The Cornell Jane Doe who is suing seven former Chi Phi fraternity members over an alleged gang rape was targeted in a swatting incident Tuesday night, when armed officers showed up at her parents’ home after someone falsely reported a shooting there.
Swatting is when someone makes a fake emergency call to send a heavily armed police response to a person’s home. Her attorney, Thomas Giuffra, told CNN the caller claimed a shooting was in progress and that people were being slaughtered inside the house she grew up in. Officers in tactical gear carrying assault rifles responded and drew their guns on her family and a friend. Giuffra said her father had guns put in his face.
According to the police report the family filed, her father told an officer that his daughter is Jane Doe in the Cornell case and that the family was being threatened by numerous unknown people. Giuffra told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Wednesday night that his client is still reeling.
The swatting comes on top of death threats. Giuffra said Doe has been receiving them since her lawsuit went public, and he gave CNN audio of one of the harassing calls.
Doe sued Cornell, the Chi Phi fraternity and the seven former members last month. She alleges she was drugged and gang raped at the Chi Phi house on October 19, 2024, and reported it to university police that November. No one was arrested or charged in the original investigation. Cornell expelled two of the men, including Matthew Ingalls, and suspended others.
Her own words about that night resurfaced this week. Months after the alleged assault, Doe told a Cornell panel, “I was prostituted, and I was held up like bait for a gaggle of men,” and urged the university to remove the men she accused from campus.
The accused men tell a different story. In police interview video obtained by ABC News, two Chi Phi members who say they did not have sex with Doe told Cornell police they heard the encounter was consensual. Ingalls has claimed in an email that Doe sodomized him that night. ABC also reported that Ingalls posted a photo of Doe naked in bed to the Chi Phi Snapchat group and invited his fraternity brothers to join.
Giuffra has accused the fraternity of a cover up, telling CNN’s Anderson Cooper that members held meetings to protect the house and the men involved. A female Cornell student told investigators that fraternity brothers described what happened as a “consensual orgy” and told her not to spread it around campus.
The case has set off protests at Cornell. On October 7, students held a seven hour sit-in at Toni Morrison Dining Hall, one hour for each hour Doe says she was assaulted. Cornell has brought in a former top Justice Department official to investigate how the school handled her report.
No one has been publicly identified as the person who made the 911 call that sent officers to her parents’ door.
