Lawyer for Cornell Jane Doe says he believes ‘there were more’ who participated in alleged gang rape

A lawyer for a woman who alleges she was gang raped at Cornell University in 2024 said Sunday he thinks there were more than seven men involved in the incident.

“I’m not even sure we have everybody who participated in this assault because my client was blacked out during periods of time, and that’s reported in these statements. We don’t even know the people we have are the people we definitively know,” Thomas Giuffra told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union.”

“If you ask me, I believe there were more,” he added.

Cornell has been facing a firestorm of controversy in the wake of a lawsuit filed in September alleging a student at the school was gang raped at a fraternity house two years ago. The student, referred to as Jane Doe, alleged seven men raped her for multiple hours at the Chi Phi fraternity house.

The lawsuit also features an alleged screenshot from the night of the incident in which a man messaged a group chat saying there was “free p—- upstairs.” Cornell has been in the national spotlight recently because of the lawsuit, which has also highlighted how sexual assaults are handled on college campuses.

On Friday, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) stopped short of pushing for the resignations of Cornell’s president and the local prosecutor who handled the allegations of gang rape but referred to the school’s handling of the incident as a “failure.”

“I’m deeply disturbed at Cornell University’s police and how they handled this. They were the first ones to be able to interview and have their questions answered, and let this young woman tell her story. Them sending a partial record over [to prosecutors] is a, in my judgment, a failure,” Hochul said.