CNN host Jake Tapper ripped into a district attorney from upstate New York over his handling of a case involving a former Cornell University student who was allegedly raped by seven men at a frat house.
Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten and his office have faced fierce public backlash after the former student, who goes by Jane Doe, filed a lawsuit earlier this month alleging that she was drugged and gang-raped by seven members of the Chi Phi fraternity at Cornell in October 2024.
At one point in the night of the alleged assaults, one of the men sent a message in the fraternity’s Snapchat group saying there was “free p****” and inviting other members to join, according to the suit.
Tapper grilled Van Houten over the fact that no criminal charges were brought against the men for two years, despite the woman, who was a 20-year-old sorority member at the time, reporting the incident to the Cornell University Police Department three weeks after it happened.
“I have a daughter. I can't imagine how mad I would be if a district attorney handled this case that way for my daughter,” Tapper said on his show The Lead Monday. “Do you not acknowledge that your office dropped the ball by not looking more into what happened?”
Van Houten pushed back, telling Tapper, “My job under the New York State Constitution is to apply the penal law of New York State. We are constrained by that law. Whether you agree with it, whether you think someone's conduct is morally repugnant or vulgar or disgusting. I'm still constrained by the law.”
The DA has argued that the accusations provided in Jane Doe’s six-page statement to university police provide no evidence of a lack of consent as defined by New York State law.
Tapper said that he concluded from the summary of the police statement that the DA publicly released “is that she consented to a threesome with two other guys, but she did not consent to the five other guys that came into the room, and that she hid under the covers, and she pushed one away, and nothing that happened with those five other guys sounds consensual at all to me. Am I reading this wrong?”
“Frankly, you are,” Van Houten retorted. “But consent or lack of consent is very much very specific under New York State law.
“You either have to be physically compelled...or you have to be physically helpless, which is unconscious, or you have to be mentally incapacitated, which is having been given drugs without your knowledge that rendered you incapable of consenting — none of those things were articulated in her initial statement.”
According to the DA’s summary of the police statement, the woman said she came to the frat house as a “5 out of 10” on a scale of drunkenness and that she became an “8 out of 10” throughout the night. She also said she took Ketamine multiple times during the night.
Tapper repeatedly mentioned the “free p****” message to Van Houten, asking, “None of that made you think I should interview this woman? I should interview people at the fraternity that night. I should interview her sorority sisters, not because you were trying to find somebody guilty of a crime, but just to get to the bottom of what happened.”
“Well, it is absolutely horrific. You're 100 percent right. We do not independently investigate crimes in the district attorney's office. We rely on the police to investigate those crimes,” Van Houten said, adding that the woman “told the police candidly what she remembered, and maybe she remembers more now. And if she does, then we want to put that in front of the grand jury.”
It was another member of the fraternity who showed the woman the Snapchat message, her lawyer Thomas Giuffra, told the New York Post, calling that student’s actions “honorable.”
Amid the public outrage, Cornell released a statement Monday saying it supports the DA’s decision for the case to be heard by a criminal grand jury.
“Cornell also conducted a thorough Title IX investigation, which is separate from a criminal proceeding, over the course of several months,” the statement read.
“At its conclusion, the hearing panel issued a range of sanctions, which included expulsions and suspensions from Cornell,” the school said, adding that the fraternity chapter was closed in 2024 and remains banned from campus.
But Cornell refused to refund the woman’s tuition after the alleged gang rape so she could transfer to another school, Giuffra told the Post.
“Her dreams were destroyed by a group of men who sought to abuse and humiliate her,” Giuffra said in a statement to The Independent. “She was subjected to unspeakable horrors that I have not seen in my 30 years of handling abuse cases.”
For those affected by rape and sexual abuse, if you are in the United States, you can call Rainn on 800-656-HOPE (4673).
