Save this story Save Story Save this story This article contains descriptions of allegations of sexual assault. Read the rest of GQ’ s special report on Cornell here and here .
I grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts, 10 minutes from frat row, a strip of filthy, dilapidated mansions long since demolished and bought by UMass. When I was a child, I went trick-or-treating there and received rolls of toilet paper for my trouble. Then, as a teenager, I went there because it seemed like a place where nobody would stop me from drinking, or otherwise try to protect me from anything. It was a kind of slumming, an escape to a decrepit environment mostly beyond the reach of the law. The first time I hung out with people who drank themselves sick, it was at a frat party. My first rock show and mosh pit too. Driving around town, my friends and I chauffeured hitchhiking frat boys from one party to another. The town was full of people who liked to criticize rich people, but frat boys and other students actually threw stuff at rich people. As a longstanding winter tradition, UMass students marched onto the campus of small, elite Amherst College, pelting students with snowballs, but also, reportedly one year with rocks, obliging Amherst College’s president, the following year, to threaten to call in the state police. But to me, their apparent lawlessness made them exciting, the local equivalent of Vikings.
Later, I wrote a book of short stories about frat boys, interviewing many of them in the course of my research. So when news spread that a woman had filed a civil lawsuit alleging a horrifying gang rape had taken place at the Cornell chapter of the Chi Phi fraternity in 2024, people asked me how such a thing might have happened.
Much of the Cornell affair is shocking. But it’s especially repugnant that the young men in question, who have denied wrongdoing, apparently wanted to have sex with a woman who was, according to the plaintiff’s account, so far gone on alcohol and ketamine that she could barely be considered conscious. “I was a sex doll for all intents and purposes,” Jane Doe told a police interviewer, according to reporting by The New York Times . Her intoxication, according to the lawsuit, was extreme. Indeed, it could have been a kind of coping strategy: “My thought was, if I do ketamine again, maybe I will pass out,” she’s reported to have told officials. And what was happening inside the minds of the men? The suit includes a photograph of a Snapchat group , where one of the brothers texted other active members to “pu” (“pull up”) for “free pussy.” What could make a man advertise an intoxicated woman’s body for the apparent purposes of sharing her with his male friends?
Since Jane Doe’s civil lawsuit was filed, much has been written about hazing rituals in general, which some pundits argue socialize members to be violent toward pledges, and women. But there is also a blend of homophobia and homoeroticism that has a long history in American fraternities. The anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday, in her 1990 book Fraternity Gang Rape, related the account from a woman who lived in a frat house for a summer and described a “circle dance” that took place, invariably, to the Doors’ song “L.A. Woman”:
The song comes on and the brothers start yelling “Ho! Ho! Ho!” All the brothers link arms and join in a circle. Then the whole circle moves around so fast that the shortest members are lifted off the ground. The “Ho!”s continue until the circle loses control and the entire group piles on top of each other, squashing the smallest members […] For a bunch of guys who were always so full of nasty, ugly, homophobic remarks, they seemed to enjoy jumping around on top of each other very much.
In some cases, there have been homosexuality-detection rituals in fraternities that are not only implicitly anti-gay but deeply homoerotic. Pledges, according to one of the accounts in Sanday’s book, were told to expose their genitals, with actives (an “active” is an active member, that is, a full-fledged brother of the fraternity) punishing those who refused with push-ups. Other rituals are just plain homoerotic: Pledges might be asked to simulate sexual acts in front of others, or forced to shower together, or consume liquor through the anus.
There’s a history, too, of frat boys using women as accessories for homoerotic revelry. In 2015, the Indiana University chapter of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity had its charter revoked after a leaked video showed a crowd of actives watching as one of their brothers, prone on a mattress and stripped to his boxers and socks, looks to be performing cunnilingus on a woman, who, the chapter’s chief executive officer said, was a hired exotic dancer, and whose legs seem to keep him in a headlock. Some men sit on the floor nearly naked, watching passively, while others stand over him fully clothed, spanking their brother or patting his back. It’s unclear to what degree, if any, the frat boy giving oral sex is being coerced, but it seems clear from his state of undress that he’s been cast as an object of desire. The woman appears to restrain him, forcing his face into her crotch. She is there, it seems, to perform dominance for both the amusement and the titillation of the frat.
The horrors alleged at Cornell seem to have taken place in that space between amusement and titillation. One of the Chi Phi’s on the now infamous Snapchat included in the lawsuit about the alleged gang rape sent a text about how a brother “went in 7 min ago and is not afk” (“away from keyboard”). Another, one of the men in the purported original threesome with Jane Doe, added something seemingly like an exhortation: “Like you can walk in and whip it out.” If word had gotten around Chi Phi that a threesome had taken place between two of the brothers and Jane Doe at the proposition of one of the men, as is alleged to have happened, they might well have been ridiculed or, worse, made to feel like outsiders. Their brothers might have asked, Who did what with whom? Did they like it? Some of their brothers, in other words, might have made a supposition about their sexuality.
It’s possible to interpret the Snapchat messages as an effort to turn a MMF threesome—with its potential suggestion of male bisexuality—into something more heterosexual. According to Jane Doe’s lawsuit, one of the two Chi Phi’s “forced oral sex on Plaintiff” while the other one “slapped Plaintiff on the buttocks multiple times, resulting in bruising.” According to the claims in the lawsuit, this might have been the beginning of a long slide into the alleged drug-fueled violence—Jane Doe treated as a shared resource, like a pizza or a keg.
According to Thomas Giuffra, Jane Doe’s lawyer, she learned of the Snapchat exchange thanks to a picture taken by a fraternity member not present. A few days after the alleged assault, she saw other users condemning Chi Phi on an online forum, as detailed in text messages accessed by The New York Times .
“Are Chi Phi brothers Crips or Bloods because I hear they have been doing hell Gang Banging?”
“They do drugs and gang r*ped a sophomore. Report them.”
Those posts reportedly started to shift Jane Doe’s perspective about what had happened to her. “That’s the first time I had ever heard the narrative change that I wasn’t a whore and that I was assaulted,” she reportedly told investigators. The posts laid bare a chilling facet of Greek life: A fraternity that discards its proclaimed values (“Chivalrous behavior crosses the ages to touch the heart of Chi Phi,” reads the creed of the frat) can start to look like a middle-class gang.
In a foreword to Fraternity Gang Rape , longtime Philadelphia trial judge Lois G. Forer remarked on the similarities between frat boys and urban street gang members, having tried both in her courtroom. Fraternities and gangs, she said, both “engage in sexual behavior that others call gang rape,” considering it “a form of male bonding for which the female is merely an available instrument.”
But there is another similarity that Forer neglected to mention: a fraternity, like a street gang, can derive much of its power by controlling access to an illicit resource. A street gang might control access to cocaine or heroin in a particular neighborhood; a fraternity, at a university located in a small city like Ithaca or Amherst, can act as the gatekeepers to a large, conveniently located house in which there might be little to no supervision or check on the consumption of drugs and alcohol. That is what brought me, as a curious teenager, to frat row, where underage drinking and other mischief appeared to be abundant.
According to text messages published by CBS, about a week after allegedly being raped at the Chi Phi house, and a couple of days after seeing the “Crips or Bloods” comments online, Jane Doe seemed to consider attending Chi Phi’s upcoming Halloween party.
“Chi phi is your house and you are welcome here,” a frat brother wrote, reassuringly. “Thank u i really appreciate that,” she replied. “<3 i’ll bring my cigs tomorrow.”
Soon after, though, she reportedly said she received a call from the chapter president disinviting her from the party. The dismay and anger she expressed in response—“yall aren’t my friends” and “the woman will always get the short end of the stick”—seem to be a testament to how central Chi Phi’s parties were to her social world, to Chi Phi’s outsize power to ostracize in the insular eddy of the American college campus.
Those within a fraternity fear ostracization, too, and they might take dramatic measures to avoid it. In Sanday’s book, she describes a brother “so worried about his attractiveness and masculinity that he set quotas for sexual encounters for certain time periods.” Sex was not merely about pleasure, “but the feeling of acceptance and approval” it might generate. The alleged violence at Cornell smacks of these anxieties, the need to transform sexual intercourse into a performance of masculinity. A healthy fraternity, committed to the cultivation of young men, might allay these anxieties rather than exacerbate them. The frat would be a place to practice alternative forms of masculinity, inculcated by a house where vice had no foothold. But then, would anyone go to their parties? Would the fraternity even survive?
As a high school kid, I wanted to live within a fraternity’s nimbus of approval. Instead, I lived with my mother, most of the time, and it was she who had taught me how to shave. I didn’t play any sports, wasn’t on a team or in a club. I was drawn to fraternities, then, for some of the same reasons boys in poor neighborhoods are drawn to gangs: loneliness, boredom, the need for male role models.
One autumn night, not long after rush week, I walked by one of the frat houses and witnessed a spectacle unfolding on a lawn: pledges, arrayed single-file, dressed for a day at the office, in sweater vests, ties, oxford shirts, khakis, and brogues. An active, pacing the line like a drill sergeant assessing the combat readiness of new recruits, barked about the importance of neat tie-knots and aftershave, of steaming your pants and polishing your shoes. The pledges listened in silence, rapt with attention, their ties crooked, their sweater vests ill-fitting, their bearing less than military, some of them fidgeting, and shifting their weight from foot to foot. They would have done anything their pledgemaster said, so total was his air of authority and their need for it. I would have too—believing, in my innocence, that he could have taught me how to be a man. ◼︎
About the Lede Photo A fraternity at UC Berkeley in the 2000s.
In 2018’s The American Fraternity, artist Andrew Moisey presented intimate photographs of Greek life at his alma mater (see above) to reveal the paradox of fraternities: Pledges take oaths to help each other become ideal men, then revel in behaving badly. Now a professor of art history and visual studies at Cornell, Moisey tells GQ: “It feels [like] we are in an abusive relationship with the fraternities. They tell the task forces that they’ll never do it again, but they’re built on breaking their own promises. If the fraternity is helping Cornell’s graduates go on to high places, then, I guess, isn’t that good for Cornell? But when there’s a death [like that of Antonio Tsialas, whose body was found at the bottom of a gorge two days after an unauthorized Cornell fraternity party in 2019] or an alleged rape or any other kind of tragedy, our association means that what they do dishonors all of us.” For Moisey, the debate now playing out among faculty, administrators, trustees, and donors about the future of frats at Cornell boils down to an “old, classic” question: “What’s more important, honor or money? Cornell is supposed to represent enlightenment. Does this look like enlightenment to you?”
What people in Ithaca are saying—and not saying—about the sexual assault allegations brought against members of the Chi Phi fraternity.
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