How the Cornell 7 case is being handled, with it being a woman’s complaint about sexual assault complaint by Cornell University fraternity members, has highlighted a rather pressing issue.
The woman, known as Jane Doe in legal documents, last month filed a lawsuit alleging she was drugged and raped by seven men in 2024 at the university in the state of New York.
Experts believe there are issues with the current laws in many states regarding sexual assault and drinking.
Doe said she had been drinking earlier in the evening of the alleged incident and then went to a fraternity house, where men pressured her to snort the drug ketamine and plied her with alcohol before advertising a “free” sexual encounter with her in a group message.
She said she was intoxicated during the alleged incident and could not provide consent.
However, under current New York law, a person who voluntarily consumes drugs or alcohol, rather than becoming intoxicated without their consent, is not automatically considered unable to consent to sex.
The media has been widely reporting this as the “voluntary intoxication loophole.”
Over this scenario, the New York Governor Kathy Hochul said that “voluntary intoxication is not a license for sexual assault or gang rape” and that she would work with the state legislature to close the “loophole.”
But some experts say the law has been misinterpreted and that it does not stop people who choose to consume alcohol or drugs from reporting sexual assault. It does, however, require them to prove they were so incapacitated they could not physically consent – a higher bar than being intoxicated.
Dan Schorr, a former sex crimes prosecutor, told the BBC that New York law still protects victims of assaults who have chosen to drink or take drugs.
“If a person cannot express consent or lack of consent due to the consumption of alcohol or drugs, any sexual activity with them is always non-consensual, whether the ingestion of alcohol or drugs was voluntary or involuntary,” said Schorr, who also helps universities review sexual assault cases.
But many people still have issues with the current law, believing that the bar is set too high with regards to what counts as being too intoxicated to give consent.
At least 19 states, including New York, have a higher bar for the level of intoxication required to deem someone incapacitated and unable to consent.
The New York law includes a provision that someone cannot consent to sex if they are “unconscious or for any other reason physically unable to communicate an unwillingness to an act.” This applies to people who are too incapacitated from drinking to consent, Schorr said.
The Cornell 7 lawsuit:
The Cornell 7 case came to light when a lawsuit was filed by a Jane Doe, on September 16.
It alleges that defendant Jonathan Newell, alongside six other members of the XI Chapter of the Chi Phi fraternity at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, raped her on October 19, 2024, at the fraternity house.
According to the suit, on the night of the assault, Newell and Matthew Ingalls, another defendant in the case, began passing around ketamine, dissociative anesthetic with hallucinogenic properties.
Soon after Newell and Ingalls began to assault and rape her. Another man, Gillio Lopes, is also accused of then joining in on the assault.
As per TMZ, past midnight, a leaked screenshot of XI Chapter’s Snapchat group titled “Chi Phi Actives” saw that Newell sent a message in the group chat promoting “free p***y“ upstairs.
“In doing so, Defendant Newell organized and encouraged other XI chapter members to join in on the gang rape of Plaintiff in the XI chapter fraternity house,” the lawsuit claims.
Scott Norris, Diego Sarabia, Winston Lee and Scott Kretzschmar are all accused of participating in the gang rape.
