This story originally appeared in New York Focus, a nonprofit news publication investigating power in New York. Sign up for their newsletter here.
Jane Doe is not the only recent student to pursue legal action against Cornell University over its handling of sexual assault on campus, New York Focus has learned.
Two female students sued the school in November 2023, alleging that the university did not take them seriously when they submitted complaints outlining how they were each “sexually, physically and verbally assaulted” by the same male student.
And they say they aren’t alone. In separate sworn affidavits, they each alleged there were multiple other students who also filed complaints with the school’s office that investigates sexual assault against the same male student.
“At least five-ten others are known to have been sexually abused” by the student, their lawyer alleged in a complaint filed in Tompkins County Supreme Court, “and it is believed that many more were abused but have yet to come forward.” (New York Focus is not naming the plaintiffs or the male student to protect their privacy.)
The case appears to have been previously unreported. It was filed under the state’s Adult Survivors Act, a landmark piece of legislation that temporarily allowed survivors of sexual abuse to bring civil lawsuits outside the state’s typical three-year statute of limitations. Survivors have brought thousands of lawsuits against schools and colleges under the act and a similar law that applies to child sexual abuse.
Cornell University, which did not respond to repeated requests for comment, asked the court to dismiss the lawsuit, arguing that the allegations that the university acted negligently or wrongfully did not meet certain legal standards.
The male student, who was also named as a defendant in the suit, denied all allegations of abuse in court filings. His lawyer did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
A trial court denied the university’s and male student’s motions to dismiss the suit. The case is scheduled to move to trial next year, offering the public a rare window into Cornell’s handling of sexual assault allegations after the university received national attention in September, when a former student sued the school over its handling of an alleged 2024 sexual assault at a fraternity.
In a sworn affidavit, one of the plaintiffs in the 2023 lawsuit alleged she was repeatedly assaulted by a male student between June and “September/October” 2018 on the university’s sprawling campus in Ithaca. The second plaintiff alleged in her affidavit that she was “sexually, physically, and verbally assaulted” May 2021 — by the same male student. The lawsuit offers few details about the alleged assaults.
The plaintiffs’ attorney did not respond to requests for comment, but according to the lawsuit, both plaintiffs filed complaints with the university’s Title IX office, which investigates allegations of sexual harassment and misconduct.
The first plaintiff said that she believed other students had submitted Title IX complaints about the same student before she submitted her own in fall 2018.
The second plaintiff said she learned that a third, unnamed student filed a complaint against the same person around the same time as her, in August 2021. “I learned that this investigation was initiated after a different survivor of a sexual assault [by the male student] filed a Title IX complaint,” the second student wrote.
“If there were this many complaints that they were investigating, why hadn’t they gotten him off their campus?” asked Elizabeth Abdnour, an attorney who files Title IX lawsuits on behalf of survivors in Michigan and who once worked as a Title IX investigator.
The outcome of the first complaint is unclear, but the second one was dismissed after the male student left the university, according to the lawsuit. Abdnour noted that rules passed by the first Trump administration in 2020 formally released schools from any obligation under federal law to continue investigations into students that graduate or withdraw.
“Cornell is doing exactly what this system is intended to do,” Abdnour said, “and right now, this system is intended to silence survivors.”
It is unclear if the two women’s allegations were ever reported to law enforcement. In their lawsuits, they accuse Cornell of failing to report the allegations.
In response to a records request from New York Focus, the Ithaca Police Department said that it did not have records of any cases involving the male student as a suspect. The Tompkins County Sheriff’s Office has not yet fulfilled records requests from New York Focus.
The 2023 lawsuit is one of two filed against the university in recent years over its handling of sexual assault on campus. The other, filed in September by a former student, identified as Jane Doe, drew intense scrutiny after the student paper, the Cornell Daily Sun, published a harrowing exposé about the case. Doe alleged that she was assaulted over a number of hours at a fraternity by multiple men, all of whom have denied claims of wrongdoing.
Her lawsuit challenged Cornell’s response to the alleged assault. Doe said that the Title IX office took more than two months to look into her complaint after she reported the alleged assault to the university’s private police force. She noted that some of the accused men were issued temporary suspensions and “afforded the opportunity to mitigate their conduct by submitting essays.”
“We as an administration and we as a community must do better,” Michael Kotlikoff, the president of Cornell, said in an eight-minute video released in early October. The university has appointed Sally Yates, a former US deputy attorney general, to review the university’s process for addressing sexual assault allegations.
Last week, New York Attorney General Letitia James announced that she would appoint a former federal prosecutor to reinvestigate the case.
Lawmakers and Governor Kathy Hochul, an ex-officio member of Cornell’s board, have also said that they will modify the so-called voluntary intoxication loophole in New York law, which currently makes it much harder for prosecutors to prove that a survivor was incapacitated and unable to consent to sex if they first consumed alcohol or other substances voluntarily.
Meanwhile, the 2023 case has been in the discovery phase for a year, and may move to trial next year. Cornell and the male student initially filed a motion to try to have the case thrown out. The university then appealed the judge’s dismissal of that motion, filing repeated letters with the court noting alleged issues with its ability to obtain evidence from the plaintiffs.
Sammy Sussman is a freelance investigative reporter based in New York. He is a 2023 graduate of the Columbia Journalism School’s Toni Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism and is currently a researcher at Columbia’s Li Center for Global Journalism.
