A 21-year-old woman reported that she was sexually assaulted last weekend at a fraternity house near the University of Chicago, the city police said, putting another campus on edge over accusations of misconduct tied to Greek life organizations.
The woman said the assault occurred in the early hours of Sunday during a party at the Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity, the police said, though neither the victim nor the suspect were students at the school. One witness said in an interview that she had interrupted an attack. That prompted the suspect to flee the house, according to the university, which called the episode “deeply concerning.”
The Chicago city police are investigating and did not provide further details, nor say whether there had been an arrest. On Tuesday, the school said it had identified a “person of interest” in the assault, adding that the person has been barred from campus.
Accusations of sexual misconduct are grimly plentiful on American campuses, and the report at the University of Chicago, a campus of Gothic architecture and intellectual rigor, came after a reported gang rape at Cornell University in New York propelled the issue back into the national debate.
The Chicago episode took place at a Saturday night fraternity party boisterous enough to be heard blocks away. Klara Grant, an 18-year-old chemistry student, said there was a D.J., dance floors on two levels of the house and a bar.
Mia Lara, a 21-year-old student at a nearby university, said she had seen the event advertised on the fraternity’s Instagram account. She and the woman who reported the attack, along with a third friend, decided to go.
It was the first time any of them had been to a fraternity party, Ms. Lara said. At the door, they were asked for identification, but not whether they attended the University of Chicago.
The trio danced in the basement. Ms. Lara’s friend and a man began kissing and Ms. Lara lost track of them. She searched the house, eventually finding a small group of men cheering outside a locked bathroom door in the basement, she said.
“They were saying things like, ‘When’s it my turn?’ and, ‘I want to go in there,” Ms. Lara said.
Ms. Lara jimmied the lock and forced her way inside. She found her friend sitting on the floor, slumped against the wall with her clothes and undergarments pulled down. The man whom her friend had been kissing had his hands on her wrists, Ms. Lara said.
Her friend began saying, “Make it stop” and “Get me out of here,” Ms. Lara said. Ms. Lara began screaming and the man left. She and her friend carried the woman out of the bathroom.
Outside the fraternity house, Ms. Lara chased the man, a scene captured in a social media video. In the clip, Ms. Lara yells at the man, accusing him of assaulting her friend.
“She wanted to,” the man replies. Ms. Lara swats the man with her hands, and he runs.
Ms. Lara said the man got away and she was intercepted by a campus police officer. The officer drove the three friends to the University of Chicago hospital, she said, where the police took a report and her friend underwent a rape exam.
In a statement posted on Instagram, the University of Chicago’s chapter of Alpha Epsilon Pi condemned what it called a sexual assault, asking for respect and privacy for the victim.
The fraternity’s national organization decried the episode in a separate statement, saying, “No one should attend an event on any campus — fraternity-based or otherwise — and have to fear for their safety and well-being.”
Jonathan Pierce, a spokesman for the fraternity’s national organization, said the suspect was not a member of the Alpha Epsilon Pi chapter at the university.
“We do not believe that any AEPi members were involved in this horrible act, nor were they complicit with it,” Mr. Pierce said in an email.
Fraternities at the University of Chicago are not formally affiliated with the institution, the school said, but are still “subject to university policies and disciplinary procedures.” Alpha Epsilon Pi has been told not hold events or programs during the investigation, according to Mr. Pierce.
Gerald McSwiggan, a spokesman for the university, declined to be interviewed.
Fraternities and Greek life overall have been under scrutiny after allegations of a gang rape at Cornell in 2024 recently came to light when a woman sued over the episode. On Tuesday, Cornell announced that it would ban fraternity parties for the rest of the academic year.
Around the country, the necessity of Greek life has been called into question, as some reflect on the history of hazing, violence and even death that has long marred institutions promising friendship and professional networks.
Ms. Grant, the chemistry student in Chicago, left the party with her friends before the incident, she said. They were stunned when they learned about it the next day, she said.
“There’s definitely going to be a different sense in the air for the next little while,” she said.
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