Cornell University police prepared requests seeking phone records in connection with an alleged gang rape investigation, but it is not known whether prosecutors ever received them, according to a new report.
Documents obtained by CNN show that Cornell police sent letters to Verizon and T-Mobile roughly a week after a female student, identified in court filings as Jane Doe, reported an alleged sexual assault at the Chi Phi fraternity house in 2024.
Dated November 15, 2024, the letters said police were “investigating a sexual assault incident” and believed the listed account or phone number could contain evidence relevant to the case, CNN reported.
Investigators said they would provide a signed warrant within 30 days and asked the carriers to “preserve all available data,” including text messages, emails, call records, photographs and video messages linked to the accounts, according to the report.
However, the available records do not establish whether the requests were ever sent to Verizon or T-Mobile, or whether Cornell police later pursued subpoenas for the information.
It also remains uncertain whether Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten was informed of the department’s effort to obtain the records.
Van Houten initially reviewed the sexual assault allegation and chose not to bring charges against the accused. His office has since reopened the investigation.
Jane Doe’s attorney told CNN that she recorded several conversations with men connected to the case, which has drawn national attention since she filed a lawsuit last month against them, Cornell University and other defendants.
Documents obtained by CNN indicate that Cornell University Police drafted letters to Verizon and T-Mobile about a week after a female student, identified as Jane Doe, reported an alleged sexual assault at the Chi Phi fraternity house, pictured, in 2024.
Protests have spread across the Cornell campus following the lawsuit Jane Doe filed last month.
Some of the communications between Jane Doe and the men have since become public, including a phone conversation she shared with Matthew Ingalls.
Ingalls allegedly invited Jane Doe to the fraternity house on October 19, 2024, where she says he drugged and raped her. Cornell later expelled him.
As university police examined Jane Doe’s allegation, Ingalls claimed he had been too intoxicated to consent to sex, according to records obtained by ABC News.
He also suggested that Jane Doe could have been the person who assaulted him.
In a call obtained by Cornell police, however, Ingalls was heard telling Jane Doe: “You did tell me you were sober, by the way.”
The recording reflected sharply different accounts of the alleged incident. Jane Doe told Ingalls he “already knew I was 10 shots deep” when he and six other men allegedly sexually assaulted her.
“If I wanted to take this somewhere, what y’all did would be classified as gang rape,” she told him in another message.
Jane Doe also said she had gone to the emergency room and entered therapy after the alleged assault, describing “so much damage on my body and my brain.”
Photos showed activists breaking windows and defacing buildings with red-painted messages criticizing patriarchy and Cornell’s handling of sexual assault allegations.
During the call, Ingalls denied wrongdoing and said Jane Doe had persuaded him that she was not intoxicated and “hadn’t been anywhere” that night. She disputed his account.
Yet Jane Doe could be heard in the audio asking Ingalls for details about the night, including how they ended up in a threesome in his fraternity house.
‘So, you come in, say hi, and we start dancing for maybe like three to five minutes… And then I pop the question, you say yes,’ he replied.
He said they ‘didn’t know who else to bring’ into the threesome, so he found another man on the dancefloor [sic] who agreed, ‘and then we go upstairs.’
That other man involved in the alleged threesome was Jonathan Newell, who has also been accused of sending out a Snapchat message to a group chat with more than 50 frat members that night that read ‘Free p****’, referring to Jane Doe, according to the lawsuit reviewed by Our News Outlet.
Newell was also expelled.
Five others allegedly engaged in sexual acts with Jane Doe while she was incapacitated and without her consent, the female student told investigators, per the filing.
Winston Lee, another frat brother named in the lawsuit, was suspended for two years and faced several semesters of disciplinary probation when he returned to campus, according to disciplinary summaries seen by The New York Times.
Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten initially investigated the sexual assault allegation and declined to file charges against the accused
Gillio Lopes was suspended for three semesters, followed by two years of probation. Both of them were also ordered to write essays and study sexual harassment, the summaries stated.
Jane Doe has also accused Diego Sarabia of forcibly kissing her that night, according to the lawsuit.
He was banned from campus for three years, and a persona non grata order was issued against him after he graduated at the time of the panel’s ruling, the outlet stated.
The other two men, Scott Noris and Scott Kretzschmar, were told they can not be in contact with Jane Doe, also had to write essays, and had to study sexual harassment and social media use and bystander intervention as a result of the school’s investigation two years ago.
The fraternity chapter has since been banned from campus following the school’s investigation.
Since the allegations came to light in September, protests have broken out across the campus.
Activists shattered windows and vandalized buildings with red-painted messages condemning patriarchy and the Ivy League school’s handling of sexual assaults on Monday, photos showed.
When approached for comment, a Cornell University spokesperson told Our News Outlet: ‘We do not have anything further to say due to the active investigation.’
The Daily Mail also reached out to the Cornell University Police Department, the Tompkins County District Attorney’s Office, Verizon and T-Mobile for comment.
