A high-profile civil suit involving an alleged gang rape at an Ivy League fraternity house has sent shockwaves from upstate New York to South Florida, reopening painful questions surrounding campus sexual assault, police investigations and student due process.
The controversy centers on a civil lawsuit filed by a woman identified as Jane Doe, who alleges she was drugged and gang-raped for several hours inside Cornell University’s Chi Phi fraternity house two years ago.
While a special prosecutor has now re-examined the case following widespread outrage over initial investigative lapses, the fallout reached Nova Southeastern University in Davie, where Jonathan Newell — one of the seven men accused and one of two expelled from Cornell — recently enrolled.
In an interview broadcast Friday by WLRN, Tamara Lave, a law professor at the University of Miami and author of Sexual Assault on Campus: Defending Due Process, was critical of the initial handling of the case by both law enforcement and local prosecutors.
She told South Florida Roundup host Tim Padgett that that police failed to execute basic investigative steps such as seizing electronic devices or conducting forensic testing.
"The police, it's their job, they're the frontline people in a criminal case," she said. "They need to get the evidence that would allow a prosecutor to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.
"They did not subpoena the cell phones... They should have taken hair samples from the accused students to see if they had ketamine," she told WLRN.
Lave was especially shocked at the fact that prosecutors never met with the victim.
"What I understand is all the prosecutor did was review the statement provided from the university... the university did not provide a statement that Jane [Doe] made in which she said that she was raped. The prosecutor did not read that. And the prosecutor never met with Jane."
"Prosecutors are ministers of justice," Lave said. "And when they have accusations that are this serious, they are obliged to do more than this prosecutor did here."
Beyond the legal missteps, Lave said among the most disturbing aspects of the case was that there were more than 50 people on a group Snapchat.
Media outlets reported that during the night of the alleged rape an explicit message in the group chat told members that the body of Jane Doe was “free.”
"What's so distressing about this is the fact that people paid so little to the humanity of Jane, and that they didn't stop their friends and their brothers from doing something that was so despicable," Lave told WLRN.
The case has also sparked discussion over whether higher education institutions should admit students who face serious allegations or expulsion elsewhere. NSU officials said they were unaware of the rape allegations when Newell enrolled at its school.
This week, Jane Doe's lawyer, Thomas Giuffra told The Associated Press that his client was “misled” about the status of the criminal investigation in the weeks after she went to police.
He said that — even as she took her allegations about a 2024 gang rape at the Chi Phi fraternity house through Cornell's internal disciplinary process — the university's police department gave her the impression that a criminal investigation was continuing.
In fact, the criminal inquiry ended almost as soon as it began.
Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten, the local prosecutor, made the decision not to go forward with a criminal case within days of the woman giving her first substantial interviews to police.
Van Houten has said that he asked Cornell's police department to convey the decision to the woman, but never spoke personally to her or her lawyer.
Giuffra said the woman was told that the criminal investigation was ongoing.
“I think she was misled. She was told it was still — they weren’t going to prosecute, but they were still investigating," Giuffra said. ”I was involved with this case early on. I thought they were still investigating. It was news to me that they weren’t doing anything."
