Hochul Strips Tompkins County DA of Cornell Rape Case, Hands It to AG Letitia James

Since Gov. Kathy Hochul called for an independent probe on Sept. 30 after DA Matthew Van Houten said he'd never seen the accuser's full police transcript, Hochul has gone further: she signed an executive order Thursday night stripping Van Houten of the criminal investigation and handing it to Attorney General Letitia James.

"Newly released information continues to raise serious questions about the investigation conducted by the Cornell Police Department and the decision by the Tompkins County District Attorney not to prosecute an alleged sexual assault on Cornell University's campus in October 2024," Hochul said in her statement. She said the discrepancies had "undercut my faith, and the public's faith," in Van Houten's ability to handle the case.

James, who has been New York's attorney general since 2019, now has authority to investigate, present evidence to a grand jury, and prosecute if warranted. "Every New Yorker deserves to know that when they report a crime, it will be investigated fully and fairly," James said in her own statement. "I stand ready to lead a process New Yorkers can trust, guided by the facts and the law."

What changed, and what didn't

Van Houten had already announced Sept. 28 that his office would reopen the case and bring evidence to a grand jury, citing new information surfaced in the civil lawsuit filed by the accuser, identified only as Jane Doe. He has maintained that her original 2024 statement to police, as he understood it, "described her participation in drug use and sexual conduct as voluntary, conscious, and consensual." This week he told CBS News he had relied on a written statement drafted by a campus police officer and signed by Doe, not the full interview transcript CBS later obtained.

That transcript, reported in detail by the Daily Mail and CBS News, shows Doe telling a Cornell police investigator in a November 2024 interview that she could "say with 100 percent confidence I was raped," while also describing parts of the night as voluntary and answering follow-up questions about whether she said "no" or "I'm tired" to one man. The discrepancy between that nuanced account and the DA's public characterization of a flatly "consensual" encounter is what triggered Hochul's loss of confidence, according to her own statement.

James's appointment effectively ends Van Houten's role in deciding whether charges get filed, though it's unclear from Hochul's order whether his office retains any formal function going forward. Neither Hochul's office nor James's statement addressed that directly.

The underlying allegations

Jane Doe's lawsuit, filed Sept. 16 against seven then-members of Cornell's Chi Phi fraternity and the university, alleges she was drugged with what she was told was ketamine and sexually assaulted for hours at the fraternity house in October 2024, with a Snapchat message allegedly sent to the chapter's group chat around 1:42 a.m. suggesting a woman upstairs was available for sex, according to CBS News. She reported the incident to Cornell police roughly three weeks later.

Her attorney, Thomas Giuffra, has said Tompkins County investigators never followed up with her beyond that initial campus police contact. Cornell's own internal disciplinary process expelled two of the seven men and gave the other five lesser sanctions, including suspension, according to Giuffra. None of the seven has been criminally charged.

Lawyers for two of the men named in the suit have denied the allegations; one said his client never touched the woman or used drugs that night, The Guardian reported. The Chi Phi national fraternity called the allegations "deeply concerning" in a Sept. 18 statement and said its local chapter has been barred from campus indefinitely. Cornell, a private university, agreed Wednesday to hire outside counsel for an independent review of how it handled Doe's complaint, a concession that came only after public pressure from Hochul and others.

The fair question critics will ask

Handing a politically charged local sex-assault case to the state's attorney general, who built her national profile suing President Trump's business empire and winning a roughly $454 million judgment against him, invites an obvious question: does this set a precedent for governors to override elected local prosecutors whenever a case generates enough public outrage? Tompkins County voters elected Van Houten; he wasn't removed by them, by a court, or by any finding of misconduct, only by a governor's executive order citing "undercut" confidence. No charges, ethics complaint, or judicial finding against Van Houten has been announced, and he has defended his original decision as consistent with the evidence he says he was given at the time.

What happens next is genuinely open. James's office has not said when a grand jury might convene or what timeline the investigation will follow. Van Houten has not said whether he will contest the reassignment. And Cornell's outside-counsel review, agreed to Wednesday, has no announced completion date either.