These videos show scenes unrelated to alleged assault at Cornell University

Multiple videos shared on TikTok about a sexual assault accusation at a Cornell University fraternity house show dramatic footage of a woman being chased down a hallway and accosted, or dragged into a room. Others show a young male suspect in handcuffs.

But they are at odds with what’s publicly known about the case, including the alleged victim’s own account of the 2024 incident described in a civil lawsuit filed Sept. 16 in New York. There had been no arrests in the case as of Oct. 1, though the Tompkins County District Attorney’s Office has reopened the investigation

PolitiFact identified these videos as part of TikTok’s efforts to counter inauthentic, misleading or false content. (Read more about PolitiFact’s partnership with TikTok.)

Videos such as these in an emotionally charged case lead to the spread of misinformation about what happened. So far, there hasn’t been any video of the assault released from officials or in credible news reports.

TikTok videos

Here’s what the TikTok videos show:

One TikTok video about the Cornell case shows a curly haired man being led down a hallway in handcuffs by two police officers. The man seen in the video is a 28-year-old man accused in 2024 of assaulting a teenage girl in San Antonio, Texas, news reports show.

Another TikTok video shows a man dragging a woman (whose face is blurred) across a front porch. That’s not from Cornell, but from a 2019 assault in California captured on a Ring doorbell surveillance video.

Several TikTok videos show a man chasing and attacking a woman in a hallway, or dragging a woman screaming and trying to escape from behind into a room. PolitiFact was unable to find the original videos in those cases, but did find that they have been used before on social media, some as early as November 2025.

The woman being chased in the hallway was used in a May TikTok video about an unrelated missing University of South Florida student. News accounts of that case do not mention videos of a woman being attacked in a hallway.

The video of the woman being dragged into a room from behind was seen in a November 2025 video about a woman killed on a cruise ship, allegedly by her brother. News coverage and information released by authorities in that case do not mention a video of that incident.

What the accuser has said

The woman, identified as Jane Doe in her lawsuit against seven Cornell students, said that after a night of drinking in October 2024, she went to the Chi Phi National’s Xi Chapter’s fraternity house, where she said she was led to an upstairs room and pressured into taking ketamine, before eventually being assaulted over several hours by the students. 

She did not describe being physically chased down a hallway and attacked, or being dragged from behind into a room she was trying to flee.

The New York Times obtained documents from a university review of the case, and did not mention any video of the assault in the case in an Oct. 1 report.

What police have said

Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten said in a Sept. 28 news release that he had been asked by the community to review the decision not to file charges in the case.

That release also did not mention any video evidence of the assault or descriptions that match the TikTok videos.

Our ruling

Several TikTok videos about the Cornell University sexual assault case share dramatic videos of women being attacked or a suspect in handcuffs.

But the videos are from unrelated cases. They do not match descriptions of the Cornell incident by the accuser or police, and no one has been arrested in the case as of Oct. 1.

We rate them Pants on Fire!

Digital Research Program Manager Sara Swann and Researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.