Charlotte Shields-Rossi & Josh Imhof | a&e editor & news editor

After fierce public backlash, Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten called to reopen a criminal investigation for an alleged rape that happened at a Cornell University fraternity in October 2024 following a civil lawsuit by the alleged victim, Jane Doe, and her lawyers.

While the alleged rape happened in October 2024, the civil suit and reopening of the investigation happened on Sept. 18, 2026 during Campus Sexual Violence Awareness Month.

Elizabeth Skrinjar, president of the Duquesne’s chapter of Students Against Sexual Violence, said that the timing of the news was significant.

“It goes to show that what we’re doing as a society right now, it’s not enough. What happened to Jane Doe is horrible, but it’s not new. It’s not the first time this will happen. It’s not the last time it will happen,” Skrinjar said.

In the civil lawsuit, Jane Doe alleges that seven members of the Chi Phi fraternity drugged, assaulted and raped her at the fraternity house. The fraternity has now been barred from campus and although the frat members faced no criminal consequences for their actions, punishments from the university included suspensions, expulsions and reflection essays.

On top of her duties as president of the campus organization, Skrinjar serves as the president of Alpha Gamma Delta. She said she wasn’t shocked hearing the news.

“It was so vile and to feel no sense of surprise, that was the hardest thing for me,” Skrinjar said.
 

Mary Kate Kitsmiller, senior health sciences major, hopes that the discussion around this case and sexual assault in general stops becoming what she calls “a gender war.”
 

“Sexual assault happens to both parties, if they’re not held accountable everyone is harmed for that,” she said. “Other universities need to evaluate their Title IX policies and how they deal with cases like this.”
 

The Duquesne Title IX and Sexual Misconduct Prevention and Response Office is located in the Gormley Student Union. Although Title IX was not able to comment on the ongoing situation at Cornell, Alicia Simpson, Title IX Coordinator and Director of Sexual Misconduct Prevention and Response, provided a statement to The Duke.
 

“Duquesne’s Title IX Office takes all reports of sexual misconduct seriously and recognizes that experiencing sexual misconduct can be deeply personal and that individuals may have different needs and concerns. When the office receives a report, we reach out to the impacted individual to provide information about available resources, supports and the options available under the university’s Sexual Misconduct Policy (TAP No. 31),” Simpson said in a statement to The Duke.

Matthew Seapker, secretary of the Alpha Delta Pi Chi fraternity and junior international security studies major, said that he was disappointed in how the case has been handled.

“It sets a bad precedent,” Seapker said. “It would make people on campus feel unsafe because who knows what else could have been handled improperly or who knows what else could have been swept under the rug.”

He said he thinks it’s important for organizations like fraternities to hold members accountable and address these situations as they come up.

“We all feel strongly about this,” Seapker said.

Skrinjar said she agreed.

“I hope that [men] will begin to look at their friends or their brothers in a fraternity and know when it’s time to say ‘stop,’” she said.

Kenzie Bole, vice president of Gamma Phi Beta sorority and senior early childhood and special education major, said that her sorority has meetings about safety and encourages members to stay in groups when they are doing social events to make sure no one is left behind.

She hoped that this situation was an eye opener for students that sexual assaults and rapes in college are a large and unresolved issue.

“They need to be able to be supported and have a voice and be heard the first time, not just having something happen over and over again and then taking accountability,” Bole said.

While the case has been officially reopened by investigators, it is still unclear whether or not anyone will be prosecuted.

Before this happens, authorities will be looking at interviews, electronic records, social service reports, psychiatric records and other evidence to determine if the case is strong enough to go to trial, said Marian Braccia, Director of the LL.M. in Trial Advocacy Program and Practice Professor of Law at Temple.

“A prosecutor’s question in any case is more than simply, ‘Do I believe that something terrible happened?’” she said. “The question for those prosecutors is whether the admissible evidence … can establish a particular criminal offense, and whether the government, or the state, the people can prove every element beyond a reasonable doubt.”

For sexual assault and rape cases in general, this can be difficult, Braccia said.

“Automatically, when you have crimes that are committed by their very nature in private, in intimate spaces and intimate moments, there is going to be a lack of corroboration,” she said. “Once that criminal behavior takes place behind closed doors in a setting as private and intimate as a bedroom, you lose the ability to capture surveillance.”

This means that proving something happened often relies on the victim’s testimony alone, which poses its own challenges, especially when intoxicating substances are involved, she said.

“That may impact how much a witness can remember or can accurately remember because you know the effect on cognition of those substances,” Braccia said.

Jane Doe reported being intoxicated by alcohol and ketamine, according to the civil lawsuit.

In New York State, where Cornell University is located, there is a “voluntary intoxication loophole” where if someone willingly ingested a substance that impaired their ability to say “yes or no” it can be a struggle for prosecutor to bring forth rape or sexual assault charges.

Braccia said that female victims of sexual assault and rape also have to deal with institutional barriers.

“I think there’s a very long standing and deep seated misogyny in our criminal legal system, in our society at large, it exists in our history, in our anthropology, in our literature, and in our crime code,” she said.

She said that on top of this, victims must also deal with the pressure of having to retell their story.

“I cannot imagine what a harrowing and intimidating experience it would be for any victim of a crime … to have to stand up in a courtroom and introduce themselves, put their names on the record, have their likeness out there for the world to see, their identity revealed, and have the most traumatic and again harrowing experience of their life explained in explicit detail,” Braccia said.

“It is a horrific, horrendous experience for victims of crime to testify in open court.”

Charlotte Shields-Rossi can be reached at shieldsrossi@duq.edu

Josh Imhof can be reached at imhofj@duq.edu