Attorney General Letitia James should step down from leading the investigation into a former student’s claim that she was sexually assaulted in 2024, a lawyer for one of the men said.
Page A207From§Eachthe morning edition — 8 October 2026
Special prosecutor appointed to make sure every fact gets examined is petitioned out for already deciding guilt.
As it ran on the front
I need somebody who knows this stuff better than I do, because I've been sitting with it since Tuesday, and I can't get the order to lay flat in my head. Maybe you can help me. The Attorney General's office, the courts, the wire desks — they do this for a living. I only read about it once.
Here's where I start. On October 2nd, Governor Hochul took the Cornell case away from the Tompkins County District Attorney — Matthew Van Houten, that's the name I have — and handed it to Attorney General Letitia James. CBS had that. The Washington Examiner had it too, and they said it came days after the DA reopened the case on new evidence the alleged victim filed. The governor's own statement, the one the Guardian ran, said the young woman "deserves to know that every fact will be examined and justice pursued." That's the reason given. I wrote that part down because I wanted to get it right.…
…(cont) Two days later, October 4th, Cornell's president says the school will take a "serious look" at its fraternities — the Guardian again — after a lawsuit alleging a woman was drugged and raped by members of Chi Phi. A serious look. Those are his words, not mine.
Anti-police bias, they call it. That's one description of how she does the job.
And then October 8th — yesterday, by my count — two things land on the same day. NBC reports a petition filed for one of the accused, a man named Gillio Lopes, arguing James has "unequivocally demonstrated a bias and presumption of guilt against the defendants." The New York Times has the same story: a lawyer for one of the men wants her removed. That's the opposite description. Same office. Same case.
And the same day the petition lands, the Washington Examiner says about eighty Cornell students sat in a dining hall for seven hours, calling it "Zero Day," refusing to spend money at the school, because the serious look the president promised back on the 4th still hasn't produced anything they can see.
I drove past the toll plaza on my way home trying to work this through — one of those readers that clocks you different depending which lane you pull into, E-ZPass or cash, same car, same bridge, two numbers. I'm not saying that's what's happening here. I'm asking whether an office that was brought in for being too easy on somebody can also be the office accused of being too hard on them, over the same case, inside the same week, and whether that's in the record the way I read it, or whether I'm misreading it, because the fan belt's been slipping on the car and maybe my head's not where it should be lately either.
So: she was appointed, by the governor's own statement, so that nothing in it would get missed. And the accused's own petition says she's already decided what the facts mean. Can both of those sit in the same file?
Oh — and one more thing, before I go. Those eighty students in the dining hall, Wednesday, seven hours — they weren't there about the prosecutor at all, were they? They were there about the serious look. The one promised on the 4th. Is that still open, as far as anybody's told them?
“They swapped out one prosecutor for looking too soft on the accused, and the accused's own lawyers immediately said the replacement looks too hard on them — notice how both complaints land on the same outcome, more delay. Cornell, the one outfit that actually controls the fraternities, hasn't published a word since its own August promise, so eighty students sat in a dining hall for seven hours just to ask where it went. Change who's holding the file as often as you like; nobody with the power to shut a house down has touched it yet.”
“Look, you can't be soft on crime and also run a secret vendetta against two college kids in the same six days — unless you're the New York Attorney General, apparently, where both headlines get to be true at once. The Post's right that she's letting cases drag, and the defense is right she's already decided the outcome, and — wait, did I just agree with both sides? That doesn't sound like me. The point is the process is working exactly as intended, whatever the intention turns out to be.”
Earlier in this story
- Not even Maduro's own lawyer got the memo on his new torture charges; reporters did. By Lou · the early evening edition, 7 October 2026
The receipts
As an ideologically driven anti-police politician, James is needlessly slow-walking her investigations — leaving cops twisting in the wind for months and even years on end.
Students at Cornell University are staging a seven-hour sit-in protest over concerns that campus leadership mishandled an investigation into an alleged gang rape in 2024. As of around 3 p.m. Wednesday, roughly 80 students gathered inside a campus dining hall for the “Zero Day”
A petition filed Wednesday for Gillio Lopes says James has “unequivocally demonstrated a bias and presumption of guilt against the defendants.”
· Letitia James appointed special prosecutor in alleged gang-rape at Cornell from the morgue, 2 Oct 2026
· Hochul appoints Letitia James as special prosecutor in Cornell gang rape case from the morgue, 2 Oct 2026
· Early details as Hochul removes district attorney in Cornell rape case, appoints Letitia James from the morgue, 2 Oct 2026
· Cornell president vows ‘serious look’ at fraternities in wake of rape allegations from the morgue, 4 Oct 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.