Text messages and documents from the investigation are providing new details about the night a then-20-year-old Cornell student known as Jane Doe says she was raped by multiple men at a fraternity house in October 2024.
This timeline of her account is based on messages obtained by CBS News, a lengthy interview transcript with campus police and documents from Cornell’s Title IX investigation in the months that followed. Â
Jane Doe has filed a civil lawsuit against seven former fraternity brothers as well as the university and others she alleges failed to protect her. Prosecutors did not charge anyone but have now reopened the criminal investigation.
Here is what we know about her account:
The night of Oct. 19, 2024
Jane Doe, the unnamed woman at the center of the allegations, said she drank vodka until she was intoxicated at a sorority house on the night of Oct. 19, 2024, according to the lawsuit she filed last month.
At 8:30 p.m., she said she and the sorority chapter’s “house mother” took an Uber to a bar in downtown Ithaca, New York, near the Cornell campus. She says she was served more alcohol there despite being underage. By 10 p.m., Jane Doe and other sorority members went to another bar in the area.
It was at 11 p.m. that she went alone to meet up with a friend at the Chi Phi fraternity house, where she claims she was later drugged and raped by multiple men.
AP Photo/Matt Rourke 
Hours at the Chi Phi fraternity house
Jane Doe told police she initially had a consensual sexual encounter at the frat house with two men she knew, which she said she was “OK with.”Â
“Yeah, as much as I can be because, again, I was super drunk when I got there. … But I was pretty OK with all of this,” she said in an interview conducted on Nov. 14 with a Cornell police investigator, university Title IX investigator, victim’s advocate and Jane Doe’s adviser.
But she says the situation quickly spiraled.
By 1:42 a.m., now on Oct. 20, one of the defendants in the lawsuit sent a message in the fraternity chapter’s Snapchat group saying there was a woman upstairs for “free” sex, according to a screengrab included in the lawsuit.
“Shop still open?” one fraternity brother wrote later.Â
The response: “Yea.”Â
Jane Doe alleges in the lawsuit that some of the men pushed her to take ketamine until she was “completely incapacitated,” and multiple men forced sex on her.
“I had become extremely uncomfortable with how this night was turning out, so my thought was, if I do ketamine again, maybe I will pass out. My thought was that if I passed out and these men have sex with me, then they could have been charged with rape at this point,” she would later say in a six-page sworn statement to Cornell police.Â
In documents from Cornell’s Title IX investigation, she described hiding under the covers in a bed as more men came into the room. “I was like literally cornered,” she said. “I’m a naked woman and they are getting in bed with me. And I was like, what the [expletive] is happening?”Â
She lost consciousness around 5:45 a.m., according to the lawsuit.
The days after: “I wasn’t comfortable”
Jane Doe said she awoke later and returned to her room at the sorority house.
She talked about it with roommates that morning, according to documents from Cornell’s Title IX investigation into the matter, which were obtained by CBS News.
One roommate recalls Doe saying, “Oh my goodness, isn’t that crazy?” The roommate said Doe was laughing but seemed to be in shock. The roommate said Doe did not call it rape or assault that morning.Â
“She was kind of recounting it as this sort of crazy thing she had done. And then, as the days went on, I think she kind of came to realize that it was something bad and that she didn’t really enjoy her time there,” the roommate said, according to the Title IX investigation transcript.
A second roommate said Jane Doe told her, “I wasn’t comfortable.”Â
The day after that, Jane Doe spoke about it with her sorority “big sister,” saying: “You may hear some rumors about me, and unfortunately they are true.” According to the Title IX documents, the woman said that Jane Doe had not processed what had happened to her yet.
Oct. 22: Medical clinic visit
On Oct. 22, Jane Doe went to Cornell Health, the medical clinic on the school’s campus, to address a urinary tract infection and was tested for sexually transmitted diseases, her lawyer, Thomas P. Giuffra, said.
“Ms. Doe disclosed to the treating health care professional that she contracted the UTI in a ‘traumatic way,'” Giuffra said in the statement.Â
Despite her reference to trauma, “all the medical professional … did was to advise Ms. Doe to ‘speak with somebody,'” Giuffra claims.Â
“She was not immediately referred for a rape kit,” he said. “By the time she went for the rape kit on 11/7 all of the DNA evidence was gone.”Â
Oct. 22-23: Text messages on “how things went down”
CBS News New York investigative reporter Mahsa Saeidi obtained screenshots from a source of text messages between Jane Doe and one of the defendants accused of rape in the lawsuit.
The messages were sent just a few days after the alleged assault.
The man started by apologizing for “how things went down.” He said his memory was “kinda fuzzy,” and that he and another fraternity brother felt bad for being too intoxicated to “shut it down and kick people out before it got way out of hand.”
Jane Doe replied that her memory was “super clouded too,” and said they had all been heavily intoxicated.Â
She also wrote, “non(e) of the sexual stuff was illegal.” She said she liked being with him and another man. Later, she suggested they smoke together again, “but like leave out the extra 5 billion men and ketamine.”
On Oct. 23, she texted with the friend she met at the Chi Phi house and later named in the lawsuit.Â
“Bro,” she wrote, “everyone knows.” She said the episode was “RUINING my life temporarily” and that all she could do was “sleep and cry all day,” according to the Title IX investigation report obtained by The New York Times.
He responded she didn’t have “anything to be ashamed of.” She said, “You’re right. It’ll get better.”
Late October: Online comments about assault
About a week after the incident, Jane Doe says she saw comments on an online forum about Greek life on campus, in a section on Chi Phi, referring to terrible people who had gang raped a sophomore.
“And that’s kind of when I came to the realization that I had been gang raped,” she said, according to the Title IX investigation documents.
Around that time, the documents show, a roommate said she heard Doe tell one of the men: “You had penetrative sex with me. I had so much ketamine, my eyes were crossed, and you still had sex with me.”Â
Nov. 3 text: “Not consensual”
Jane Doe continued texting with two of the Chi Phi members, and was upset to learn she’d been disinvited from a Halloween party at the frat house, according to The New York Times report on the Title IX documents.
“I knew this was going to happen,” she texted. “The woman will always get the short end of the stick. Yall aren’t my friends. Yall are covering your asses.”
On Nov. 3, she wrote, “let’s be clear that 90% of what happened that night was not consensual,” according to the investigation report. Another text cited in The Times report said she “felt like a sex doll/worker.”
Nov. 7: Sexual assault forensic exam
Jane Doe went to an Ithaca hospital and requested a rape kit on Nov. 7, but by that time, more than two weeks after the night at the frat house, any potential DNA evidence was gone, Giuffra said.
Nov. 8: Reporting it to police
Jane Doe went to the Cornell University Police Department to report the alleged gang rape on Nov. 8, with the encouragement of her friends, according to the lawsuit.
The same day, the Xi Chapter of Chi Phi was placed on suspension and the seven men later named in the lawsuit were also temporarily suspended by Cornell as the school began its investigation.
Nov. 14-15: Jane Doe’s police interview
On Nov. 14, Jane Doe sat down for an interview with a Cornell University police investigator, a Title IX investigator, a victim advocate and Jane Doe’s adviser to detail her allegations.Â
“I can say with 100% confidence I was raped,” she told them, according to a transcript obtained by CBS News New York.
According to the transcript, Jane Doe described drinking and using drugs that night and said she had gaps in her memory.
The transcript shows she distinguished the initial sexual activity from what she says happened later, and when asked whether she was OK with the initial encounter, she said, “Yeah, as much as I can be because, again, I was super drunk when I got there … But I was pretty OK with all of this.”
Later she described feeling coerced and tired and giving in, and said she was “completely and totally incapacitated.”
She said she didn’t remember the end of the night “where I was raped” and didn’t know how many people had sex with her.
She also said, according to the transcript, “And then, of course, I was being hit at the same time. Physically hit very, very hard.”
The transcript shows the investigator documenting her account, reading it back and asking her to clarify or correct it.
When she returned for a second day, Jane Doe reviewed the revised six-page statement. Before signing, the transcript shows Jane Doe said, “I’m very confident about this.”
No charges filed
No criminal charges were filed against the seven men accused by Jane Doe in the investigation.
Cornell conducted an internal review and hearings. The school said two of the men were expelled, two were suspended for at least two semesters, one had already graduated before any punishment could be handed down, and two were found not to be responsible for sexual misconduct.
Her lawyer says Jane Doe dropped out of school after the incident.
September 2026: Lawsuit filed, investigation reopened
Jane Doe filed a civil lawsuit against the seven former fraternity brothers, Cornell University, Chi Phi and others on Sept. 16, 2026, nearly two years after the alleged attack.
On Sept. 28, Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten confirmed he reopened the criminal investigation.
Van Houten told CBS News New York’s Mahsa Saeidi that he never saw the transcript of Jane Doe’s interview in which she said she had “100% confidence” in the rape allegation. Â
“I never saw it, never heard it until tonight,” Van Houten said. He added, “If that kind of thing was omitted from a statement, if it is true, it needs to be fully investigated by someone outside of Cornell.”Â
Cornell University said its police department shared the victim’s sworn six-page statement and the Snapchat screenshot with the DA’s office.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul says Cornell has agreed to hire outside counsel for an independent investigation, and she appointed state Attorney General Letitia James to serve as special prosecutor in the case.
