Seven men are named in a civil lawsuit alleging a female Cornell student was drugged with ketamine and repeatedly raped over seven hours at the Chi Phi fraternity house in October 2024. She reported the assault three weeks later. No one was arrested. Two were expelled. Five resumed their studies after writing an essay, attending a workshop, or serving a short suspension. The case went dormant until the lawsuit went public in September 2026 — nearly two years later. The Tompkins County DA, Matthew Van Houten, reopened the investigation on Monday, citing allegations in the civil suit that were "dramatically different" from the woman's original sworn statement to Cornell police. He defended his initial decision not to prosecute, noting her November 2024 statement described her participation in drug use and sexual conduct as "voluntary, conscious, and consensual." The DA's framing is precise and defensive: he could not have known what she had not yet alleged. Text messages obtained by CBS News complicate the picture further. In exchanges days after the alleged assault, the unnamed male defendant apologized for "how things went down" and said his memory was "kinda fuzzy." He and another man present said they regretted being too intoxicated to "shut it down and kick people out before it got way out of hand." The woman replied her memory was "super clouded too" and wrote that "non[e] of the sexual stuff was illegal" — before adding they should smoke again, "but like leave out the extra 5 billion men and ketamine." Snapchat messages from the night itself, reviewed by CBS, show a member of the Chi Phi Actives group chat writing there was "free pussy upstairs" while the woman was in the house. A later message asked "Shop still open?" The response: "Yea." The woman's attorney, Thomas Giuffra, said she was in denial, traumatized, intoxicated to the point of incapacity, and was trying to extract information from a defendant she couldn't afford to antagonize. The woman's six-page statement to Cornell police, summarized by Van Houten, acknowledges she initially consented to sex with two of the men before others arrived and joined in. She said she was plied with alcohol, marijuana, and ketamine, was slapped multiple times, and felt she could not escape a room of "predatory, fraternity men" with her phone on the other side of the room. Two defendants — Kretzschmar and Norris — have denied involvement. A third, Diego Sarabia, was fired from Wells Fargo after the case resurfaced. What this case maps is not unique. It is the standard institutional pipeline for campus sexual assault in the US: a traumatized victim gives an initial account that minimizes or normalizes what happened, university disciplinary processes apply trivial sanctions, prosecutors decline charges based on the minimized account, and the case dies — until someone files a civil suit and the full picture emerges in discovery. Every institution in the chain optimized for its own liability exposure, not for justice or truth-finding. The reopened investigation will now test whether the DA's office can build a criminal case from evidence that has aged two years, with text messages that defense attorneys will weaponize and a victim whose initial statement contradicts her later allegations. The Snapchat messages — "free pussy upstairs," "shop still open" — suggest premeditation and coordination that no amount of post-hoc text cherry-picking can neutralize. But the gap between the first statement and the civil suit is the terrain every defense lawyer in America knows how to exploit.
