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The Big ReadTuesday, 09.29.2026View in App

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Get the whole story. Join now.The ‘Cornell 7’ Have Not Been Proven Guilty

A handful of former frat bros were accused of a horrific crime. The court of public opinion has already punished them.

Jane Doe’s new court filing contains details that seem to illuminate a truly horrifying miscarriage of justice. (Heather Ainsworth/The New York Times/Redux)

By Kat RosenfieldPREVIEW

In a world where matters of the heart and hormones are among the most turbulent fronts in the culture wars, new traditions must be established to cope with the ongoing conflict. Hence, our annual (except in some cases, it’s more like seasonal) ritual, wherein a murky unpleasant sexual encounter between two or more consenting-or-were-they adults becomes the pressure release valve for all our pent-up frustrations about the increasingly fraught landscape of affairs between the sexes.

This time, the encounter in question took place in 2024 at upstate New York’s Cornell University, at the off-campus home of the fraternity Chi Phi. According to a statement given at the time by the alleged victim—identified only as Jane Doe—it all began around 11 p.m., after she left a sorority meetup and walked a mile or so to the Chi Phi frat house, to meet up with a male friend who lived there. Once there, she continued drinking and also took ketamine, until the friend suggested they have group sex with one of his fraternity brothers. Jane Doe agreed—per her statement, she was “pretty okay with having this threesome” as well as titillated by the possibility that the two men might be sexually attracted to each other—but the encounter ended when both men proved too drunk to perform. Her friend lost his erection and fell asleep; the other man started dry heaving.

But then a third man entered the room—and eventually, a fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh...

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