Woman told Cornell investigators she 'felt like bait' during alleged gang rape

A woman who says she was gang-raped at a Cornell University fraternity told the school's investigators last year that she “felt like bait” as the attackers were “like lions around me,” according to records from the school’s disciplinary investigation.

The documents, reviewed Friday by The Associated Press, include excerpts of interviews Cornell's investigators did with the woman and the men she accused and shed more light on the university's handling of the case.

While heavily redacted, the records offer a fuller but sometimes conflicting timeline of events and a glimpse at how the men responded to the allegations. Some disputed the woman’s account and said they weren’t involved in any assault.

The woman, identified in court papers only as Jane Doe, sued Cornell and seven former students last month, alleging she was given ketamine and repeatedly assaulted at a fraternity house in October 2024.

She went to campus police three weeks after the encounter and gave a detailed account of what happened, but the local district attorney decided not to file criminal charges or push for more investigation after reviewing a police summary of her interview.

Only the school’s investigation, under the federal Title IX law, persisted, with a goal of deciding discipline for the students involved.

This week, a lawyer for one of the accused men filed documents from the school’s investigation in a lawsuit that seeks to overturn the university’s punishment and remove it from his academic record. They include a 99-page report on a campus hearing panel’s disciplinary findings and a summary of events submitted by the university's lawyers.

Though only a fraction of the thousands of pages amassed in the investigation, the records show the breadth of the university’s inquiry — including 50 interviews with 32 witnesses and 12 days of hearings.

Late Thursday, Gov. Kathy Hochul appointed Attorney General Letitia James as a special prosecutor to lead a renewed criminal investigation, saying she had lost faith in Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten.

According to the Title IX documents filed in court, which are only a portion of the entire investigation, the woman and several of the men gave investigators similar accounts of drug use and sexual activity that took place at the Chi Phi fraternity house — but differed sharply in how much of it was consensual.

The woman had been invited there by a fraternity member for whom she had long held strong romantic feelings and sexual interest, according to the disciplinary panel’s findings. The panel found that she initially consented to sex with that man and one of his friends, though she later alleged in her lawsuit that she had been pressured into taking ketamine, marijuana and alcohol and was too intoxicated to consent.

Then other men began showing up in the room, some drawn by a message one of the fraternity brothers sent to a Snapchat group at 1:42 a.m. using a vulgar term to advertise that a woman's body was freely available. Later, another person in the chat asked if the “shop” was still open.

The woman told investigators that her intoxication had rendered her partly defenseless. She said she remembered smoking marijuana and said she knew she took ketamine, her first time doing so, but didn’t have an independent memory of it. The drug, she said, left her in a state of “vague consciousness."

“You look like an operating human being," she told school investigators at a hearing in May of 2025. "You don’t look dead or asleep necessarily. So, lights are on, but nobody’s home. Your brain is not functioning at its proper level.”

She said some of the men inhaled drugs off her unclothed body.

“I felt like bait. I felt like lions around me. It just was a totally debilitating place to be in," she told investigators.

One of the men the woman accused of snorting drugs off her body — but not participating in other elements of the assault — denied her account.

He told investigators he was in the room for no more than five minutes, and didn’t go there for sex.

“That was not our intentions at all. We were just checking out to see if everything” was OK, he said.

He insisted that he did not see the woman naked at any time — she was under bed coverings, he said — and did not partake in drug use. He said he sat on a couch and chatted for a few minutes, then left after the woman and another man there both indicated they were all right.

A Cornell disciplinary panel later cleared him of sexual assault or exploitation allegations, but found him responsible for attempted sexual exploitation because it didn't believe his claim to have gone to the room for altruistic reasons.

The fraternity member, who is challenging Cornell’s disciplinary process in court, also posted in the Snapchat conversation, saying what was happening in the room was not a joke, adding: “Firsthand pov not a bit.” The student later told investigators he did not remember sending the message, according to Cornell’s account.

In her lawsuit, Jane Doe accused two of the other men who entered the room of performing sex acts on her without her consent, while she was partially incapacitated. She accused another man of kissing her without her consent. According to the Title IX documents, Jane Doe told investigators two other men stood at the foot of the bed acting “more like voyeurs than anything."

The lawsuit seeks to hold all seven men liable for rape. She is asking for unspecified damages.

Cornell hasn’t detailed the results of its investigation, but said it resulted in some students being expelled.

The man who filed the lawsuit challenging his punishment was allowed to stay at Cornell, but he was ordered to stay away from the woman, take a class on sexual harassment and bystander intervention, and write a paper reflecting on the circumstances for which he was found responsible and include a proposal to train other students on preventing sexual harassment.