Sharon Otterman

The expansive changes to campus life, including working closely with the state police, come in the wake of the national uproar caused by allegations of a gang rape at a fraternity house.

By Sharon Otterman and Deborah Kamen.

Cornell University has banned parties at fraternity houses for the rest of the academic year and will add experienced sexual assault investigators to work with its police force in response to a student's allegations of gang rape in October 2024.

The university announced the changes on Tuesday as it tried to reassure students, faculty, and alumni that it is addressing the ongoing crisis set off several weeks ago by the lawsuit filed by a former undergraduate known as Jane Doe.

Like I said, this article was published by the New York Times and the headline, Meet the Woman Who Stands to Inherit Much of Jeffrey Epstein's Fortune.

This article was authored by Matthew Goldstein and Sharon Otterman.

The young dentist was smiling and soft-spoken, wearing a Columbia University fleece jacket and holding her long hair back with a clip.

She was introduced by her assistant, simply Dr. Corinna.

Can I have somebody besides Nurse Ratched, please? Dr.

Shulak was the last person Mr. Epstein called before he killed himself in his jail cell in 2019, allegedly.

I'm glad they're so sure about everything, huh? I mean, Matthew Goldstein and Sharon Otterman, I'm sure they trust the Trump administration in all other areas.

But all of a sudden, they're sure that Epstein killed himself, huh? Okay, I guess.

[laughs]

Okay, so I just found a New York Times article by Sharon Otterman, and this does say that she and the guys had taken, like, a couple of the guys that were her friends, and they had taken...

They had been drinking and taking ketamine, and it started off consensual.

Yeah, 'cause I think they were gonna have a threesome.

How a Cornell student went from shame to action.

This was written by Deborah Common, Matt Flagenheimer, Amy Julia Harris, and Sharon Otterman.

In October twenty twenty-four, after a week after a Chi Phi fraternity party at Cornell University, the sophomore who would come to be known as Jane Doe was milling around an online forum about Greek life when she encountered a post that stopped her cold.

"Are Chi Phi brothers Crips or Bloods? Because I hear they have been doing hell gang banging," someone had written.

A female student who's being referred to as Jane Doe alleged that she was drugged and raped by seven members of the frat.

Sharon Otterman is one of the reporters who broke this story for The Times, and she joins us now.

Sharon, welcome.

Thank you so much.

And there's been a lot of research done on how do we improve these sorts of cultural situations to make this completely unacceptable.

And so this is a work in progress that not just Cornell, but all universities are working on.

Sharon Otterman covers higher education for The New York Times.

She was part of the team that broke the story about the 1,000 pages of internal documents related to this investigation.

The woman's lawsuit brought renewed pressure to reopen the investigation.

By Sharon Otterman.

Prosecutors have reopened an investigation into a 2024 report by a Cornell University student who said she was raped at a fraternity house, raising questions about how the case was initially handled by law enforcement officials and the school.

Her allegations surfaced again two weeks ago after the student, identified as Jane Doe in a lawsuit, sued seven men, the university, her sorority, and the fraternity.