James prejudged the Cornell case. Now she's investigating it | Opinion
Since "Jane Doe" filed a civil lawsuit in September alleging she was drugged and gang raped at a Cornell University fraternity house in 2024, the court of public opinion has loudly convicted the seven
young men she accuses – facts be damned.
Unfortunate as that may be, it's par for the course in our social-media-obsessed, 24/7 news world.
What's far more disturbing is that the officials now overseeing a criminal investigation into the case seem to have prematurely assigned blame, too. On Oct. 1, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul appointed the state's top prosecutor, Attorney General Letitia James, to investigate the allegations. Both women are Democrats, and both are up for reelection.
James, you may recall, is best known for her civil fraud case against President Donald Trump. Putting her in charge of a case this explosive, weeks before she and Hochul face voters, makes it blatantly political.
It's also wildly inappropriate, given what she has already said about it.
James immediately cast blame with her social media post
Days before her appointment, after news broke that the local district attorney was reopening the criminal investigation, James posted this on her official Facebook page: "What this young woman has been forced to endure is horrific and unacceptable. I'm holding her in my heart and in my prayers. To her, and to all survivors: you're not alone. We stand with you."
That isn't the language of a prosecutor weighing evidence. James had plainly made up her mind about what happened that night in October 2024 before digging into the facts or opening her own investigation.
At a news conference the day after her appointment, a reporter asked Hochul and James whether the social media post was appropriate.
“I will not comment on a Facebook post,” James said, as if it were someone else's.
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Hochul came to her defense, saying she has "every confidence in our attorney general to do what she has always done – look at the facts, examine the record, and draw the proper conclusions. That's exactly what's going to happen in this case."
Why should anyone believe that? The seven accused men have every reason to worry about an investigator who has already taken sides.
Hochul should have left the investigation to the district attorney
In a statement on X, Hochul said she acted because "new information has raised serious questions about how this case was handled, and I've lost faith in the Tompkins County DA's ability to fairly oversee it."
That's unfair to Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten, who had already reopened the investigation in light of the new allegations in Jane Doe's lawsuit.
The governor should have let his investigation play out.
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Van Houten has explained why his office declined to prosecute. In her 2024 sworn statement to university police, he said, Jane Doe described her participation in the drug use and sexual conduct as "voluntary, conscious, and consensual."
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That, he concluded, didn't meet New York's criminal standard.
Van Houten said he invited Jane Doe to contact him with any further questions or concerns but heard nothing from her for two years. The lawsuit was the first he learned of her “dramatically” changed account.
Van Houten has also acknowledged that he never saw the full transcript of Jane Doe's interviews with Cornell police before deciding not to bring charges. But he'd already chosen the remedy: reopening the case so it could be "prosecuted in the most objective and impartial means available – by testimony to the Tompkins County Grand Jury." He assigned a senior prosecutor (a woman) from his office with "significant experience" prosecuting sex crimes.
That should have been enough.
Instead, the governor sided with the court of public opinion and handed the case to a prosecutor who announced where she stood before seeing the evidence. Whatever the outcome, it will be tainted.
That hardly sounds like justice.
Ingrid Jacques is a columnist at USA TODAY. Contact her at ijacques@usatoday.com or on X: @Ingrid_Jacques
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