“Two-hundred years of building better men.” This is how Chi Phi – the oldest fraternity in the US – describes its mission. And yet now, former members of its Xi chapter at Cornell University in New York state are accused of drugging and gang-raping a female student over the course of nearly seven hours.

The men, dubbed the “Cornell Seven”, vehemently deny the allegations. They are not facing any criminal charges.

In a civil lawsuit filed on 16 September, the woman, identified as Jane Doe, says that on the night of 19 October, 2024, she had consumed hard liquor at the Tri Delta House, before making her way to Moonies Bar and Nightclub in downtown Ithaca for an event.

Despite being 20 at the time and under the legal drinking age in the US, Doe alleges that she was served alcohol by bar staff – claims they deny – and that she was allowed to “stumble alone” to the Chi Phi frat house, where she had arranged to meet her friend and defendant, Matthew Ingalls.

Ingalls allegedly proposed a threesome, though Doe was “incapable of consenting”. He and his fraternity brother, Jonathan Newell, are claimed to have then pressured the plaintiff to consume a substance believed to be ketamine, and provided her with alcohol and marijuana, before carrying out non-consensual sex acts on her.

It is claimed that Newell sent a message in the fraternity’s Snapchat group inviting others to take advantage of the “free pussy”. “Like you can walk in and whip it out,” Ingalls added, according to a screenshot provided by the plaintiff.

Other fraternity members – Winston Lee, Gillio Lopes, Diego Sarabia, Scott Norris and Scott Kretzschmar – joined them in the room, where they, too, allegedly subjected the plaintiff to sexual assault and battery. 

“It’s not uncommon,” Yuvaan Ibañez-Garware, a 23-year-old former Cornell student, told The i Paper. “I have friends who have dealt with sexual assault in fraternities. The way that it’s handled isn’t great. The culture just kind of perpetuates this treatment and attitude towards women.”

Ibañez-Garware notes that while “most frats are genuinely good people”, there are some who “would talk about women and objectify them very, very plainly”. 

“It’s quite disturbing and gross, which is also probably why I decided to leave.”

Still, he acknowledges that some can “fall into the trap” and “allure” of these houses, especially in small college towns. “You’re injected into this hierarchy – this ecosystem. Suddenly, you have access to so many friends, so many people… You’re in this little bubble in the middle of nowhere and it’s almost like the law doesn’t really carry the same weight that it should.”

He believes universities have a duty to help alleged victims carry on their studies and feel safe – through online classes, separate emergency housing or financial relief. “The system, I think, breeds an environment where women are terrified to speak up because also the reality is that many of the men in these fraternities come from immense social clout or wealth, which creates a big power imbalance.”

Doe reported the allegations to Cornell University Police in November 2024. The college then placed the Cornell branch of Chi Phi under temporary suspension and opened an internal university investigation under Title IX, the US law governing sex discrimination and sexual misconduct in education. Doe says she was never made aware of its conclusion.

Chi Phi, which remains barred from campus, did not respond to requests for a statement. 

The woman also claimed the defendants were “afforded the opportunity to mitigate their conduct by submitting essays”. While the university said that “none of the individuals charged were offered the opportunity to write essays as a sole consequence of their involvement”, they did not deny that essays were part of the “punishment”.

“Any suggestion that the university did not impose consequential punishments for those involved is false,” said Kyle Kimball, Cornell’s vice president for university relations. “A continuation of the false narrative that there were minimal consequences in this case is irresponsible, will make survivors feel less safe and supported, and will perpetuate the underreporting of sexual assault.”

Alexandra Miller, a student at the Cornell School of Arts and Sciences, said she had heard rumours about an alleged gang-rape on campus during her freshman year. “I assumed that they had all been kicked off campus, and so I had no reason to be afraid. So when it came out, my initial reaction was just shock,” she told The i Paper. “The fact that I’m on the same campus as someone currently that could even imagine doing something that horrific to someone is so scary.”

The 19-year-old added that “to know that if one of my worst fears were to happen to me, I wouldn’t even be fully protected by the administration, according to everything that I’ve been told, is really scary”.

On Monday, after global condemnation of how these allegations had been handled driven in part by student newspaper and actor Florence Pugh’s social media campaign, New York prosecutors announced they would reopen a criminal inquiry into the alleged incident. Cornell said it supported presenting the case to a grand jury and having the case examined by an independent investigator.

Matthew Van Houten, district attorney of Tompkins County, acknowledged that the outrage “requires that I provide an answer to why the investigation resulted in a lack of criminal charges”.

He said Doe’s 2024 statement “did not allege that she was drugged against her will or gang-raped”, that he had never been contacted by her lawyers and that he had reached out to them “after the lawsuit was filed to understand the discrepancy between the original statement and the lawsuit’s allegations”.

However, in a transcript of Doe’s statement to university police from November 2024, seen by CBS News, she says she was “incapacitated,” but adds: “I can say with 100 per cent confidence I was raped.” She said she didn’t know how many people raped her, because she was being hit hard at the same time.

As a member of Cornell’s Office of Student Conduct and Community, Miller wants to know more about the 2024 investigation, “who these panel members were and why the information was never publicised”.

“It would be very interesting to see what evidence this hearing panel got to see when they made the decisions regarding the punishments,” she said, questioning if the university was “trying to protect some modicum of their reputation”.

An administrator of the Cornellians Only page – a social media account for students and alumni – told The i Paper that many now felt Cornell was seen as “the school that protects rapists” because of how it was perceived to have dealt with the incident.

“It makes us all look bad, just by association. It just makes everybody – students, alumni – extremely disappointed, disgusted and upset.”

The source, who wished to remain anonymous, said communication between the Cornell administration and students had been minimal. “They sent out an email at the time, and it was very vague. It was like, ‘something happened at Chi Phi and we’re closing the house’ … It was just a very lacklustre response. I think [it was] their attempt to bury it under the rug and for it to just, sort of, go away – which for the most part it did. I think that’s what’s so scary about this whole situation: if it hadn’t been for this lawsuit, the whole thing would have gone away.”

They continued that the fraternity “didn’t have a great reputation for being creepy” but “the extent of what had happened” was not made clear. The source said the university must have known how serious the alleged behaviour was because of how promptly they closed the fraternity chapter.

“The first tragedy is that the Cornell administration has undoubtedly failed female students, and the second tragedy is that this is kind of the tip of the iceberg at Cornell and at many other places,” they added. “This is just one example that’s particularly graphic and particularly detailed, but there’s unfortunately many examples like this that have happened at our school and at lots of other schools and lots of other places that nobody knows about.”

Asked about claims the allegations were “buried”, the university directed The i Paper to statements in which it said that federal privacy law “prohibits Cornell from disclosing specific information regarding individual students” and it was therefore unable to comment on any other disciplinary response. 

It added: “We have an obligation to ask what more we can learn, what we can do better, and how we can reduce the likelihood that anything like this happens again.

“We take sexual violence extremely seriously. The [university’s] Presidential Task Force on Campus Sexual Assault was launched shortly after this incident and issued a report in March 2026. Several of the recommendations have already been implemented.”

Toxic frat-boy culture is not a new phenomenon – nor is rape on university campuses. According to the RAINN national assault hotline in the US, one in eight students experience sexual violence during college overall – 26 per cent of undergraduate women.

Cornell’s own Survey of Sexual Assault and Related Misconduct, published in 2025, also demonstrated a rise in sexual misconduct, with 35 per cent of undergraduate women reporting experiencing non-consensual sexual contact during their time at Cornell, up from 23 per cent in 2023.

Democrat Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez condemned the “culture of rape” at universities like Cornell. “Jane Doe, that survivor, lost her education because you can’t stay in school when something like that happens to you,” said the Representative from New York’s 14th District.

Jennifer Simmons Kaleba, RAINN’s vice president of communications, says that institutions like Cornell need to look at “what we are saying to the student body at large about what they can do to intercede in those moments”.

She told The i Paper she believed what was gaining particular attention was that a Snapchat message was allegedly sent to a group about an “opportunity” to sexually assault a woman and that “so few, almost none, did anything about it”, adding that we need to start “opening the doors wider” to encourage boys and men to speak up.

The main solution, she believes, is routine education to prevent sexual assault and more awareness about the resources available.

Matthew Ingalls, Jonathan Newell, Winston Lee, Gillio Lopes, Diego Sarabia, Scott Norris and Scott Kretzschmar all deny the allegations made by Jane Doe.