra, said she "was incapable of consent" and called the original investigation a cover-up. First scale reading: the system failed her.

Second reading came off the same Friday. The President of the United States stood on the South Lawn and said the seven young men accused in this case "won't get a fair shake" now that Letitia James is running the investigation. He called her corrupt. Same case. Same seven men. Same woman. Same Friday — I checked twice, because I didn't believe it myself — just hours between one scale and the other.

I stood in a bank line Tuesday, and the first teller told me I had forty-one dollars in checking. I went back through the line twenty minutes later because I'd forgotten to deposit a check, and the second teller read me a different number off the same account — nothing deposited, nothing moved — and when I asked her about it, she said the system updates at different times for different windows. All right. For forty-one dollars, I can live with two different windows.

Excuse me — before you go — can I ask you something, because I never got this straight and maybe you can help me. On Friday the Governor of New York said, in public, on the record, that this woman was failed, denied justice, by the system as it stood that morning. That same Friday, the President said the system's replacement would fail the seven men accused. Both statements are sitting in my notes, same date, same case, a few hours apart. Which window was open when the first one got read, and which one was open for the second?