Cornell names former acting US attorney-general to lead review on rape allegations

• Cornell University has appointed Sally Yates to lead an independent review of a former student’s rape claim and the school’s sexual assault policies.
• The case has caused anger after Jane Doe sued Cornell, saying it mishandled her report and failed to investigate properly after an alleged 2024 fraternity assault.
• Yates will review support and investigation rules, while state and campus probes continue; the case has renewed national debate on campus sexual assault.

Cornell University named Sally Yates, the former acting US attorney-general, on Oct 6 to lead an independent internal review of a former student’s rape claim amid growing outrage about how it was first handled.

Yates, 62, will also examine the school’s policies related to sexual assault allegations, including how they are investigated and what support is given to students, the university said in a statement.

Anne Smalling, the head of the committee that hired Yates, told The New York Times that the university was obligated to the woman who had filed the rape complaint.

“We owe it to her and to our community to take a hard look at what happened so that we can determine what we can do better around both prevention and response,” she said.

Yates and the white-collar law firm King and Spalding, where she is a partner, will “have independence in conducting the review”, Cornell said in a statement on Oct 6.

Students and politicians have demanded answers from Cornell after the former student sued the university, seven men, a fraternity and her sorority in September, claiming she was sexually assaulted in October 2024 at a fraternity party. She claimed the university allowed a culture to flourish that led to the assault, and then did not conduct a thorough and proper investigation after she alerted campus police.

Her claims have set off a wave of shock and anger across the country and renewed national conversations over sexual assault on college campuses.

Three weeks after the incident in 2024, the woman, identified as Jane Doe in court papers, filed a report with campus police, which was then passed to the Tompkins County district attorney, who declined to file charges.

All of the men have denied any wrongdoing. None of the men have been charged with a crime. Their fraternity, Chi Phi, has been banned from campus.

The university, though, conducted its own months-long investigation, which includes more than 1,000 pages of transcripts, text messages, hours of interviews with a dozen people and the woman’s statement to police, which she signed.

A three-member panel at the school met on Zoom over 12 days in May 2025 and expelled two men, barred one who had graduated from campus, suspended two and gave lighter punishments to the rest, according to the documents.

The panel did not conclude that Jane Doe was sexually assaulted by all the men she had accused, according to discipline summaries reviewed by the Times.

The district attorney, Matthew Van Houten, has said that the Cornell University Police Department forwarded only a six-page summary to him. But, according to the records, the police did offer Van Houten more evidence to review, but he declined to do so.

Governor Kathy Hochul rebuked Van Houten on Oct 1 and appointed the state’s attorney-general, Letitia James, to review the evidence and determine whether criminal charges should be filed.

It is a common practice for universities to turn to outside law firms when faced with a significant public scandal, and the reactions to those inquiries have typically been mixed.

In 2011, Penn State hired former Federal Bureau of Investigation director Louis Freeh of the firm Freeh, Sporkin & Sullivan to identify what the university might have known about the allegations of child abuse against Jerry Sandusky, a former assistant football coach.

Freeh delivered a damning indictment that declared several leaders had known about the abuse and concealed it from law enforcement. Critics said he had overstepped his mandate.

Columbia University also commissioned Joan Loughnane, a partner at Sidley Austin, to conduct an external investigation into the school’s handling of sexual abuse allegations made against former Columbia gynaecologist Robert Hadden in 2012. In her findings, released in 2026, Loughnane documented systematic failures by administrators to address his abuse, but the university was criticised for the slow process of the report.

Yates is a high-profile choice for a role that will inevitably be deeply scrutinised. She previously led the US Soccer Federation’s investigation into allegations of abuse and misconduct in women’s professional soccer, and currently leads King and Spalding’s crisis management practice.

She has spent nearly four decades with the Department of Justice. She became assistant US attorney for the northern district of Georgia, her home state, in 1989 and rose through the ranks to become the first woman to lead that office in 2010.

She became deputy US attorney-general in 2015 under then President Barack Obama.

In that role, she wrote a policy memo, known as the Yates memo, redefining how the country prosecutes white-collar criminals.

In 2017, just days after accepting the role of acting attorney-general under then President Donald Trump, she was fired for refusing to enforce the president’s immigration ban. NYTIMES

• This article originally appeared in The New York Times.