On October 19, 2024, a 20-year-old female Cornell student attended an event at the Tri-Delta sorority house before going to Moonies Bar in Ithaca, where, despite being underage, she was allegedly served alcohol while visibly intoxicated. Later that night, at around 11 p.m., she went to the Chi Phi fraternity house to meet her friend Matthew Ingalls. 

 According to the victim’s allegations, Ingalls and another fraternity member, Jonathan Newell, brought her to a room where she was given a white substance they allegedly claimed was ketamine, along with more alcohol and marijuana. Ketamine is a dissociative anesthetic that can cause feelings of detachment, slurred speech, dizziness, drowsiness and, at high doses, unconsciousness.

 The lawsuit alleges that after she became incapacitated, a Snapchat message saying “free p*ssy” was sent to the fraternity’s group chat, and that over the next seven hours she was repeatedly sexually assaulted by seven men — the two men accused of drugging her and five others who allegedly responded to the group-chat message.

 The seven men named in the civil lawsuit are Matthew Ingalls, Jonathan Newell, Winston Lee, Gillio Lopes, Diego Sarabia, Scott Norris and Scott Kretzschmar. The post claims that despite witness statements, medical evaluations and screenshots from the group chat, no criminal charges were filed, and that several of the accused were able to overturn university suspensions after submitting written essays, while the woman later left Cornell.

It also says that the Chi Phi fraternity had previously been associated with drug-related incidents, including an incident involving law enforcement roughly a week before the alleged assault and what the post describes as a “culture of ketamine use.”

The victim has since filed a civil lawsuit of more than 100 pages in New York State Supreme Court seeking compensatory and punitive damages from more than a dozen individuals and organizations, including the seven men, Cornell University, the Chi Phi national organization and its Cornell chapter, the former president of Cornell’s Chi Phi chapter, her former sorority Alpha Beta Tri-Delta and the national Tri-Delta organization, as well as Moonies Bar and Nightclub.

 The lawsuit alleges negligence by the university and Greek organizations, including failures by designated “sober monitors” to protect visibly intoxicated underage students, and alleges that Moonies unlawfully served her alcohol despite her being underage and visibly impaired. According to the post, the civil lawsuit is now her remaining legal avenue after the Tompkins County District Attorney closed the criminal case without charges, citing insufficient evidence. 

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