See more of our coverage in your search results.
A former Cornell student has been suspended from his job after being falsely linked to fraternity brothers’ chats about the alleged gang rape — even though he’d already graduated before it happened.
The grad, who calls himself an “ally” who is “progressive to a fault,” was not at the 2024 Chi Ph party and had no knowledge of chats about “free p—y” until they emerged recently in a lawsuit, he told the New Yorker, which referred to him only as B.
He had only heard about a public-safety alert, texting a frat leader friend that he hoped he wasn’t involved, adding, “Please tell me we’ve already de-brothered the people who were involved.”
But when accuser Jane Doe’s shocking allegations blew up after she filed a lawsuit accusing seven frat bros of raping her, B was shocked to see his name included in a TikTok claiming to be a verified list of the callous frat members who chatted about the sick party.
The clip, entitled “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the ‘brothers of Chi Phi,” quickly went wildly viral, amassing millions of views — and taken at face value by online sleuths, who dug in further and started listing B’s name, address and place of work, he told the mag.
It was like “a bomb went off,” B said, with his employer getting unverified and anonymous messages wrongly connecting him to the incident.
He was placed on paid leave from his job, which the New Yorker did not identify beyond saying it was something that involved building trust with clients.
His bosses knew that he had graduated before the party, but still demanded proof that he had never been in the group chat, which he said was impossible without the power to subpoena Snapchat for the records.
He was still on forced leave when he spoke to the New Yorker for the article published Thursday.
He hired a defamation attorney who sent a cease-and-desist letter to the architect of a doxxing website, which then removed B’s name along with other frat members who were falsely implicated.
The falsely accused man considered issuing a public statement but didn’t because “then you’re forever connected to the story, because you’re not connected,” his lawyer Adam Ford told The New Yorker.
B deactivated his social media accounts — but his loved ones were soon inundated with harassment, with some even writing on his mom’s Facebook page saying, “You know you raised a rapist, right?”
They “couldn’t get to me, they just tried to get to anyone adjacent to me. It spread all the way out,” he said.
B was left “heartbroken” over the incident and remains on leave.
Word of his ordeal came after an active-duty US Marine Corps sergeant who shares a name with one of the men named in Jane Doe’s complaint was mistakenly served with the lawsuit.
Matthew Ingalls, 23, never attended Cornell and had no connection to the case whatsoever, but he and his family became the target of death threats after Doe’s lawyers incorrectly attached his upstate New York address to the case docket.
All seven of the men named in the lawsuit have denied wrongdoing and have not been charged. A criminal investigation was reopened after Jane Doe came forward with her bombshell lawsuit against the school, the frat and the alleged perpetrators.