By Kanishka Singh
WASHINGTON, Oct 1 (Reuters) – New York Governor Kathy Hochul said she signed an executive order on Thursday appointing state Attorney General Letitia James as special prosecutor in the case of the alleged 2024 gang rape of a Cornell University student.
The student filed a civil lawsuit last month saying several members of a campus fraternity drugged and assaulted her in 2024. Hochul said on Thursday that newly released information raised questions about the investigation conducted by the Cornell Police Department and the decision by Tompkins County prosecutors not to prosecute the case.
“I’ve lost faith in the Tompkins County DA’s ability to fairly oversee it (the case),” Hochul said in a statement.
James said her office would “fully and fairly” investigate the allegations.
“The Governor has entrusted my office with this investigation, and we do not take that responsibility lightly,” James said in a statement.
The case raised questions about how law enforcement and the university initially responded after the woman, then 20, made a report to police a few weeks after the alleged incident occurred.
In recent days, several new reports have revealed more about what law enforcement knew in 2024.
CBS New York obtained a copy of the transcript of the alleged victim’s interview with police, which included far more detail than the sworn statement police eventually provided to prosecutors.
The New York Times obtained more than 1,000 pages of material from Cornell’s internal investigation. The documents show that it took some time for the woman to determine that she had been gang-raped, the newspaper reported.
The woman’s lawsuit names as defendants seven fraternity members, the Chi Phi fraternity, Cornell, a bar and her own sorority.
Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten has acknowledged the public outcry about how authorities had handled the case. He said this week his office had reopened the case and would present evidence, including testimony from the woman, to a grand jury for possible indictment.
Van Houten said his office initially declined to pursue charges against the students accused of raping the woman partly because of the constraints of state law. Experts and advocates say it can be more difficult to bring certain rape charges in New York if the plaintiff had chosen to consume intoxicants prior to the alleged assault.
Some lawmakers urged a revamp of the state’s sexual assault statutes to make it easier to prosecute cases involving intoxicated victims.
The New York Times, citing internal Cornell documents, reported that the men all denied any wrongdoing and told school investigators that the sex was consensual.
Cornell has defended its handling of the matter, saying that it launched a comprehensive investigation and barred from campus the Chi Phi chapter, which remains closed. The school imposed a range of discipline on the fraternity members, including expulsions and sanctions.
The interim executive director of the national Chi Phi fraternity, Trey Robb, said in a statement on Wednesday that the Cornell chapter expelled members understood to have been involved in the incident, as did the national fraternity.
(Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Washington; Editing by Sergio Non and Stephen Coates)
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