The Cornell Chi Phi Case (one narrator)

Sam This is the story of a sexual assault allegation against members of Cornell's Chi Phi fraternity, and of what a university, a district attorney and the state of New York each did about it. It begins the night before the night in question.

Sam On October 18, 2024, according to a heavily redacted internal report Cornell later produced from its 2025 disciplinary hearings, someone overdosed on ketamine at the Chi Phi house. The report doesn't give a precise time, only "on or about" that date. This detail later became central to a civil lawsuit's argument that Cornell knew, or should have known, that the fraternity's Xi chapter had a drug culture built specifically around ketamine — the lawsuit also notes that police had responded to a drug-related incident at the same house just a week before the assault that followed.

Sam The next night, October 19, a 20-year-old student — later identified in court papers only as Jane Doe — went out drinking with her sorority sisters. Her evening began at Cornell's Tri-Delta sorority house, where she drank hard liquor, before the group moved to an event hosted at Moonies Bar and Nightclub. Over roughly three hours she consumed what amounted to the equivalent of ten drinks. At Moonies, according to the lawsuit, she was marked on her hands as underage and was visibly intoxicated — and was served alcohol by the bar's employees anyway.

Sam Around 11 p.m., Doe left the bar alone and walked to the Chi Phi house, intending to see a friend who belonged to the fraternity. In the complaint he's called "Male No. 1" — later named as defendant Matthew Ingalls. According to the lawsuit, once she arrived, Ingalls proposed a threesome involving himself and another brother. The complaint states she was "incapable of consenting" at that point. He allegedly brought her to a room regardless.

Sam From there, the account in the lawsuit describes a sequence of escalating conduct. Ingalls and a second man, identified as defendant Newell, allegedly pressured her to snort a white powder said to be ketamine, and gave her marijuana along with a liquor believed to be high-proof rum. A third man, defendant Lopes, then allegedly joined — kissing her while Newell groped her from behind — before the two of them put her on a bed and initiated sex without her consent, the complaint says.

Sam At 1:42 in the morning, one of the men sent a Snapchat message to fraternity members reading, in the fuller wording that later surfaced, "Free p***y in alum pu" — a reference to the house's alumni room. Replies came back quickly: "This is crazy work." "Free…" "I f*****g love chi phi." One brother reportedly asked by video, "Shop still open?" and two others answered, "Yeah." According to the complaint, several members then joined the assault already underway.

Sam The lawsuit alleges the assault continued for hours after that, with Doe becoming increasingly incapacitated while what the complaint calls "heinous criminal sexual acts" were committed against her, continuing until 5:45 in the morning. In total, the suit names seven fraternity members as participants: Matthew Ingalls, Johnathan Newell, Winston Lee, Gillio Lopes, Diego Sarabia, Scott Norris, and Scott Kretzschmar.

Sam Monday, October 21, two days after the night at the Chi Phi house, Doe's own roommates offered two different pictures of how she seemed. One roommate later recalled her saying, "Oh my goodness, isn't that crazy?" — laughing as she described what had happened, though the roommate said she also seemed to be in shock. That same roommate was clear on one point: Doe did not use the words rape or assault that morning. A second roommate gave a different account, saying Doe told her directly, "I wasn't comfortable."

Sam That same day, one of the accused men texted Doe to apologize. According to the Title IX record, he told her his memory of the night was "kinda fuzzy".

Sam Two days after that, on October 23, word of the night had started moving through campus, and Doe texted Matthew Ingalls directly about what she was hearing. "My reputation is destroyed and I'm utterly ashamed," she wrote. In the same exchange she also wrote, "everyone needs to grow up because sexuality and sex and stuff is changing and stuff like this is going to become more common. i'm also really open minded tho. i love u king."

Sam By November 1, two weeks after the night in question, Doe had been excluded from a fraternity event. "i knew this was going to happen. the woman will always get the short end of the stick," she wrote. And then: "yall aren't my friends. yall are covering your a****."

Sam Around this same stretch, the Title IX record — the file Cornell would later compile through its internal investigation — contains an interview with one of the accused men describing his own conduct in the days after the night at the house. He told investigators he had worked to convince Doe not to, in his words, "spread any rumors" about what had happened. In the same interview, he said that he and the others involved had settled on an approach if anyone ever asked them directly about that night: they were, as he put it, "in the idea of just deny."

Sam On November 8, two and a half weeks after that night, Doe sent Matthew Ingalls one more message: "i think i'm done talking to you. i know you lied." That same day she walked into the Cornell University Police Department and filed a formal report, describing the alleged sexual incident at the Chi Phi house.

Sam Cornell acted the same day. It placed the Chi Phi chapter on temporary suspension for alleged violations of the student code of conduct, and issued temporary suspensions to several of the students connected to the incident.

Sam Also on November 8, Cornell's Office of Civil Rights filed an incident report after receiving the complaint, according to court records later reviewed by CNY Central. That office handles claims of discrimination and harassment on campus, and its involvement here ran alongside, rather than instead of, the criminal report Doe had just filed with campus police.

Sam Six days later, on November 14, Doe met with Cornell's Title IX coordinator — the official responsible for the university's response to sexual misconduct complaints under federal education law — along with the Office of Student Conduct and Community Standards and campus police.

Sam At this early stage, the seven suspended men were offered something short of a disciplinary hearing. According to the lawsuit, they were given the chance to mitigate their conduct by submitting essays to the university. When the case became public two years later, that detail became a major point of dispute, with Cornell disputing that essays were the sole discipline.

Sam Chi Phi's national organization acted on its own timeline. Michael Azarian, the fraternity's executive director, said in an emailed statement that the national organization had temporarily suspended its Cornell chapter after the November 8 police report — and he specified that the national organization had done this on its own accord, not at Cornell's direction. That claim contradicted earlier reporting from The Guardian, which had described university officials, not the fraternity itself, as the ones who suspended the chapter.

Sam Cornell's Interfraternity Council, the body that coordinates the university's fraternity chapters, responded the same week. It voted unanimously to cancel all social activities for the coming weekend, saying the decision was made "in solidarity and respect for those affected by the recent tragedies." The council was careful to note it had no role in Cornell's ongoing investigation — this was a gesture of its own, separate from any disciplinary process. The cancellation applied across all 29 fraternity chapters at Cornell, not just Chi Phi.

Sam The student newspaper's editorial board took a harder line. Its editorial argued that the problem went well beyond any single fraternity or any one generation of students, and that it couldn't be solved by a suspension here or a cancellation there. The board called for something more permanent: a ban on fraternities at Cornell altogether.

Sam On November 26, Cornell's interim president, Michael Kotlikoff, issued a public statement on the matter. He described "serious and deeply disturbing allegations of drug abuse and sexual violence at the Chi Phi fraternity house," and said campus police continued to pursue a criminal investigation, while the Office of Student Conduct and Community Standards and the Office of Institutional Equity and Title IX were, in his words, "diligently reviewing all reported information regarding the many allegations."

Sam Kotlikoff's statement also confirmed where things stood procedurally: the Chi Phi chapter remained under the temporary suspension order issued November 8 for alleged violations of the student code, and interim measures — temporary suspensions for a number of students — had been issued the previous week to protect, as the statement put it, "the immediate physical health and safety of all students."

Sam Cornell's formal Title IX investigation opened on January 14, 2025, more than two months after Doe's initial report to campus police. This was the university's own internal process, separate from any criminal case, built around the federal education law that governs how schools respond to sexual misconduct complaints. It would run for roughly four months, into May.

Sam Over that stretch, Cornell held at least twelve separate hearing days. Court records that later became public — surfaced through one of the accused men's own appeal of the university's decision — give a sense of the scale involved. The investigation covered seven accused participants and eight additional witnesses, produced an estimated four to five thousand pages across the full record, and generated more than seventeen hundred pages of hearing transcripts alone. The panel's final written decision ran ninety-nine pages.

Sam The university investigator assigned to the case, Samantha Freeburn, conducted more than fifty interviews in total, including thirty-two separate witnesses. Reporting that later reviewed the same records independently described the process as a twelve-day internal proceeding at which more than thirty witnesses testified, following those fifty-plus interviews.

Sam The investigation confirmed that on the night of the alleged assault, a photograph of Doe had been shared among active Chi Phi members in a Snapchat group.

Sam Her original sworn statement to police, from November 2024, described her participation in the drug use and sexual conduct that night as — in its own language — "voluntary, conscious, and consensual." The district attorney would later cite that statement as the basis for his decision not to prosecute.

Sam But that wasn't the whole of what she'd told investigators. Her fuller statement to Cornell police, portions of which surfaced later through reporting, also included her saying that the encounter "felt like coercion." Both of those descriptions — voluntary and conscious on one hand, something that felt like coercion on the other — came from the same statement.

Sam When the hearing panel reached its conclusions, the sanctions split unevenly across the seven men. Two were expelled from Cornell outright. Two more were suspended. A third man, who had already graduated by the time the panel ruled, was barred permanently from campus. The remaining two received no-contact orders and were assigned reflection papers. Chi Phi's Xi chapter itself was closed permanently and banned from campus.

Sam Outside the hearing room, two of the Chi Phi brothers named in the suit were removed from their rugby club after the allegations came to light.

Sam While Cornell's hearings were still running, Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten was making his own determination. Reviewing the case through the same period, he decided not to bring criminal charges against any of the seven men. He would later say that decision rested on the "voluntary, conscious, and consensual" language in Doe's original sworn statement.

Sam With the DA's decision made and Cornell's hearing panel finished, Doe withdrew from the university, according to the lawsuit she would later file.

Sam What followed was close to two years in which the case stayed out of public view. The Title IX file was closed, and the district attorney's office had declined to prosecute.

Sam That changed in September 2026. Reporting on the exact filing date varies slightly — the Cornell Daily Sun and a legal commentary site give September 14, while CNN and a regional outlet give September 16 as the date the lawsuit became publicly known in New York Supreme Court — but every account agrees on what was filed and what it said.

Sam The complaint itself ran to 101 pages, naming more than a dozen defendants. Alongside the seven fraternity members from 2024, it named Cornell University and the Chi Phi fraternity directly, and it laid out claims of negligence, breach of contract, sexual assault and battery, and violations of New York's Human Rights Law — a state statute covering discrimination and related harms, separate from the criminal law that governs prosecution.

Sam The list of defendants went well beyond the university and the fraternity's local chapter. The suit named several Chi Phi organizations at different levels, several sorority organizations, the former president of Cornell's Chi Phi chapter individually, a number of unnamed individuals, and a local bar — Moonies, the same bar from the night in question, now accused of illegally serving someone who had been visibly marked as underage and was clearly intoxicated. The Tri Delta sorority was named as well, over the event where Doe had started drinking that night.

Sam Doe gave a statement to the Cornell Daily Sun. "What happened to me was horrific and deeply disturbing," she told the paper. "Almost two years later, I still carry the weight of its impact every day and night."

Sam Her attorney spoke to CBS about how the matter had been handled. He said that, after an investigation, only two of the accused were expelled and no one was arrested.

Sam The lawsuit does not specify how much she is seeking. There is no dollar figure attached to any of the claims it makes against the defendants.

Sam Once the lawsuit became public, the Ithaca Police Department — the city's own police force, distinct from Cornell's campus police — said in a statement that it had never been told about any of this. It said it was "disturbed" to learn of the 2024 allegations, and that it had only found out about the alleged incident recently, through media coverage, because the case had never been reported to that agency at all.

Sam Attorneys for the accused men responded to the lawsuit's account. The men denied wrongdoing — with some maintaining the sexual activity that night was consensual, and others denying they'd taken part in it at all. No criminal charges had been filed against any of the seven at that point. One attorney went further, calling the lawsuit "intentionally dishonest," while arguing his client's conduct, though immature, broke no law. A second attorney described the public narrative as "incomplete," and said it was inconsistent with the evidence developed during Cornell's own investigation — including, he said, Doe's own statements.

Sam Chi Phi's national organization issued its own statement defending how it had handled discipline. It said the fraternity had gone "beyond anything the law or Cornell University required," pointing to the fact that the men involved had been permanently expelled from the national fraternity itself, not just from the local chapter.

Sam Social media scrutiny pointed out that Chi Phi's Cornell charter — the formal document establishing the chapter's existence — had never technically been revoked. On the university's own fraternity-life website, the chapter was listed only as "dormant," not terminated. That distinction fed criticism that the organization had avoided a more permanent form of accountability, even while its public statement framed its response as having gone further than required.

Sam The case also fed a wider argument about Greek life. The Hill described the allegations as the latest in a long list of incidents that have made the public wary of Greek life altogether, noting that fraternity and sorority membership nationwide involves an estimated 750,000 undergraduates.

Sam On September 28, 2026, two weeks after the lawsuit surfaced, the office of Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten confirmed it had reopened the investigation into the alleged 2024 assault, following the national attention the civil suit had drawn.

Sam Van Houten defended his original decision, repeating that Doe's original sworn statement had not alleged she was drugged against her will or gang raped, and had instead described her participation as "voluntary, conscious, and consensual." He added: "My office obviously did not and could not have based our November 2024 decision on the allegations in a civil lawsuit that would not be filed until nearly two years later."

Sam The same day, Cornell made its own announcement. The university said it would commission an outside review of how it had handled the case, framing the decision partly in terms of a shared concern with the state's governor about campus culture issues affecting universities more broadly. The person Cornell's trustees brought in to lead that review was Sally Yates, a former U.S. deputy attorney general. Her review was set to examine how the school investigates sexual assault and harassment complaints, how its disciplinary process works, and how campus police had responded in this instance.

Sam One day later, on September 29, New York Governor Kathy Hochul stepped in directly. She directed Attorney General Letitia James to open the state's own investigation into the case, saying James would "investigate the incident and, if warranted, prosecute any offenses arising from the investigation and present evidence to a grand jury." Later reporting described the arrangement as effectively giving the case a special prosecutor, with James's office confirming it had opened an active criminal investigation into the allegations stemming from the October 2024 incident. Separate reporting noted that James's review would extend beyond the criminal question, examining Cornell's own response to the allegations as well, running alongside the DA's reopened case rather than replacing it.

Sam That same day, Cornell published a detailed public FAQ laying out its defense of the process it had run back in 2025. It stated that its Office of Civil Rights and Office of Student Conduct and Community Standards had investigated the allegations against both the individuals and the fraternity consistent with university policy and Title IX, and that the investigation had run over several months, including hearings before a panel of trained faculty and staff who heard evidence across multiple days.

Sam On the relationship between its own process and the criminal system, Cornell drew a clear line: its process, the university said, is distinct from the criminal justice system and applies university policy and standards rather than criminal law — and at the end of that process, the hearing panel had issued a range of sanctions that included expulsions and suspensions. The university also stated directly that it had publicly supported the Tompkins County DA's decision to give Doe's account a chance to be heard before a criminal grand jury.

Sam On the claim that the men's only consequence had been writing essays, Cornell was direct. "Any suggestion that the university did not impose consequential punishments for those involved is false," the statement read.

Sam In early October, a woman came forward. She says she had given Cornell police leads back during the original 2024 investigation told NBC News she now feels "betrayed" by how the case was ultimately handled.

Sam Critics argued that investigators had failed to chase obvious leads. As one critic put it, speaking of the Snapchat group chat, "What they should have done is investigated who was on that group chat and interviewed witnesses and developed evidence. That's what investigators do, and that was not done at all."

Sam CBS News, around the same time, reviewed the actual Title IX interview transcript of Doe's formal statement to Cornell's investigators — the document that had produced her written account. The transcript showed the investigator reading her account back to her, word by word, and giving her the chance to correct or clarify anything in it before it was finalized.

Sam In that same interview, Doe offered her own explanation of what consent meant to her, telling investigators she hadn't shown what she called "excitement and enthusiasm, which is kinda the basis of consent." She also said she had told the men at the time that she was tired and didn't want to continue, and that she was, at points, encouraged to take more substances rather than stop.

Sam As of October 8, 2026, that is where the case sits. No criminal charges have been filed against any of the seven men. The Tompkins County DA's reopened investigation is moving toward a grand jury presentation, coordinated with the New York Attorney General's office under the governor's directive. Sally Yates's independent review of Cornell's handling — its investigation, its disciplinary process, its campus police response — is underway.

Sam Cornell continues to defend its original process as thorough and consequential, pointing to the two expulsions and the permanent closure of the Chi Phi chapter as proof the school didn't look away. Critics, including Doe's own attorneys, maintain the sanctions fell short of what the scale of the allegations warranted, and that leads like the group chat were left unexamined at the time. The civil lawsuit remains active in New York state court, with Cornell, the fraternity's local and national organizations, the sorority, the bar, and the seven men all still named as defendants. Several of those men, through their attorneys, continue to deny wrongdoing, describing the encounter as consensual and pointing back to Doe's own initial sworn statement to that effect.

Sam What is left, at this point, is a university that calls its process complete and consequential, and a civil lawsuit, a reopened criminal inquiry and a state attorney general's investigation that are all still under way. Whether a grand jury ultimately hears this case, and what Sally Yates's review concludes about how Cornell handled it the first time, are the two threads still unresolved as this stands.

Sam Before I go, it's worth saying plainly: this show is AI-generated, the voice you are hearing is synthetic, and everything in this telling is drawn from the reporting and documents named at the close, whose authors have no connection to this production.

Sam Everything today came from reporting by the Cornell Daily Sun, CBS News, ABC News, Wikipedia, NBC News, CNN, The Washington Post, and statements published by Cornell University itself. Thanks for listening.