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The Ivy League Shield and the Cornell Seven By Wayne Ince

Writer: Wayne Ince
Wayne Ince
4 days ago
8 min read

Tampa, Florida

Update, October 2, 2026: On October 1, Gov. Kathy Hochul signed an executive order naming Attorney General Letitia James special prosecutor in this case. Hochul said she had "lost faith in the Tompkins County DA's ability to fairly oversee it." James said, "This is now an active criminal investigation led by the Office of the Attorney General." Hochul also pointed to a 120-page transcript of the student's 2024 interview with Cornell police, with details she said "never made it into the account that Cornell police sent to prosecutors." Van Houten has said he worked from a six-page statement.


In May 2023, a federal jury in Manhattan found Donald Trump liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll in a department store dressing room in 1996 and awarded her $5 million. Eighteen months later, the country elected him president. In June 2026, the Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal. He still denies it happened.


In October 2017, a woman told Monterey police that Pete Hegseth sexually assaulted her at the Hyatt Regency hotel. Investigators documented bruises on her thigh. No charges were filed. Hegseth's lawyer says the encounter was consensual, and Hegseth later paid her an undisclosed sum under a confidential settlement. In January 2025, the Senate confirmed him 51 to 50, with the vice president breaking the tie, to run the department I served for twenty-three years.

On September 23, 2026, a New York judge sentenced Harvey Weinstein to fifteen years in prison for forcing a sexual act on Miriam Haley in 2006.

One of those men is in prison. The other two run the government and the military. This country does not decide what repels it by what happened in the room. It decides by how much power the man still holds when the story comes out.


Three days after the country elected Trump, a twenty-year-old Cornell student went to campus police.

At 1:42 in the morning on October 20, 2024, a message landed in a Snapchat group called "Chi Phi Actives." According to the lawsuit, it told the brothers there was "free pussy" upstairs.


Upstairs in that fraternity house on Cornell's Ithaca campus was the same student. Her 101-page civil complaint, filed in New York State Supreme Court, alleges that two members gave her high-proof rum, marijuana, and ketamine before an assault began. After the Snapchat went out, others came into the room. The complaint describes forced kissing and groping, ketamine snorted off her body, and two men walking her to a second bedroom, where the assault continued until about 5:45 a.m. Later, another message hit the chat: "Shop still open?" The answer came back: "Yea." Hold on to that Snapchat. Cornell and the district attorney still can't agree on where it went.


Nearly two years passed before the public learned the names of the seven men she sued: Matthew Ingalls, Jonathan Newell*, Winston Lee, Gillio Lopes, Diego Sarabia, Scott Norris, and Scott Kretzschmar. None has been criminally charged. All of it remains allegation until a court says otherwise.

The public did not learn those names from the Cornell University Police Department. The public did not learn them from Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten. We learned them because a young woman filed a lawsuit, and because the student editors at The Cornell Daily Sun printed what the adults in charge sat on for twenty-three months.


Cornell knows how to move fast when its authority is on the line.


In October 2024, the same month as the alleged assault, Cornell handed three-year campus bans to four students over a pro-Palestinian protest, according to The Nation. Order on the quad got speed. A woman's report from inside a recognized fraternity house got paperwork.


Cornell suspended the chapter the day she reported. Then the case went in-house. Cornell ran it through Title IX. The Ithaca Police Department, the agency with criminal jurisdiction in the city, says nobody told it. "This incident was not reported to the Ithaca Police Department," the department said in a September 28, 2026, press release. "The Ithaca Police Department learned of these allegations recently through the media."


Read that again. The city's own detectives found out from the news.

What about Kendall Francis?

I retired a Senior Master Sergeant in 2006. I was in uniform in January 2003 when an anonymous email reached the Secretary of the Air Force and Congress, alleging that Air Force Academy leaders had ignored cadets' sexual assault reports for years. The Pentagon's inspector general later found that twelve percent of the academy's female graduates that year reported being victims of rape or attempted rape. Part of the rot was structural. The academy ran its own confidential reporting process, and the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, the agents trained to work these crimes, had objected since 1996 that it kept cases away from them. The fallout reached every base: a sexual assault response office at every installation and new reporting rules by 2005. Nobody handed us those rules because we were good at policing ourselves. We got them because we weren't. Cornell's campus police kept this one in the building.

Behind the shield of federal student-privacy law, the outcomes came out uneven. After the lawsuit went public, Cornell President Michael Kotlikoff told CBS News that two of the accused were expelled, two were suspended for at least two semesters, one graduated before any punishment landed, and two were found not responsible. The Sun reported that some of the accused were allowed to mitigate their discipline by writing essays. Cornell answered that "none of the individuals charged were offered the opportunity to write essays as a sole consequence." Sole. That word is doing a lot of work. The university still won't say which man got which outcome, citing privacy law.


She left Cornell.


In February 2025, three months after her report, Cornell stood up the Presidential Task Force on Campus Sexual Assault. In December 2025, the Sun asked co-chair and Dean of Students Marla Love about the group's progress. Her answer: "The charge was never for us to solve the problem."


At least she was honest. Cornell's 2025 campus survey found fifteen percent of respondents reported nonconsensual sexual contact, up from eleven percent in 2023, according to the Sun's editorial board. One in five of those incidents happened in fraternity chapter houses or annexes.


Then came the district attorney.


Van Houten closed the case without charges. After the lawsuit drew national coverage, he defended that call. He said the survivor's sworn statement described taking the drugs and alcohol herself. "That's not coerced. That is not forced. She took them voluntarily," he said. He called the Snapchat messages "disgusting" and "morally despicable," then said they were not relevant to whether she consented.

He is leaning on a real hole in New York law. Under the Penal Law's definition of "mentally incapacitated," a person only counts if the substance was given to them without their consent. Drink the rum yourself, and prosecutors have to prove you were physically helpless. The State Senate has passed a bill to close that loophole five times, according to The Meteor. Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie has never brought it to a floor vote.


But a bad law does not explain everything. Van Houten has said he never saw the transcript of her interview with campus police. "I never saw it, never heard it until tonight," he told reporters. He has also said he hasn't heard from her directly in two years. And the two institutions can't agree on the most basic fact in the file. Cornell's published FAQ says it handed the DA's office "all investigatory information" in 2024, naming "the Snapchat screenshot." Van Houten told ABC News his office "never received this Snapchat image."

Somebody is wrong. A woman lost two years waiting for them to figure out who.


On September 28, 2026, two weeks after the lawsuit was filed, Van Houten reopened the case and said he would take it to a grand jury. Within days, Gov. Kathy Hochul announced that Cornell had agreed to an independent review of its response, and Attorney General Letitia James opened her own. On October 1, Hochul went further. She signed an executive order making James the special prosecutor and took the criminal case out of Van Houten's hands.


Look at the words each office picked to stand behind. Cornell's word is "sole." Van Houten's word is "voluntarily." The task force's word is "never." Each one is true enough to survive a lawyer and small enough to hide behind. That is how an elite university runs. Its own police force keeps embarrassing crimes off the city blotter and city detectives off the grounds, and when the questions get specific, privacy law answers them. None of it gets a survivor in front of a grand jury.

On September 21, 2026, the Sun's editorial board printed the seven names under a headline that said what the administration wouldn't: "Cornell Won't, We Will."


A special prosecutor will now weigh the evidence, and those seven men are entitled to every presumption the law gives them. Cornell's record doesn't need a jury. Handed a report of an alleged gang rape inside its own fraternity system, the university kept it in-house, kept the city police out, and let a student leave school. At 1:42 that morning, a Snapchat told a house full of men what was upstairs. The city's own detectives got the news twenty-three months later, from the media.

*Name spellings follow The Cornell Daily Sun editorial "Cornell Won't, We Will," September 21, 2026. The Sun's September 2026 news report on the lawsuit spells the second name "Johnathan Newell."


Sources

Trump and E. Jean Carroll

Pete Hegseth

Harvey Weinstein

The lawsuit and the Cornell Seven

Cornell's response

The district attorney and New York law

The Air Force Academy, 2003

The special prosecutor

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