Nov. 12, 2026
By Jacob Collins Dodd
Staff Writer
On Sept. 16, an anonymous woman, known in court filings as Jane Doe, filed a lawsuit against Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and seven male Chi Phi fraternity members, alleging they had drugged and gang-raped her for multiple hours at their frat house in October 2024.
After Cornell concluded its investigation, it expelled two of the fraternity members, suspended two, barred one from campus and issued non-contact orders and an essay to the remaining two. Doe’s rape was not reported to local police, and no arrests were made.
Doe accused seven men of gang rape. For two of them, the university’s answer was a writing assignment. This is the patriarchy. Are you awake yet?
On Oct. 19, 2024, Jane Doe was a sophomore living in the Tri Delta sorority house at the prestigious university that had once been her dream school. According to her lawsuit, at about 8:30 p.m., Doe and her sorority house mother took an Uber to a social event at a bar in downtown Ithaca.
Cornell University has had a long, grotesque history of rape culture in its fraternities and throughout its institution.
She was marked by bar staff with an “X” on both of her hands to identify her as under the legal drinking age, but by the time Doe left, she had consumed the equivalent of 10 drinks in three hours, according to USA Today.
Around 11 p.m., Doe arrived alone at the Chi Phi fraternity house to meet up with a friend who was a member there, later identified as Matthew Ingalls. He gave Doe a beer before proposing a threesome with one of his fraternity brothers, which she recalled feeling “pretty OK” about initially, according to a court document.
Later, the men took her to another room, where they allegedly pressured Doe into ingesting ketamine — a dissociative anesthetic commonly used to facilitate rape — and plied her with marijuana and high-proof alcohol, the lawsuit alleges.
“I felt like I was unable to make any decisions because of how intoxicated I was,” Doe said in her 2024 statement to police.
A third Chi Phi fraternity member entered the room before groping and forcibly kissing Doe without her consent. At 1:42 a.m., Jonathan Newell posted in the fraternity’s Snapchat group chat, Chi Phi Actives, that there was “free p***y” upstairs, leading more men to gather in the room and join in the assault. None of the more than 50 men in the group chat objected to or reported the ongoing incident.
The rape continued until 5:45 a.m., when the “assault concluded, and Plaintiff lost consciousness,” according to the lawsuit. Within hours, what happened to her had become campus gossip.
ILLUSTRATION BY ANNA MOSASHVILI
Three days after, while testing for sexually transmitted diseases, Doe told a university doctor at Cornell’s medical clinic that she contracted a urinary tract infection “in a traumatic way,” said her lawyer, Thomas P. Giuffra, in a statement.
The doctor at Cornell simply advised Doe to “speak with somebody” and did not refer her for a rape kit. “She didn’t really follow up on that,” Doe said of the doctor, according to The New York Times.
Cornell University has had a long, grotesque history of rape culture in its fraternities and throughout its institution.
According to a 2025 campus climate survey conducted by Cornell, nearly one in six Cornell students — including one in three female undergraduates — said they experienced unwanted sexual contact on campus since enrolling. Both the 2025 survey and a previous 2023 survey indicate that about a fifth of the undergraduate incidents occurred at fraternity houses and annexes.
The lack of strict punishments for perpetrators of sexual violence at Cornell reflects a culture and society that blatantly protects men.
Leniency is not neutral and never has been. It is an unspoken practice that teaches survivors that reporting sexual misconduct and assault is pointless while communicating to perpetrators that there is little to fear. In practice, that is a lesson Cornell has been teaching for years.
For over two years, seven men accused of drugging and gang-raping a young woman faced no criminal charges after an incomplete investigation worked in the men’s favor. They continued their day-to-day lives while Doe’s life, by contrast, was ruined.
“What I experienced from those who raped me in the fraternity was the worst experience of my life,” Doe said in a September 2026 statement to CNN. “I was brutalized, and it injured me physically but perhaps more importantly, emotionally.”
A university that answers cases as repulsive as Doe’s with minor infractions and punishments is not at all confused about its priorities. It has already chosen them. This is what the patriarchy looks like when it has systems built to protect it and to dismiss and silence its victims.
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