A person walks past the Ithaca Police Department headquarters on March 22, 2021, in Ithaca, New York.
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John Munson/AP
Allegations by a former Cornell University student who says she was drugged and gang raped at the school in 2024 have led to widespread condemnation from the school and investigators.
The case also raises questions about how police handled the initial investigation.
Earlier this month, the woman, known as Jane Doe, filed a civil suit detailing allegations against seven men who she said assaulted her. Prosecutors later reopened the investigation.
Details of the lawsuit differed from a statement Doe provided to Cornell University police following the alleged 2024 attack, according to excerpts shared by Tompkins County Prosecutor Matthew Van Houten. The 2024 declaration largely explains why his office did not pursue criminal charges two years ago, he said.
Van Houten said Doe’s 2024 statement “did not allege that she was drugged against her will or gang raped” and “describes her participation in the drug use and sexual conduct as voluntary, knowing and consensual.”
There are, however, several instances in Doe’s statement shared by Van Houten where she said she did not remember certain details, did not consent to certain activities, and became increasingly intoxicated as the night progressed.
Van Houten said in an interview with NPR member station WSKG that Doe’s statement was taken by “an experienced investigator” trained in sexual abuse investigations “over an extended period of time.” Cornell University police did not respond to questions about the details of the length, time and location of the interview or other details about how to interview prior to publication.
Many police officers lack training on responding to victims of sexual assault
Trauma researchers and advocates for sexual assault victims say an initial statement like Doe’s often cannot be taken at face value and that further investigation must be conducted.
Gaps and inconsistencies in an assault survivor’s statement to police are often the result of the victim’s trauma and the way police question her – not evidence that she is unreliable, according to Dave Thompson, a certified forensic investigator and consultant who trains investigators in interrogation techniques.
“Anyone who interacts with survivors, victims or witnesses of crimes should be trained in a trauma-informed approach,” he said.
This is an approach that trains investigators to act in ways that anticipate how trauma survivors might respond differently after an assault, which may include impacts on their behavior and memory. This approach centers the survivor and aims to avoid questioning approaches that could harm them again.
Rebecca Campbell, a psychology professor at Michigan State University, said this is all done with an understanding that their stories may not be clear, complete or chronological at first.
But most U.S. police officers are not trained in this approach, Campbell said. For almost 30 years, she has studied trauma and sexual assault.
A study conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics for the Census of Law Enforcement Training Academies analyzed the areas offered to police recruits during basic training. The average duration of the core training program was 833 hours.
At nearly 94 percent of police academies surveyed that offered training on sexual assault, trainees received an average of seven hours of training on the issue, according to the report. They received six hours of training on victim response at nearly 88% of the academies that offered education on this issue.
Instead of meaningful training, Campbell explained, “What we consistently find in research is that responding officers and detectives very often treat the victim as the subject to be questioned and interrogated. »
This impacts victims’ ability to share necessary information with investigators and ultimately affects an investigation.
The sources for this story generally spoke about sexual assault investigations and are not involved in the Cornell investigation or police interviews.
What is the impact of trauma on the body?
Scientists and researchers have examined how survivors of severe trauma, including sexual assault, can often have difficulty remembering events leading up to, during, and after the event.
“Our memories don’t work like a VCR that we can just rewind, start playing and memorize from start to finish. We can remember the sound. The feeling of an impact. Maybe a scream. We remember bits and pieces,” said Thompson, the certified forensic interviewer.
It’s important for investigators to know that, too, rather than dismissing memory lapses as falsified details or concluding that the story has too many inconsistencies, he said.
It’s important “not to expect the memory to go from start to finish,” he said. “And we allow that person a safe space to remember, recall and retrieve the details that may be most relevant or present in their state of mind.”
Tracy Matheson created a foundation, Project Beloved, to create special police interrogation rooms across the country to make the environment for victims reporting a traumatic event more calming and conducive to this approach.
Matheson’s 22-year-old daughter, Molly Jane, was raped and murdered in 2017. Her killer, Reginald Kimbro, was sentenced to multiple life sentences for the murder of his daughter and another woman and other sexual assaults in 2022.
After this tragedy, Matheson learned about the impact of brain trauma. She learned that during these events, the brain goes into survival mode.
“It’s about spotting things that may seem insignificant, but in the long run corroborate the events reported by the victim,” Matheson said.
An entrenched problem hampers investigations
Campbell, of Michigan State University, said she could not speak to how the Cornell case was handled. But she said that in her research, prosecutors and police often treated traumatized victims’ inconsistencies as a reason to stop the investigation, citing credibility concerns, rather than as something to follow up on.
“We actually don’t see the same behavior in other types of crimes,” she said.
When there’s a discrepancy, “That’s something that warrants more evidence, more follow-up, more interviews to figure out why there’s a discrepancy or is there really a discrepancy? They don’t do that in sexual assault cases.”
That’s part of the problematic dynamic for victims, who already struggle to report sexual assault because they fear they won’t be believed or helped, she said.
“And they are criticized and skeptical,” Campbell said. “And it becomes a vicious dynamic of more blame, more withdrawal.” Eventually the police shrugged and said, “She didn’t give me the information,” she said.
Data shows that from January 2021 to December 2025, law enforcement documented an average of 127,798 reports of rape, according to RAINN, an anti-sexual assault nonprofit. FBI crime data shows that law enforcement solves 26 percent of reported rape cases. (This may mean that someone has been arrested or a suspect has died and not necessarily that they have been charged or convicted.)
An even grimmer statistic shared by RAINN shows that, based on a 20-year review of reported sexual assault cases, 89 percent of cases were “substantiated,” meaning investigators determined the crime likely occurred. But only 8% of these cases resulted in a conviction.
Campbell said research she and other researchers have done shows that in the vast majority of cases, police make no effort to track down or question suspects.
“And in cases where it’s an assault and it happened between people who know each other and there might be text information and text messages and social media information. Again, research suggests that about 80 percent of the time the police are never going to get that information,” she said.
This is partly due to the complexity of some of these cases, Campbell added. But during her decades of research, she said law enforcement repeatedly told her that resources and personnel were not a priority to help solve these cases.
The Cornell case, unfortunately, shines a light on these long-standing and entrenched patterns, she said.
“We’ve tried, through different initiatives and policy avenues, to create change and make things fair and equitable and trauma-informed,” she said. “It’s like one step forward, two steps back.”
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