August 2022: A young student on a new campus
In August of 2022, Jane Doe was 18, a recent high school graduate full of “hopes, expectations and trepidation” when she flew more than 1,000 miles across the country to Cornell, according to the lawsuit.
She joined about 16,000 other undergraduates at the Ivy League university located in Ithaca, a city in upstate New York. With 37 fraternities and sororities recognized by Cornell, the complaint said. Greek life was promoted as being “vital” to making friendship and connections. Drawn by "promises of sisterhood,” the lawsuit said, she joined the Alpha Beta chapter of Tri Delta, whose brick mansion at 118 Triphammer Road was situated in a leafy neighborhood near campus.
The lawsuit said Doe wasn't aware when she arrived that during the fall semester of 2022, Cornell received reports at least 5 cases of drugging and 2 reports of sexual assault, each at a fraternity location. Records show that from 2018 through 2024, more than 1,200 incidents of sexual assault, dating and domestic violence and stalking were reported to Cornell University’s Title IX office, USA TODAY has reported.
October 2024: ‘Worst experience of my life’
By 2024, Doe was 20 and living at the Tri Delta house. On a Saturday night that fall, Oct. 19, she drank some vodka at the house before heading out to a sorority gathering, according to the lawsuit.
At about 8:30 p.m., the complaint says, she took an Uber with the chapter's house mother, identified in the lawsuit only as "Jade," to a Tri Delta social event at Moonies Bar & Nightclub in downtown Ithaca, about 2 miles away. While bar staff drew an "X" on each of her hands to mark her as under 21, and the sorority had its own designated “sober monitors,” Doe had at least one drink at the event, the lawsuit said. By 10 p.m. she and several sorority sisters walked to another bar.
At 11 p.m, Doe “stumbled alone” to see a friend at the Chi Phi fraternity house, nearly a mile away, the suit said. Her lawsuit says she arrived visibly drunk after about 10 drinks in three hours. At the fraternity house, her friend gave her a beer and they danced before he proposed a threesome with another fraternity brother.
“In her drunken state, Plaintiff was incapable of consenting to this proposition,” the lawsuit reads.
The complaint says she was pressured into snorting a white powder said to be ketamine, a dissociative anesthetic, using marijuana and drinking rum before the men started having sex with her. The complaint maintains she was unable to consent. At one point, another man also had sex with her, the complaint says.
At 1:42 a.m. one participant posted a message to a Snapchat group called "Chi Phi Actives" there was “free p***y” available, according to the lawsuit.
"Shop still open?" one fraternity brother wrote later, according to video of the chat obtained by
CBS News.
The lawsuit says Doe hid under the covers as more men came in. One “commanded her” to snort drugs off his genitals, the suit said. She was later taken to another room and assaulted again by two men. The lawsuit says she was "completely incapacitated" by then. About 5:45 a.m. the “assault concluded and Plaintiff lost consciousness,” the lawsuit said.
Later that day, the lawsuit noted that what happened was spreading around campus."
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