Cornell police received tip about Chi Phi fraternity seeking to keep alleged gang rape under wraps
One day after a campuswide alert notified students about a reported rape at a Cornell University fraternity in 2024, the school’s police department received a tip from an anonymous caller saying that the Chi Phi fraternity’s leadership asked a potential witness to stay quiet because “the reputation of all involved and the frat would be ruined” if details of the incident spread across campus, according to the school records reviewed by ABC News.
Videos first obtained by ABC News showed that Cornell investigators in the following days began questioning witnesses about a potential coverup by the fraternity brothers.
“Chi Phi held a meeting essentially to get all of the men on the same page about what happened. I know for a fact there are [GroupMe] messages about the situation,” one female student told investigators.
That student told investigators that the fraternity brothers described the incident as a “consensual orgy” but expressed concern that it “would be bad for [their] image.”
The woman at the center of the case, an undergraduate student identified only as Jane Doe, originally made a complaint to campus police in November 2024, three weeks after the incident occurred, alleging that she had been raped by eight to 10 men at the Chi Phi fraternity house.
The case has now rocked the university and started conversations about treatment of alleged sexual assault on college campuses across the country.
On Tuesday, Cornell’s board of trustees announced it had tapped the law firm King and Spaulding to conduct an investigation, led by former acting U.S. attorney general Sally Yates, into the school’s handling of Jane Doe’s allegations.
In 2024, Cornell police officers interviewed at least two fraternity members about the incident and what communication took place within the organization, according to materials reviewed by ABC News. One of the brothers said the incident only came up informally during a meeting when the fraternity discussed their “brother of the week and idiots of the week.”
“We didn’t have a meeting about it specifically,” he said. “It was our weekly chapter meeting. We got through a bunch of stuff.”
ABC News also reviewed text messages from some of the fraternity brothers that appear to show a scramble to contain the fallout after Cornell suspended the chapter.
“When was the last time you spoke to [Jane Doe]?” the fraternity’s president wrote in the messages to fraternity member Matthew Ingalls, who invited Jane Doe to the house before participating in the alleged assault.
“Yesterday … what’s the plan of action?” Ingalls replied. “Should I call [her]? I don’t think she would have reported this.”
All seven of the accused fraternity members have denied all wrongdoing. Ingalls, who has not been charged with a crime, has not responded to requests for comment about the incident. According to records reviewed by ABC News, he later told investigators that he was too intoxicated to consent that night and portrayed himself as the victim in the incident.
In an email to Cornell’s Title IX investigator in February 2025, Ingalls accused the school of “entrapment” and suggested he might file his own complaint against Jane Doe.
“After all, you received information that I was sodomized by her while I was incapacitated back in November, and you never once thought to alert me of my rights under these procedures as a survivor of this assault?” Ingalls wrote in an email reviewed by ABC News. “The very fact that I had to bring this to your attention now in February confirms my worst fears: that this process is rolled [sic] with gender discrimination.”
Jane Doe has filed a civil suit in the case, and the New York attorney general, Letitia James, is conducting an investigation into the incident.
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