In the weeks after a Cornell University student reported being raped at a fraternity party on campus, most of those she accused were questioned by university officials about their actions that night.
Their answers, which have not been previously reported, were detailed in hundreds of pages of confidential investigative files obtained by The New York Times.
The woman, who left Cornell and last month filed a lawsuit against the university, the fraternity and seven of its members, and her sorority, said she was plied with drugs in October 2024 after a night of heavy drinking and sexually assaulted multiple times at the Chi Phi fraternity house.
But in hours of interviews and a statement collected during Cornell’s administrative investigation over the winter of 2024, all of the men denied any wrongdoing. Four acknowledged having sexual contact with the woman but said that their interactions had been consensual. The others denied participating in sexual encounters.
One said that he, in fact, was “a victim of sexual misconduct” because the woman had given him oral sex when he was “too incapacitated” to consent.
All of their accounts differed, frequently contradicted each other and generally ran counter to the statements given by the woman to the Cornell police in 2024. The majority said they did not think the woman appeared intoxicated.
Most of the interviews, which were conducted by the university’s Title IX office, focused not on asking explicitly whether the men had raped the woman but rather on more quotidian questions: Where they had been that night, what they had said and why they had found themselves in the bedroom to begin with.
None of the men has been charged with a crime — the local district attorney declined to pursue a criminal case after reviewing the woman’s police complaint in 2024. But each was identified by name in her lawsuit filed on Sept. 16 and accused of sexually assaulting her, and the district attorney, Matthew Van Houten of Tompkins County, has since said that his office would again consider whether charges were warranted.
Since the woman, identified in her lawsuit as Jane Doe, sued the fraternity members, the men have largely remained silent. Lawyers for at least three of them have issued statements denying criminal wrongdoing.
None of the men’s lawyers immediately responded to requests for comment.
But in the interviews detailed in the investigative records, the men described their recollections of the night of the party in their own words.
They said their interactions with Jane Doe began when one of the men, Matthew Ingalls, asked if she wanted to have a threesome with him and another fraternity member, Jonathan Newell.
That request later spiraled into a series of sexual encounters, they said. It was Mr. Newell who, not long into their encounter, fired off a Snapchat message to dozens of other members advertising “free pussy” in the bedroom, according to Jane Doe’s lawsuit.
Mr. Newell told investigators that he was invited by Mr. Ingalls to participate in the threesome, saying he assumed Mr. Ingalls had asked for permission, the records show. Mr. Newell said that he and Mr. Ingalls had drunk a lot and consumed marijuana and ketamine, causing both to throw up.
The other men involved that night said that Jane Doe and those around her did not seem overly inebriated and that they themselves had not had too much to drink.
“They weren’t slurring their speech,” said Winston Lee, one of the accused men. “They seem perfectly normal.”
Another fraternity brother, Gillio Lopes, who, along with Mr. Newell lived in the room where the sexual encounters took place, said that he had “a pretty solid recollection” of the night because in his view he had not drunk that much — roughly six beverages, he estimated, in the form of three Keystone beers and three vodka-and-Hawaiian Punch mixed drinks.
When asked about his involvement with Jane Doe, Mr. Lopes said that she initiated their sexual contact and did not ask for his consent — a statement flatly at odds with her account of the night.
Mr. Lopes left around 2 a.m., he said, after he said he became “uncomfortable,” and went with three friends to McDonald’s. He said he did not tell them about what had transpired, in part because he was “admittedly a bit embarrassed about what happened,” according to the interview records.
Mr. Lee also said that Jane Doe initiated sexual activity without asking. He said he snorted a line of ketamine off her body and she tried to initiate sex.
“I kind of took a step back because I didn’t want to engage in anything like sex,” Mr. Lee said. “I thought it wasn’t the time for that.”
But later that night, Mr. Lee said he asked for Jane Doe’s consent before engaging in a threesome with her. He recalled telling Jane Doe that “if you’re uncomfortable with any of this or you won’t want to do this, that’s perfectly fine. We can call it a night.” He said Jane Doe replied: “We’re all consenting adults here.”
Another of the men, Mr. Kretzschmar, told interviewers that he and his friend Scott Norris entered the room after reading Mr. Newell’s Snapchat message, which he said had left him “befuddled.”
He said Jane Doe was not slurring her words when they arrived and that she did not appear drunk. He said he asked her “if she was all right just because the nature of the text, and there was one female in the room with a couple dudes.”
“We were just checking out to see if everything was OK, and it was,” he said, later adding of Ms. Doe: “And if she wasn’t, I’d like to think that I would have helped out and did something about it.”
Mr. Norris, in his interview, said he had been “somewhat concerned” when he received Mr. Newell’s Snapchat message, but assumed it was “crude humor.” He said he did not do any drugs in the room and did not have sex with Jane Doe.
“She was conversational with people, and that alleviated whatever concerns I had from the text before,” Mr. Norris said, adding that he stayed in the room for only five minutes and that all of the men in the room were completely or partially clothed for the duration.
In her interview with police, Jane Doe said that Mr. Kretzschmar and Mr. Norris were “more like voyeurs than anything,” the records show.
Diego Sarabia said he entered the room after 2:30 a.m. and was shocked by the scene before him: several fraternity brothers were there and one was standing behind Jane Doe, although Mr. Sarabia refused to say whether the person was naked or dressed.
“I was immensely concerned since I’ve never seen anything like this in my four years at the house,” he said, according to the records.
But he said his concerns were allayed when “all the people in the room” told him to come in.
“I remember the girl in specific saying something along the lines of, ‘This was normal in the medieval times,’” he said. Jane Doe said at one point he insulted her before grabbing her and kissing her.
Jane Doe, a sophomore at the time, was also interviewed at length by Cornell’s Title IX investigators, as were about 20 other people, including her friends and other witnesses to the assault and its aftermath.
She described a horrific night in the fraternity room where she could not reach her phone. She said she was given large amounts of drugs and alcohol and repeatedly raped by men she barely knew or had never met, the files show.
“I was super drunk,” she said.
Still, she said, she came to understand what had happened to her. When she gave her account to a police investigator three weeks after the party, she was unequivocal: “I can say with 100 percent confidence I was raped,” she said.
Cornell said on Monday that it gave the men “a range of sanctions, which included expulsions and suspensions.” Thomas Giuffra, Jane Doe’s lawyer, has said that only two of the men were expelled, which his client does not consider justice.
Michael C. Bender, Jay Root and Hurubie Meko contributed reporting.
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