One of the Cornell 7 told campus police he was too wasted on booze and ketamine to consent, and suggested the female student assaulted him instead, undercutting the gang-rape narrative now driving a reopened probe.
New York Post reporting on records from the Tompkins County District Attorney’s Office shows Matthew Ingalls, a Chi Phi fraternity brother, told Cornell University police he was too intoxicated to consent to sex on a 2024 night at the fraternity house.
Ingalls is one of seven young men at the center of the disputed encounter with a then-20-year-old student identified in court papers as Jane Doe. No one has been criminally charged. The local district attorney once found too little evidence to bring a case, then reopened the matter after Doe filed a civil suit.
That sequence matters. Campus rape claims move fast. Due process often does not.
According to documents released by the district attorney’s office, Ingalls said alcohol and ketamine left him unable to agree to sex. He suggested Doe assaulted him rather than the reverse.
Breitbart noted the same police statement, placing it in November 2024, and highlighted contemporaneous messages in which Doe indicated the sexual activity was not illegal and showed interest in further contact afterward.
The records describe a multi-person sexual encounter at the Chi Phi house. Ingalls first invited Doe over and propositioned a threesome. Group-chat messages from a thread with nearly 60 people captured the tone that night.
Ingalls wrote lines that later became central to the case file.
"Like you can walk in and whip it out,"
and
"Boys come whip it out."
Other chat language included a crude reference to “free p, sy.” Those messages are ugly. They are also not a criminal conviction.
DA-released materials state that Ingalls allegedly fell asleep during the encounter. Another brother reportedly took his place. Ingalls later woke and rejoined, the documents say.
Cornell documents also show Doe originally assured Ingalls that everything they did together was consensual. Her account changed in the ensuing weeks after she thought about the night and heard campus rumors.
About three weeks later she reported the incident as rape. In a campus police interview she said she was “100% confident I was raped.”
A recorded phone call between Ingalls and Doe, obtained by ABC News, captured the fight over what each claimed about sobriety that night. Ingalls pressed her on earlier statements.
"You did tell me you were sober. You did, you said you hadn’t been anywhere."
Doe answered that she was “100% sure” that was not true and that Ingalls “already knew” she was “10 shots deep” when she arrived at the house.
The statement campus police provided to the district attorney’s office apparently omitted Doe’s “100% confident I was raped” language. Her own statements included claims she had willfully been drinking and using drugs.
Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten previously did not see enough evidence to warrant charges against Ingalls or the other six men. After Doe filed the civil suit last month, Van Houten said he was reopening the probe based on what he called new details in the lawsuit.
Specifics of those “new details” were not laid out in the available records. Neither Ingalls nor the other six have been charged.
Political pressure has already wrapped itself around the same Cornell case, including commentary on whether fraternity members can get fair treatment once high-profile Democrats insert themselves into the fight.
Doe’s later civil filing and the DA’s reversal have kept the story alive on campus and beyond. Protests and national figures have treated the “Cornell 7” label as settled fact. The police statements and early texts do not read that cleanly.
The strongest tension in the file is simple. Doe’s early communications treated the night as consensual. She later described it as rape with total certainty. Ingalls told police he was too impaired to consent and cast her as the aggressor.
That is not a tidy morality play. It is a contested adult encounter soaked in alcohol, ketamine, group-chat bravado, and shifting stories. Campus processes and civil lawyers often skip straight to the villain assignment anyway.
Similar dynamics have already produced political fallout far from Ithaca, including the moment Pelosi scrapped a Cornell event as the assault probe reignited.
Public figures have also leaned hard on a single framing of the night. One progressive star’s version of events has been set against the sworn material and campus record in ways that expose how quickly a disputed case becomes a talking point.
Readers watching the clash between activist claims and the campus record will notice the same pattern here: certainty first, full file second.
Ingalls’s police statement does not erase crude chat messages or the seriousness of a rape allegation. It does force a basic question the activist script prefers to skip. If one participant told police he was too intoxicated on booze and ketamine to consent, why is only one side’s incapacity treated as dispositive?
Van Houten’s office once declined to charge. The civil suit changed the temperature. Reopening a probe is not the same thing as proving a crime. It is a reminder that prosecutors feel heat when lawsuits and campus politics arrive together.
The seven men remain uncharged. The woman has a civil case. The night in 2024 still has no single clean public narrative that survives the documents.
High-profile assault claims have upended other races and reputations when the early story outran the evidence, a pattern also visible when Democrats fled a Senate bid after a rape allegation hit the campaign.
Cornell’s Chi Phi case now sits in that same gap between accusation, paperwork, and proof. Ingalls’s statement to campus police, the omitted phrasing in the file sent to the DA, Doe’s early assurances of consent, and her later absolute certainty all belong in the same frame.
Due process is not a technicality for fraternity brothers. It is the only reliable way to separate a crime from a drunken mess that lawyers and activists later revise.
When the first police statement and the early texts tell one story, and the later lawsuit and protest chant tell another, the adults in the room are supposed to read the whole file before they pick a villain.