A recorded phone call between a Cornell University student who alleged she was gang raped and fraternity member Matthew Ingalls has shed further light on their account of events at a Chi Phi house party in 2024.
Jane Doe made the call three weeks after the alleged incident, seeking to establish what had happened. The recording, obtained by ABC News, captures a tense discussion about consent, the number of men involved and the pair’s recollections of the night.
Doe reportedly told Ingalls she had consumed 10 shots of alcohol before arriving at the party and said she had been out of it. Ingalls appeared to challenge that account, telling her: “You did tell me you were sober, by the way. You said you hadn’t been anywhere.”
She questioned how so many men had ended up in the room and told him: “If I wanted to take this somewhere, what y’all did would be classified as gang rape.”
Ingalls then gave his version of how they came to be together. “So you, you, you come in, say hi. We start dancing for like maybe three to five minutes, and then I pop the question. You say yes,” he said.
He added that he approached another man who had also been dancing. “So I go up to [redacted] who was on the dance floor too, and I pop the question, and he’s like ‘Yo,’ and then we go upstairs,” Ingalls said.
Doe asked Ingalls to help identify the men present, saying she remembered four people in the bed and others in the room. He suggested that neither of them could be certain of their memories, saying: “I have racked my brain for this mystery. You know, it’s possible that both of us, like, remember this, and it’s not true.”
Doe reportedly said she had spent time in hospital and in therapy, describing “so much damage on my body and on my brain”.
The call did not include any mention by Ingalls of a photograph he had allegedly posted to the Chi Phi Snapchat group showing Doe naked in bed. He reportedly invited fraternity members to come to the room, writing: “boys come whip it out.”
Doe reported the alleged incident to university police in November 2024, saying she had been gang raped at the fraternity house on October 19. Two men, including Ingalls, were expelled, while other students received suspensions.
The Tompkins District Attorney has since reopened the investigation.
