ITHACA, N.Y. (The Daily Whatever Press) — Yessssssss! This just in, Letitia James is taking over The Cornell 7 case! New York’s attorney general, the woman who spent years dragging Donald Trump’s business empire into court, has been named special prosecutor in the alleged 2024 gang rape at Cornell’s Chi Phi fraternity house, and the DA she’s replacing would very much like you to know he is a man of evidence, not emotion.
Sure thing, dude. You never went out and, you know, collected the evidence.
Gov. Kathy Hochul signed the executive order Thursday night, saying she’d lost faith in the local investigation, including Tompkins County DA Matthew Van Houten. So James now owns the case. Translated from Albany: Matt, leave the badge on the desk. No, you can’t keep the mug. The grown-ups are driving now.
Quick refresher. In October 2024, Jane Doe says she was drugged and raped by seven men at the Chi Phi house. Her civil lawsuit says that around 1:42am, a brother posted to the frat’s Snapchat group chat that there was a woman upstairs available for sex. No, that’s too calm. The post read: “Free pussy.” A follow-up asked: “Store still open?” That chat had 57 members, and not one of them intervened.
Attorneys for two of the men deny the allegations. Nobody was charged.
How does a case like that end with zero charges? Editing. Jane Doe told Cornell police she could say with 100% confidence she was raped, according to the interview transcript CBS reported this week. That sentence never made it into the six-page statement campus cops handed the DA.
I have line-edited a lot of essays in my life. I have never once cut the thesis.
Van Houten passed without independently investigating anything. Then the lawsuit dropped, and he went on offense, releasing chunks of her statement to the press, including a bit about her “drunken curiousness,” and declaring that prosecutions must be based on “evidence and not emotion.”
Bull. Fucking. Shit.
Back in 2024, Cornell police sent his office a Snapchat screenshot. He had receipts from that night in his hands, and he went with drunken curiousness? Get outta here with that nonsense.
Cornell, meanwhile, issued a statement supporting the DA when he reopened the case last week, then another supporting the governor when she took it away from him. Cornell supports everything. I suppose Cornell would co-sign a ransom note if the font was nice.
Look, I’m a mom of two girls. When a woman says something happened to her, the question is whether anyone in the system bothers to look. For two years, nobody did. Now it’s Letitia James’s case, and she doesn’t strike me as someone who skips page one.
Evidence, not emotion. She’ll start with the transcript, Matt.
I, for one, cannot wait.
More about The Cornell 7:
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The sigh that left my body when i found out it was her. Thank baby Jesus, mary, baby donkey. All of them. 😮💨
Yes! Consequences for perps and those who cover it up including the university, the police and the DA she replaced. FAFO at last?