Lilia Luciano spoke to the attorney for Jane Doe, who says that campus police at Cornell University failed to properly investigate after she was allegedly raped at a fraternity house in 2024.
Page A4From§Eachthe early bird edition — 3 October 2026
Chi Phi says it acted quickly, immediately after two years of Cornell police inaction.
As it ran on the front
Chi Phi's national organization wants you to know it acted quickly. On September 30th, the fraternity explained, for the first time, how it handled the 2024 episode at its Cornell chapter: the named members expelled, the organization fully cooperating, the whole episode handled with dispatch. Acted quickly is the phrase they chose. Write it down, because the date matters more than the word.
September 30th is also the day CBS News published an interview transcript. Days after the alleged assault, the accuser told Cornell's own campus police, "I can say with 100% confidence I was raped." Full confidence, on the record, to the department whose job it is to do something with that sentence. And September 30th falls one day after NBC reported that Tompkins County prosecutors had reopened the investigation, with plans to bring her before a grand jury. Run the dates in order: the certainty came first, in 2024; the reopening came second, in September; the fraternity's acted quickly came third, the same week, after both. Strike quickly. Try eventually, and only because somebody else forced the question.…
…(cont) What actually happened in between is in the lawsuit CBS reported on September 28th: seven Chi Phi brothers, the suit says, drugged and raped her over several hours at the fraternity house in 2024. That is the incident campus police had, on tape, a woman swearing to with total certainty, within days. What the transcript does not show is campus police doing anything with that certainty for roughly two years. Her attorney calls it a cover-up. I'd call it an investigation that — correction, there wasn't one. There was a statement, taken and filed, and then nothing, until a county prosecutor decided to look again.
Zoom out and this stops being one fraternity's public-relations problem. The federal count for 2024 alone: 8,227 rapes reported at American colleges and universities. Cornell is one line in that file, which is the part nobody wants to say plainly — this is not the exception the statement implies, it's the baseline.
So read Chi Phi's statement again, slowly. It acted quickly to expel its members, once expulsion was the only option left. And the university's own version of acted quickly is presumably being drafted right now, about an investigation it didn't reopen and, until a prosecutor stepped in, had no apparent plan to.
“They act quickly right after the DA reopens the file, which tells you who the deadline was really ticking for — not her, the lawsuit. A woman told Cornell's own cops she was 100% sure, on tape, and the department sat on that for two years while she still had to walk that campus. Multiply that by 8,227 reports in one year and acted quickly stops being a defense; it's the system working exactly as designed.”
“Chi Phi did everything right — expelled the members, cooperated fully, acted quickly the moment it learned... in September, when the DA reopened the case. Did I say moment? I meant two years later. That's not a cover-up, that's an investigation finding its own pace, which happened to match the pace of not investigating at all.”
The receipts
The columnist David French argues that “we have privileged getting wasted over taking care of people.”
A staggering 8,227 rapes were reported by American colleges and universities in 2024, and elite New York institutions are far from immune.
· Chi Phi Says It Acted Quickly in 2024 to Expel Cornell Members Named in Sexual Assault Lawsuit from the morgue, 30 Sep 2026
· Cornell Sexual Assault Investigation Reopened by Prosecutors from the morgue, 29 Sep 2026
· Former Cornell student alleges she was sexually assaulted by 7 frat brothers in new lawsuit from the morgue, 28 Sep 2026
· Cornell University frat house rape investigation reopened: What we know from the morgue, 30 Sep 2026
· Cornell Jane Doe told campus police, "I can say with 100% confidence I was raped," transcript shows from the morgue, 30 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.