35% of Cornell undergraduate women reported having been sexually assaulted: Survey
As prosecutors reopened an investigation into a former Cornell University student's allegations of being drugged and gang-raped at a fraternity house in 2024, a state-mandated survey of undergraduate students revealed that more than one-third of undergraduate women said they had experienced sexual assault during their time at the Ivy League university.
According to the school's 2025 Survey of Sexual Assault and Related Misconduct (SARM), 35% of undergraduate women at the Ithaca, New York, school reported experiencing nonconsensual sexual contact involving force or incapacitation since entering Cornell. Among undergraduate men, 8% said they experienced the same.
"Despite a long history of actions to address sexual assault, culminating in Cornell’s Sexual Violence Framework ... rates of sexual assault remain persistently high," according to a summary report released in March by the Cornell University Presidential Task Force on Campus Sexual Assault (TFSA).
The report also found that alcohol played a part in "the majority of reported incidents," with the perpetrator having consumed it prior to the incident in 62% of cases and the victim having done so in 55% of incidents.
"In 50% of cases, respondents reported being conscious but incapacitated by alcohol or drugs during all or part of the incident," according to the report, with 19% saying they were "passed out or unconscious for some or all the time."
Reported instances of sexual assault were significantly higher among Cornell undergraduate women who were "Greek-affiliated" compared to those who were not: 52% to 29%, respectively, according to the report.
"If there's one takeaway from all of this, it's that we know for certain that sexual assault is underreported," Jennifer Simmons Kaleba, vice president of communications for the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), the nation's largest anti-sexual assault organization, told ABC News.
"Whether the numbers grew 2%, 3%, something like that, the reality is it's probably much higher than that," Kaleba said.
Kaleba said her group, which runs a national sexual assault hotline, estimates that 1 in 6 freshman women experience sexual assault in their first year of college, and that 1 in 4 undergraduate women and 1 in 14 undergraduate men experience rape or sexual assault by force or incapacitation before they leave school.
Tompkins County, New York, District Attorney Matthew Van Houten said this week that his office is reopening an investigation into the 2024 alleged "gang rape" of a former female student by seven former and current members of the Chi Phi fraternity after the alleged victim, identified only as Jane Doe, filed a civil lawsuit earlier this month, sparking outrage when news of the suit became public.
Cornell’s Chi Phi chapter was barred from campus after the Oct. 19, 2024, rape allegations were made. Trey Robb, the interim executive director of Chi Phi fraternity, said in a statement that all the accused members were kicked out of the Cornell chapter within three days of Jane Doe filing her police report in 2024.
Three of the defendants named in the suit have denied the allegations through their attorneys.
"Any suggestion that the University did not impose consequential punishments for those involved is false," Cornell said in a statement Monday, in part.
In an earlier statement, Cornell said it conducted a thorough Title IX investigation of Jane Doe's allegations. "At its conclusion, the hearing panel issued a range of sanctions, which included expulsions and suspensions from Cornell," the university's statement said.
Van Houten said in a statement that his office is considering whether to bring criminal charges related to the incident, though he said the allegations in the civil complaint are "dramatically different" than the woman’s statement to police two years ago. He further said that his office did not bring charges in 2024 because the woman’s statement to Cornell police officers at the time did not allege she was drugged without her knowledge or that she did not consent to engage in sexual activities.
"It's our intention to present the case to the Tompkins County grand jury with Jane Doe's cooperation," Van Houten told ABC News. "We want to reexamine whether there's additional evidence that we were not aware of in November of 2024, that exists now that would change our assessment of the case and would result in the grand jury finding that there was criminal conduct."
Kaleba told ABC News that some victims of sexual assault often do not recall exact details of what occurred to them until years later.
"One of the first things that people will say on the hotline is, ‘I think something happened,'" Kaleba said. "And so what we want is some black-and-white narrative that says everybody absolutely recognizes what sexual assault is and it's this and it's that, and the victim must also know exactly what happened to them and retell it to the detail with exactly the right emotion for the remainder of their lives."
"That is profoundly unrealistic and another avenue to blame victims," according to Kaleba.
