A Cornell graduate was suspended from his job after internet sleuths falsely linked him to fraternity group chats about an alleged gang rape that occurred after he had already left campus.
The man, identified only as B in a New Yorker article published Thursday, had graduated before the October 2024 Chi Phi party where the assault allegedly took place. He told the magazine he considers himself an “ally” who is “progressive to a fault,” and had no knowledge of the chats until they surfaced in a recent lawsuit.
B had texted a fraternity leader friend after seeing a public-safety alert, hoping he wasn’t involved. “Please tell me we’ve already de-brothered the people who were involved,” he wrote.
When accuser Jane Doe filed her lawsuit naming seven fraternity members, B was stunned to find his name included in a viral TikTok video claiming to list the Chi Phi brothers who participated in the chats. The clip, titled “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the ‘brothers of Chi Phi,'” accumulated millions of views and was accepted as verified by online investigators.
“It was like a bomb went off,” B told The New Yorker.
Those investigators dug deeper, publishing B’s name, home address and workplace. His employer began receiving unverified anonymous messages wrongly connecting him to the incident. Though his bosses knew he had graduated before the party, they placed him on paid leave and demanded proof he had never been in the group chat — a task B called impossible without subpoena power over Snapchat.
He remained on forced leave when he spoke to the magazine.
B hired defamation attorney Adam Ford, who sent a cease-and-desist letter to the creator of a doxxing website. The site removed B’s name along with other falsely implicated fraternity members. Ford told The New Yorker that B considered making a public statement but decided against it because “then you’re forever connected to the story, because you’re not connected.”
B deactivated his social media accounts, but the harassment spread to his family. Some wrote on his mother’s Facebook page, “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” by the ordeal.
His case was not the only instance of mistaken identity surrounding the lawsuit. Active-duty Marine Corps sergeant Matthew Ingalls, 23, never attended Cornell and had no connection to the case, but was mistakenly served with the lawsuit when Doe’s attorneys incorrectly attached his upstate New York address to the court docket. He and his family received death threats.
All seven men actually named in Jane Doe’s lawsuit have denied wrongdoing and have not been charged. A criminal investigation was reopened after she filed her complaint against the school, the fraternity and the alleged perpetrators.
The lawsuit alleges that Chi Phi fraternity brothers forcibly drugged Jane Doe before a horrifying gang rape, and that members sent text messages including a “free p–y” invitation to the party. The allegations became public when she filed suit, triggering widespread outrage and the online vigilantism that swept up B despite his lack of involvement.