The Simple Truth Behind Jane Doe’s Story
· The Atlantic
Imagine that you make a business deal with a friend—someone you know and trust. Say you’re selling him some land. But when you turn up at his country club to complete the sale, your friend announces that you were offering such a good deal that his friends want to buy some of your land too. And they’re all here, so could you sign the deeds over immediately? That’s asking too much of you, so you hesitate. Still, your friend is a nice guy, and you know he wouldn’t screw you over. You agree.
When you get home, though, your friend texts to say that he feels bad about what happened. It’s fine, you reassure him. But then, a few days later, you find out that everyone who bought your land is laughing about what a fool you were to sell it so cheap. You find out that other people think that your friend has screwed you over. You call up your friend and say: Hey, this doesn’t feel right. His tone changes. He doesn’t want to speak to you anymore. And then you find out his country club has barred you.
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After all that, might you not conclude that the transaction was a betrayal by your friend—and that your land sale was coerced, even though you ostensibly agreed to it? Consent is often treated as a binary concept, when reality is much more gray, and too often we act as though legal judgments and ethical ones must be the same.
Last month, a former Cornell University student referred to in legal papers as Jane Doe alleged that seven men had participated in an hours-long assault on her at a fraternity house in 2024. Thanks to reporting by outlets including The New York Times and The Cornell Daily Sun, the campus student newspaper, we now have a clearer picture of what happened on the night of October 19 that year. Around 11 p.m., the anonymous complainant left a bar and walked to the Chi Phi fraternity house. Jane Doe was already drunk, according to the lawsuit. There, she asserts, she met a male friend, Matthew Ingalls, and began a threesome with him and a buddy of his, Jonathan Newell. (The men are named in Doe’s lawsuit and their identities have been widely reported elsewhere.)
[Read: Is college getting less safe for women?]
She says that another man, Gillio Lopes, later came into the room and initiated sex with her. A photo included in the lawsuit indicates that, at 1:42 a.m., Newell sent a message to the fraternity’s Snapchat group promising “free pussy” in the alumni room. This announcement was greeted with the equivalent of high fives from several men. “I fucking love Chi Phi,” Ingalls replied, according to the image, and added, “like you can walk in and whip it out.” According to Doe’s lawsuit, multiple other members of Chi Phi entered the room: One of them kissed her, two others joined the group in snorting ketamine off her naked body, and a seventh participated in another threesome with her and Ingalls. (All seven men have denied wrongdoing; Ingalls told Cornell that he was sexually assaulted by Doe while incapacitated, according to messages reviewed by ABC News.) The lawsuit also targets Cornell, the fraternity, Doe’s own sorority, and the bar where Doe, then 20, was drinking before heading to the frat house.
Jane Doe did not arrive at the frat house that night with the intention of participating in an orgy; that much has not been disputed. The narrow legal question is therefore whether the various men involved obtained her further consent as the sexual scenario spiraled. (According to Doe, she did successfully refuse some of what the men were asking for, such as a foursome that she understood would involve anal sex, according to the district attorney’s statement on September 28 this year.) She says in her lawsuit that she consumed so much alcohol and ketamine that she was extremely disoriented, but under New York law, if a person is voluntarily intoxicated, then the mere fact of their intoxication does not make them unable to consent. Was the ketamine offered to her, or forced on her? That is a key question in assessing whether any of the men committed a crime.
What has made this case the subject of so much viral debate is that Doe herself did not initially understand what happened as rape, and her recent lawsuit includes allegations that she did not make in her sworn statement to police two years ago. The day after, Newell was sufficiently uncomfortable with what had happened that he messaged Doe to apologize. He should have acted to “shut it down and kick people out before it got way out of hand,” he wrote. Doe reassured him: “At the end of the day non [sic] of the sexual stuff was illegal and honestly i really liked being w u and matt.”
Some of the fraternity members quickly began to coordinate among themselves to defuse the situation. Another of the men present that night, Winston Lee, told Doe in a phone call that he had been advised not to speak to her, according to a recording obtained by ABC News. When Doe asked how so many men had gotten into the room, Lee told her that “there was nothing saying that like, um, anything was happening in that room or anything.” The group-chat image included in the lawsuit tells a different story: Lee had responded to the “free pussy” offer on Snapchat with the exultant words “CHI PHIII.”
Three days after the incident, Doe got checked for a urinary-tract infection, which she told the doctor had been acquired in a “traumatic way,” according to a transcript of her interview with investigators obtained by the Times. In that account, her perspective on what happened changed when unsettling rumors about a “gang bang” began to fly around campus. According to Doe’s account, she reassessed her experience after reading an allegation in an online forum that Chi Phi members had “gang r*ped a sophomore.” Around this time, she was disinvited from the Chi Phi Halloween party by the fraternity president, text messages indicate. She wrote to Ingalls, her supposed friend, to say, “The woman will always get the short end of the stick. Yall aren’t my friends. Yall are covering your asses.” On November 3, she texted Newell: “let’s be clear that 90% of what happened that night was not consensual.”
Doe reported the encounter to the campus police on November 8. Investigators interviewed her six days later, and turned her extensive testimony into a six-page sworn statement, which was submitted to the district attorney’s office. (The sworn statement does not describe what happened as a rape, whereas the longer interview transcript records Doe as saying, “I can say with 100% confidence I was raped.”) The DA declined to prosecute, arguing that “the facts as set forth in the statement objectively prevent the filing of criminal charges,” although his office also declined to review additional evidence collected by Cornell, according to the Times. Amid the publicity generated by Doe’s recent lawsuit, New York Governor Kathy Hochul appointed State Attorney General Letitia James as a special prosecutor to review the case. Cornell has hired former U.S. Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates to review the university’s handling of the matter.
In January 2025, Doe made a Title IX complaint, prompting Cornell to conduct a thorough investigation, which included interviewing six of the men, according to the Times. The university expelled Ingalls and Newell and suspended Lopes and Lee. (All four admitted to having sexual contact with Doe, but all four maintain that it was consensual.) A fifth man, who Doe said had kissed her without consent, had graduated; Cornell barred him from campus for three years. The two men accused of entering the room and failing to intervene were asked to write “reflection papers.” (In the lawsuit, Doe incorrectly accuses Cornell of agreeing to let all of the men off easy if they agreed to write essays about the encounter.) The fraternity was also barred from campus.
Whether any of the men are guilty of rape is a matter for the New York court system. However, the evidence we have so far convicts them of being cruel, misogynistic jerks who deserve the punishments they have already received. Those Snapchat messages are both revealing and incriminating, because they demonstrate the emotional dynamics of the night more clearly than any witness statement ever could. These men saw Doe not as a fellow human being, but as a vending machine dispensing bro points they could cash in with their buddies.
The academic literature on multiple-perpetrator rape finds that, in the words of forensic psychologist Mackenzie Lambine, “sexual elements within juvenile group offending are often ‘coincidental’—secondary to the need for the group to exercise power over the victim, exert male dominance and develop relationship bonds.” Ingalls was supposed to be Doe’s friend, but the evidence now before us suggests that his loyalty was entirely to the fraternity. The persistent criticism of fraternities is that they foster unhealthy relationships among the powerful men of the future, by a system of interlaced kompromat and shared transgressions. This case does nothing to debunk that view.
Really, the whole of the Cornell story can be boiled down to Jane Doe’s realization that her male peers adhered to the old adage “Bros before hoes.” “I was a sex doll for all intents and purposes, which is sad,” she told police.
In rape cases, the traditional approach has been to pick apart the complainant’s actions. What was she wearing? Why did she let herself get so drunk? Why didn’t she fight back? Why did her story change? Online, you can easily find the view that Jane Doe is a regretful slut who maliciously decided to ruin seven men’s lives with a knowingly false criminal complaint. A slightly softer version of this is the claim that Doe reached for the identity of victim because the alternative was whore. The former Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly thinks Doe must have consented, because she is “extremely beefy in her arms and her legs” and was therefore grateful for the validation of being desired. “An unambiguous case of consensual sex,” Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute declared, plugging an interview she had given about the “campus rape myth” to The Daily Wire. “Women shouldn’t expect coddling,” the USA Today columnist Ingrid Jacques wrote. “And regretting one’s bad decisions is a far cry from rape.” Jacques further wondered why the men involved were being held to a “higher standard” than Doe.
[From the March 2014 issue: The dark power of fraternities]
Were they, though? This is where the land-deal analogy is instructive: Doe thought she had signed up for mutually pleasurable group sex; she discovered later that she was just a prop in a bonding exercise among men. The bargain changed when she was in no state to renegotiate. Doe was heavily outnumbered when further sexual acts occurred beyond the initial threesome.
Heavily outnumbered, need I say, by men. The right has spent the past few years mocking the left for not understanding—in the context of, say, competitive sports—that sex differences exist. Now some conservatives are reflexively defending the Cornell 7 by playing cute and pretending that a sexual situation involving one woman and multiple men is a meeting of equals. Please. Our understanding of rape cannot be gender-neutral, even though women do indeed have agency and personal responsibility, just as men do. The scenario in which a drunk man is lured upstairs in a sorority house—where its sisters text the group chat offering “free dick” to anyone interested and send one another messages about what legends they are—does not exist outside porn.
What happened at Chi Phi that night might very well not satisfy a criminal standard of proof, but, as the conservative writer Natalia Bower notes, “we don’t have to call it rape to get mad at it.” To use an old-fashioned word, it was wrong. Tell your daughter, if you must, not to take ketamine with strangers or agree to a threesome in a frat house. But tell your son this, too: Don’t send messages to the group chat offering a drunk woman like a box of doughnuts. Don’t turn up to a frat-house room expecting anal sex with a woman you’re meeting for the first time, when she is already surrounded by other men. Jane Doe transgressed against historical standards of purity for women. The men at Chi Phi broke a code of human decency that ought to be eternal.