The college 'gang rape' that has horrified the US: Ketamine use, foul text messages and claims omitted from police reports. How the 'Cornell Seven' case has divided America... and shone a light on frat house culture

The college 'gang rape' that has horrified the US: Ketamine use, foul text messages and claims omitted from police reports. How the 'Cornell Seven' case has divided America... and shone a light on frat house culture Around midnight on October 19, 2024, a 20-year-old female undergraduate at America’s revered Cornell University stumbled into a student ‘fraternity’ to meet a friend who’d invited her to a party there. After an evening’s vodka-drinking with female friends, she admits she was the worse for wear – and that, she claims, made her the perfect victim of a seven-strong band of predatory frat boys who would spend the hours until dawn forcing drugs on her so they could gang rape her in one of their dorm rooms. In the process, members of that fraternity – Cornell’s Chi Phi chapter, one of tens of thousands of such lodging houses for male students – allegedly exchanged messages on their group Snapchat that have left millions of Americans full of horror and disgust. According to a screenshot of part of the Snapchat exchange released by the university police, at 1.42am Chi Phi member Jonathan Newell announced that ‘free p***y’ was available in a room upstairs. Others swiftly chimed in. ‘I f***ing love chi phi,’ said one, adding: ‘You can walk in and whip it out.’ Later, another member asked: ‘Shop still open?’ A fellow member confirmed it was. The ‘shop’ to which the young men were so crudely referring was allegedly the second-year student, who by this time had taken part in a consensual threesome with two of the frat boys. She had also drunk rum and beer, smoked marijuana and snorted considerable quantities of the powerful veterinary anaesthetic ketamine, including from Newell’s genitalia while he was in a state of arousal. The woman claims that she was gang raped and sexually assaulted by the seven men. But four of them have told investigators they only had consensual sex with her while the remaining three insist they had no sexual contact with her at all. So far, reaction to the case has divided down predictable lines. Far-Left Democrat Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has pronounced that a ‘culture of rape’ was being ‘protected in elite institutions’ such as Cornell, an Ivy League institution in upstate New York whose alumni include scores of Nobel laureates and world leaders. Cornell’s Chi Phi chapter, one of tens of thousands of lodging houses for male students, allegedly exchanged messages on their group Snapchat that have left millions of Americans full of horror and disgust (stock image from the campus) A 20-year-old female undergraduate claims that a seven-strong band of predatory frat boys forced drugs on her so they could gang rape her in one of their dorm rooms Maga influencers have lined up to denounce the young woman for ‘crying rape’ after – by her own initial admission – voluntarily choosing to take part in a drug-fuelled threesome, alleging she has repeatedly changed her story about what happened that night. This week, New York prosecutors announced that they will now reopen a criminal investigation into the affair that was closed without charges two years ago. The woman, named only as ‘Jane Doe’, has just filed a fresh civil lawsuit against the so-called Cornell Seven, accusing them of drugging and raping her, which if successful could see her paid millions of dollars in damages and compensation. She is separately suing the fraternity, her sorority (the female equivalent of a frat house) where she was living at the time, and Cornell University, for allegedly failing to protect her. ‘What happened to me was horrific and deeply disturbing. Almost two years later, I still carry the weight of its impact every day and night,’ she told the student paper. Although her supporters say the accusations are confirmed by the toxic Snapchat discussion, critics have complained that there’s been a rush to judgment on a group of young men who have not been charged, let alone convicted. While the media has so far preserved Jane Doe’s anonymity, the Cornell Seven have been named across the US media and their photos published online. Several have been confronted on film by furious students and footage of those encounters posted on social media. At least three of the men have lost their jobs. Many Americans, especially liberal ones, are treating the allegations as a national scandal. It hardly helps allay their suspicions that frats – which date back to the 18th century and were once the mainstay of university life – are nowadays castigated by the Left as elitist bastions of ‘white male privilege’ where rich playboys indulge in crass misogyny, disgusting ‘hazing’ initiation rituals and sometimes lethal over-drinking. So what actually happened on that fateful night? According to a sworn statement she gave to Cornell University Police, Jane Doe admits she’d had about ten drinks before she arrived at Chi Phi. She was then given more to drink and her friend, Matthew Ingalls, allegedly suggested they had a threesome along with one of his fraternity ‘brothers’, Jonathan Newell. (Newell’s lawyer says he denies the allegations against him. Ingalls has yet to comment.) ‘What happened to me was horrific and deeply disturbing. Almost two years later, I still carry the weight of its impact every day and night,’ she told the student paper (image posed by model) While her new lawsuit described her as ‘incapable of consenting’ when she got to the party, she has previously admitted she felt ‘pretty OK’ about having sex with at least two of the men, Newell and Ingalls. According to an interview she gave to Cornell Police, Doe ‘remembered being excited because [she] thought that [the two men] wanting to have a threesome meant that they were gay’. She also claims the pair gave her ketamine. However, she says the situation changed drastically when a third man – whose bedroom the three were using – came in and, pulling her towards him and kissing her, started a second threesome involving her and Newell and involving further quantities of ketamine. Ingalls by this point had gone to sleep elsewhere. At some point, however, Ingalls reappeared and suggested a foursome, but she said no, according to her lawsuit. The men did not pursue the foursome idea, but that didn’t prevent Newell allegedly sending the first message on the frat house’s Snapchat, encouraging others to come and enjoy the ‘free p***y’. It was Ingalls who allegedly added the similarly obscene message about how ‘you can walk in and whip it out’. When four more frat members came into the room, Jane Doe has said she hid her nakedness under the bed covers, though she did not ask the men to leave, and said she backed away from a man who grabbed and forcibly kissed her. She admitted she had difficulty remembering subsequent events but recalled she later moved to a smaller room with Ingalls and yet another man where she took more ketamine and felt ‘extremely high’. She was involved in a third threesome with them. According to a statement by Cornell Police based on interviewing Doe: ‘Some of the Chi Phi members started to compliment Doe’s looks and asked if they could take drugs off her body. Jane Doe responded, “Sure.” Then [two fraternity members] entered the room and said something like, “OK we’re shutting down whatever the f*** this is.” ’ At 5.45am – four hours after that first invitation went out on social media – she asked the men to stop, and as far as she could remember, they complied. She then fell asleep or ‘lost consciousness’ as her lawsuit puts it. She returned to her sorority house the following morning after 11am and told her two roommates that she had had sex with various men. She did not use the words ‘rape’ or ‘assault’. The following day, she went to her sorority house’s ‘big sister’ – a student mentor – saying that rumours were circulating on campus that she was a ‘slut’. The big sister later told investigators that Doe had laughed, adding. ‘Unfortunately they [the rumours] are true.’ However, she soon stopped laughing. Evidence uncovered by the New York Times found that Jane Doe later received a text message from Jonathan Newell, one of the men she would go on to accuse of sexual assault. He apologised to her ‘for how things went down the other night’, adding that he and Ingalls both felt awful for being too intoxicated to ‘shut it down and kick people out before it got way out of hand’. Doe reassured him, writing: ‘At the end of the day none of the sexual stuff was illegal and honestly i really liked being w u and matt.’ She also told her roommate: ‘If anyone asks about this, say it didn’t happen.’ Within days, she was texting Ingalls that ‘everyone knows’ what had happened at the frat house. It was ‘RUINING my life temporarily’, she added, telling him her reputation had been destroyed and she could only ‘sleep and cry all day’. The roommate later said that Doe was ‘kind of recounting it as this sort of crazy thing that she had done... As the days went on, I think she kind of came to realise that it was something bad. And that she didn’t really enjoy her time there.’ By this point, Cornell online forums were discussing the matter. One user had written: ‘Are Chi Phi brothers Crips or Bloods [members of notorious gangs] because I hear they have been doing hell Gang Banging?’ Another user had replied: ‘They do drugs and gang raped a sophomore. Report them.’ Doe later told investigators that when she read the forum: ‘That’s the first time I had ever heard the narrative change that I wasn’t a whore and that I was assaulted.’ She sent Ingalls a screenshot of the forum posts, writing: ‘???’ ‘Ridiculous,’ he replied. ‘I’m gonna report that.’ The New York Times has reported that, as Halloween approached, Jane Doe was increasingly viewing what had taken place as non-consensual. But she was still eager to attend another party at the frat house with the men she was later to accuse of gang raping her. ‘chi phi is your house and you are welcome here,’ wrote Ingalls. ‘thank u i really appreciate that... i’ll bring my cigs [cigarettes] tomorrow,’ she replied. Then she received a phone call from the frat house’s president, who is not accused of any wrongdoing, disinviting her from the party. She texted Ingalls: ‘I knew this was going to happen. The woman will always get the short end of the stick. Yall aren’t my friends. Yall are covering your a***s.’ On November 3, she texted Newell: ‘let’s be clear that 90% of what happened that night was not consensual. i was given more key [ketamine] than i can remember. and i know that i told u i felt uncomfortable and i didn’t know anyone in the room.’ She added that she remembered snorting ketamine from Newell’s body ‘in front of everyone like a sex doll/worker’. Four days later, she went to A&E and requested a ‘rape kit’, which are used to secure forensics in sex crimes, but too much time had apparently passed for it to be usable. She made her first report to campus police on November 8, about three weeks after the alleged assault. The university police sent a ‘crime alert’ to the university saying that Doe had reported being ‘sexually assaulted by several males and coerced into consuming ketamine and other drugs’. However, the force made no arrests. It sent her signed statement to the Tompkins County District Attorney’s office, which also decided not to pursue the case. Doe’s lawyer, Thomas Giuffra, said it was classic behaviour for a rape survivor initially to deny what happened, then feel shame and finally accept she’d been a victim. He said that at first she found it hard to accept her friends ‘would throw her like a piece of meat in front of a bunch of lions’. This week, local district attorney Matthew Van Houten announced that he was reopening the criminal investigation, emphasising that the version of events Doe had told police two years ago was significantly different from her latest account. Doe, he said, had previously made clear her participation in the drug-taking and sex had been ‘voluntary, conscious and consensual’. Van Houten subsequently admitted that he didn’t know at the time that Doe had told police that ‘I can say with 100 per cent confidence I was raped’ and that she was ‘completely and totally incapacitated’. This was because those obviously crucial remarks were mysteriously omitted from the report police had sent to him. On Thursday, New York governor Kathy Hochul said she’d lost confidence in Van Houten and appointed state attorney general Letitia James to investigate. At a press conference yesterday, Hochul vowed that she wouldn’t let anyone ‘sweep this case under the rug’. She said: ‘In what world does the district attorney not even interview her, or anyone else involved, or even request the full transcript?’ She claimed Jane Doe had been repeatedly ‘failed by people and institutions with an obligation to protect her’. However, James may struggle to bring charges. New York state’s rules on criminal allegations of rape require evidence of either ‘forcible compulsion’ or ‘incapacity to consent’. But if an accuser was ‘voluntarily intoxicated’, they cannot argue they were mentally incapable of consent. What’s more, although false accusations of rape are rare, they are not unknown. In 2014, in an article in Rolling Stone magazine, an unidentified student calling herself ‘Jackie’ claimed she had been gang raped by seven men at a fraternity house party at the University of Virginia in a grotesque ‘initiation rite’ two years previously. In response, students’ homes were vandalised with spray paint calling them rapists and bricks were thrown through their windows. It later emerged that Jackie’s accusations were false. The magazine was forced to retract the article, and settled a lawsuit out of court. The writer apologised. However, many Americans are understandably willing to believe the worst about frat houses, amid evidence that their behaviour is getting more and more out of control. Meanwhile, they are increasingly international and now operate at several British universities. In 2020, St Andrews in Scotland – which is heaving with American undergraduates – suspended members of its Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity over allegations of more than a dozen rapes and sexual assaults. In 2018, another Cornell frat, Zeta Beta Tau, was placed on a two-year probation for holding a sordid competition to see how many women its members could sleep with. The contest was allegedly called a ‘pig roast’. And in 2011, the parents of Cornell student George Desdunes accused a fraternity of killing him after his body was found on a frat-house sofa, having been tied up and forced to drink alcohol until he lost consciousness during a ‘hazing’ ritual. For now, the shocking case of Cornell’s ‘Jane Doe’ rumbles on. A new investigation may turn up crucial new evidence but, for the moment, millions of Americans appear to have made up their minds.