May 15, 2025, was a bright day in New York. But all Scott Kretzschmar could see was the social and institutional black hole threatening to swallow his future. Kretzschmar, then a 20-year-old junior at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, was trying to tell his side of the story before a Zoom-based university disciplinary panel that had charged him with some of the most heinous violations on the books: the rape and sexual exploitation of a female student at his fraternity house, the Xi Chapter of Chi Phi, part of a case that has now garnered global headlines.
Kretzschmar’s lawyer, Jeremy Saland, spotted something curious: Savannah Bao, one of the panel members, was in a car, seatbelted, and apparently driving (since the shadows playing over her face were shifting). Saland immediately emailed a flurry of complaints to Lauren Branchini, the university’s Title IX coordinator — who was involved in the case because the allegations implicated the federal antidiscrimination law. Here was a university adjudicator apparently carrying on with her various casual life activities while being presented with evidence in a case that could destroy a young man’s life, branding him a “rapist” forever.
“Shame on Cornell,” Saland fumed in one email. “I certainly hope none of you, from the General Counsel to anyone on that panel, is wrongfully accused of wrongdoing or has a child wrongfully accused, and has an adjudicator so cavalier and flippant towards the rule of law.” Branchini, the Title IX coordinator, coldly acknowledged that Saland’s protests had been entered into the record, and that Cornell would preserve records for a possible appeal. In the end, Kretzschmar was exonerated of rape and sexual exploitation but found guilty of attempted sexual exploitation, a charge Cornell hadn’t notified him of, despite its legal obligation to do so.
The written record of the day’s hearing, reviewed by UnHerd and first reported here, opens a window onto the shockingly one-sided procedures used by universities to impose after-the-fact accountability on one group and only one — accused young men. This, while young women, and everyone else in the system, refuse to accept responsibility for their role in a broken sexual ethic.
May 15, 2025, was a bright day in New York. But all Scott Kretzschmar could see was the social and institutional black hole threatening to swallow his future. Kretzschmar, then a 20-year-old junior at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, was trying to tell his side of the story before a Zoom-based university disciplinary panel that had charged him with some of the most heinous violations on the books: the rape and sexual exploitation of a female student at his fraternity house, the Xi Chapter of Chi Phi, part of a case that has now garnered global headlines.
Kretzschmar’s lawyer, Jeremy Saland, spotted something curious: Savannah Bao, one of the panel members, was in a car, seatbelted, and apparently driving (since the shadows playing over her face were shifting). Saland immediately emailed a flurry of complaints to Lauren Branchini, the university’s Title IX coordinator — who was involved in the case because the allegations implicated the federal antidiscrimination law. Here was a university adjudicator apparently carrying on with her various casual life activities while being presented with evidence in a case that could destroy a young man’s life, branding him a “rapist” forever.
“Shame on Cornell,” Saland fumed in one email. “I certainly hope none of you, from the General Counsel to anyone on that panel, is wrongfully accused of wrongdoing or has a child wrongfully accused, and has an adjudicator so cavalier and flippant towards the rule of law.” Branchini, the Title IX coordinator, coldly acknowledged that Saland’s protests had been entered into the record, and that Cornell would preserve records for a possible appeal. In the end, Kretzschmar was exonerated of rape and sexual exploitation but found guilty of attempted sexual exploitation, a charge Cornell hadn’t notified him of, despite its legal obligation to do so.
The written record of the day’s hearing, reviewed by UnHerd and first reported here, opens a window onto the shockingly one-sided procedures used by universities to impose after-the-fact accountability on one group and only one — accused young men. This, while young women, and everyone else in the system, refuse to accept responsibility for their role in a broken sexual ethic.
The case — popularly dubbed the “Cornell 7” after the seven accused men, including Kretzschmar — has gone viral since the accuser filed a civil suit against a host of defendants in mid-September. The young woman, referred to as “Jane Doe” in her complaint, is suing Cornell and several of its officials, three bodies associated with the young men’s fraternity, the sorority to which she belonged at the time, a bar in Ithaca, and the seven young men.
A manic rush to judgment has followed, one that is all too reminiscent of episodes like the 2006 Duke lacrosse case and the controversy sparked by a 2014 Rolling Stone essay that alleged a heinous, hours-long gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity. Both of those earlier narratives ultimately unraveled under factual scrutiny, but not before upturning the lives of the accused and contributing to an atmosphere of paranoia and accusation on campus.
The Cornell case has yet to be fully adjudicated. Yet already, the staff of The Cornell Daily Sun, the university’s main student publication, published an editorial headlined, “Cornell Won’t, We Will,” and doxxed the students. They wrote, “We refuse for this victim to be reduced to just another story. Cornell has failed to protect its students. Cornell has failed to address the growing issue of sexual assault on campus with its pathetic task force. Cornell has failed the student allegedly raped by those seven men at Chi Phi in October 2024. Cornell has failed her. Cornell has failed us.” The accused students’ likenesses have been shared as well on social media, often with instructions to “make their images and names known” or even to “remove their heads in a public setting” (the latter post has received more than 140,000 “likes” on Instagram as of the time of this writing).
According to Jane Doe’s civil suit, it all went wrong on the evening of Oct. 19, 2024. That’s when the 20-year-old Cornell student headed, alone, to the Chi Phi Xi Chapter fraternity house after a night of drinking that had begun in her sorority house and continued on Ithaca’s downtown strip. There, Doe’s suit claims, she was “drugged and raped by multiple members of Chi Phi National’s fraternal organization.”
The allegations are appalling: at the Chi Phi Xi Chapter house, two Cornell fraternity brothers, Matthew Ingalls and Johnathan Newell, allegedly pressured Doe into snorting ketamine and engaged her in a threeway sexual encounter without her consent. Another young man, Gillio Lopes, allegedly dropped by and joined in the rape. Then, at 1:42 a.m., Newell sent a message to the fraternity Snapchat advertising “free pussy” and providing the girl’s location — a bedroom at the frat called “alumni room” — thus allegedly encouraging other young men to come and rape Doe. Four more young men — Diego Sarabia, Winston Lee, Scott Norris, and Kretzschmar — are alleged to have entered the room at some point in the evening and had various degrees of contact with Doe. In the most lurid detail, Newell allegedly forced Doe to snort ketamine off of his erect penis; the other young men, including Kretzschmar, are accused of snorting lines of ketamine off her naked body.
Kretzschmar’s side of the story can be gleaned from an administrative appeal he lodged this year, challenging his disciplinary conviction for attempted sexual exploitation on procedural grounds. UnHerd reviewed, for the first time, documents from the appeal, which haven’t been posted to the New York court system’s online docket. He asserts that when he saw the “free pussy” message on the group chat, he stopped by the alumni room to make sure nothing “bad” was afoot. He also insists that, when he stepped in, Doe was in bed but under the covers. Kretzschmar’s legal team apparently also provided the school with the results of a hair-follicle test, which turned up negative for ketamine. (Hair-follicle tests generally detect drugs, including ketamine, up to four months after use.)
Eventually, most of the young men allegedly departed the scene, and Doe was allegedly removed to another room in the fraternity house, where she claims she was raped until 5:45 a.m. by two remaining young men.
Several weeks later, Doe says, she went to the Cornell Police Department (a private force) to file a complaint about the incident. The Tompkins County District Attorney’s office, however, declined to prosecute. Cornell instituted Title IX disciplinary proceedings against the seven young men, two of whom were eventually expelled; five others received consequences that included suspension, sexual-assault training, and essay-writing.
Doe herself left the school some time after the incident, which had become widely known on campus, according to a Cornell student who spoke with UnHerd on condition of anonymity. Doe didn’t complete her degree at Cornell.
The sexual activities described in the lawsuit — if they were nonconsensual — are horrifying. Yet the same activities, conducted consensually, amount to a more complicated matter. And evidence, as it has emerged in the days since the story of Doe’s lawsuit broke, has painted a much murkier picture than the one presented in her civil suit.
A statement provided to The New York Times by Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten summarizes a “six page, single-spaced, typewritten statement,” amended with “more than 20 hand-written notations,” that was originally made by Jane Doe to campus security. Van Houten maintains that, based on the young woman’s statement, there were no legal grounds for criminal proceedings. Doe’s behavior met the legal standards for consent in the state of New York, including voluntary consent to consume alcohol and drugs. Since then, and in response to the media brouhaha, his office has reopened a criminal investigation.
There are also many mitigating factors that cut in favor of the accused in Doe’s original complaint to Cornell police. The statement described “male number 1” — revealed in the later civil suit to be Ingalls — as her friend, with whom she had plans to meet. She rated her level of intoxication as “5 out of 10” upon arrival at the frat; said she agreed to the original threeway; agreed to take ketamine; and consented or declined consent to various sex acts. She snorted the line of ketamine off of the penis of “male number 2” because it was “implied” that he wanted her to; and she verbally consented to having other lines of ketamine snorted off her body. By the end of the evening, she reported, her level of intoxication was “8 out of 10,” and she found herself having sex with male number 1 and one other man, but couldn’t remember “how it started.”
The condition of the young men is not the focus of the statement, but the inability of “male number 1” to maintain an erection and need for a “nap” during a threeway, not to mention dry-heaving by “male number 2,” suggest that both of the original men in the scenario were also deeply impaired.
Other facial hallmarks of consent have also come to light, including a text message from Doe to one of the men in the days following the incident, in which she conceded that “non[e] of the sexual stuff was illegal” and suggested that they get together again, “but like leave out the extra 5 billion men and ketamine.” Doe’s attorney, Thomas Giuffra, confirmed to CBS News that she exchanged texts with a defendant, and suggested that her friendly tone was because she “was trying to find out what happened.” (Giuffra didn’t return UnHerd’s emailed requests for comment by press time.)
What happened to Doe was a tragedy. There is no question about that. The legal situation, however, is fairly clear: barring facts still to come to light, she was not sexually assaulted, not according to the legal definition under state law. Attempts to reopen the case are transparently motivated by the eruption of public outrage. And Doe’s own civil claim makes the weak argument that she was “incapable of consent” due to intoxication, without presenting any of the standards of proof required, which go well beyond the simple fact of intoxication.
Even so, a young woman was involved in group sexual acts that she subsequently regretted, finding them alienating and degrading. In other words, Doe is mostly a victim of a campus sexual ethic that rests upon bare consent as its sole criterion of right and wrong. Try as they might — and they clearly did in this case, as will be seen, anon. — university and Greek-life officials can’t stop a student like Doe in her determination to drink away her own inhibitions and to place herself in sexually risky circumstances.
Cornell tried. In 2022, the university established a special office that implements anti-sexual-violence training in fraternities. Four years earlier, it prohibited the consumption of hard alcohol in fraternity and sorority houses entirely.
Doe managed to drink anyway. Even before she left her own sorority for the evening, according to her own suit, she drank Tito’s vodka. This, in blatant violation of both the campus prohibition against hard alcohol in Greek houses and the sorority’s own rules. Then, at the two events that she later attended in Ithaca, the private vendors took measures to identify her as underage, marking X’s on her hands and giving her an under-21 bracelet.
At one of the events, Doe’s sorority had designated “sober monitors” to surveil “their fellow sorority sisters for signs of excessive intoxication,” according to the civil suit. Once again, Doe continued to drink. We can implement ever stricter measures: this week, Ithaca’s mayor moved to ban Cornell student-event permits altogether. However, in a more or less free society, human beings who want to get intoxicated and have sex will find a way to do so; decades of efforts to prevent this have so far been in vain.
Which is why the solution is not law, but judgement: among the young men, yes, but also the young women and the wider culture. Our narrow — and libertine — view of sexual morality holds that anything goes as long as there is consent. According to both our cultural values and the law, a young woman can engage in sexual activity with seven frat boys, as long as it’s what she wants. Bonnie Blue, to some, is a feminist icon. As a standard for sexuality, this shows extremely poor judgment, and it’s no wonder both young women and young men make terrible errors.
With the present, thin ethical culture in place, all the system can do is mete out after-the-fact punishment to young men. But the unfairness of these processes only compounds the aggregate injustice.
Savannah Bao, the Cornell adjudicator, was driving for at least 45 minutes, according to Kretzschmar’s appeal of the panel’s decision. This, he charges, was during a crucial portion of the Zoom hearing, in which another of the accused Cornell men, Scott Norris, was offering testimony that Kretzschmar saw as exculpating him.
Yet her driving was far from the only procedural defect in the hearing. Earlier that day, Saland complained in another email to the Title IX coordinator that Bao’s “glasses clearly reflected a blue box with a white background on her screen as her head and eyes moved back and forth” — that is, she was surfing other windows, rather than focusing on the matter at hand. (Cornell didn’t reply to UnHerd’s emailed queries by press time; likewise, Bao didn’t return a request for comment sent through LinkedIn.)
An even more serious procedural defect was that Cornell struck Kretzschmar with a disciplinary conviction related to a charge he didn’t even know he was facing. The original charges against him, recall, were rape and sexual exploitation. These charges arose from Doe’s allegation that Kretzschmar had seen her naked and sniffed ketamine off her body, both without her consent.
But Kretzschmar insisted, and the hearing panel implicitly agreed, that he hadn’t taken either step: Doe was fully covered with sheets when Kretzschmar entered the alumni room. And the hair follicle test indicated that Kretzschmar hadn’t taken any ketamine, sniffed from a woman’s body or otherwise. Thus, he was exonerated of both rape and sexual exploitation.
But Cornell wasn’t done. In the end, as noted, the school convicted Kretzschmar of attempted sexual exploitation solely because he had visited the alumni room after seeing the Snapchat messages and because of his own message to the group (“the alumni shit is not a bit. . . .”). Kretzschmar, the panel contended, “understood that a female was likely nude and/or engaged in sexual activity in the alumni room . . . and entered the room on that basis, intending to observe the same.”
Here’s the problem: Kretzschmar wasn’t, beforehand, apprised of the attempted charge, which is its own separate offense category in the university’s policies. Therefore, neither he nor his counsel could have prepared for or attempted to refute it: “attempt,” after all, has different elements than exploitation proper. Under Cornell policies, the attempt charge involves conduct “tending toward completion of the prohibited conduct.” As Saland, his lawyer, argued in the administrative appeal of the panel’s determination, “had Cornell informed [Kretzschmar] that he was being charged with Attempted Sexual Exploitation, … he would have focused his defense, arguments, questions as to witnesses, and review of the investigative file towards” disproving attempt.
But Cornell denied him such notice, leaving him and his counsel helpless before what amounted to a legal switcheroo. This was, without a doubt, a grave violation of his right to due process and even of Cornell’s own rules — with which, courts in New York have repeatedly held, the university was obligated to comply.
This is not a failure of any one institution, but of all of them. The university kangaroo court trampled on procedure and possibly the truth to achieve an ideological vision of justice. The court of public opinion has done the same. The police and prosecutors held firm at first, but since a new criminal case has been opened, we don’t know what the future holds. Both the young woman and the young men were ill-served by a culture that told them that in some situations, their behavior was desirable. Both have had their college experience and lives derailed.
The American university — and, indeed, US society writ large — desperately need a new sexual ethic. It won’t do to punish only one side of the sexual equation, young men, especially not in procedurally deficient quasi-trials that bring shame to a rule-of-law society. The public is angry for reasons that no criminal process, no lawsuit, and no administrative hearing can fix.
Nikos Mohammadi contributed reporting to this essay.
Sohrab Ahmari is the US editor of UnHerd, where Valerie Stivers is a senior editor.