Methodology

We document the 2024 Chi Phi case at Cornell University and how the university, campus police, and prosecutors responded. We record what happened and who said what. We do not decide guilt or innocence, which is a matter for the courts.

We rely on three kinds of source, in this order of preference:

Court filings

Documents filed in court, linked to the official record where possible. A complaint is one party's account; we describe its contents as allegations.

Official statements

Statements issued by Cornell University, the Tompkins County District Attorney's Office, police, and attorneys for the parties. We report what they say and attribute it to them.

News reporting

Reporting from established news organizations with editorial standards. Where outlets disagree, we say so. We link to the original article.

Social media posts, anonymous claims, and unverified screenshots are not treated as evidence of fact.

Alleged

Stated by a party, usually in a court filing, and not yet tested or established.

Disputed

Alleged by one party and denied or contradicted by another.

Confirmed

Established by a court ruling, a public record, or agreement between the parties, or independently verified by more than one reliable source.

Unresolved

Not yet known from the public record.

A claim's label changes only when the record changes, and each change is noted in the timeline.

We name the seven students who are defendants in the civil lawsuit. Their names are in the public court record and have been widely published by news organizations. Being named here is not a finding of anything: none of the seven has been charged with a crime, and no court has found any of them responsible. Wherever we name them, we say so.

For each of the seven, we publish only his name as it appears in the complaint, his Cornell class year as reported by news organizations, his status in the legal process, and any public statement he or his attorney has made. We do not publish photos, ages or birthdates that have not been reliably reported, home addresses, employers, social media accounts, family details, or speculation. We do not name other people mentioned in the complaint who are not parties to the case.

We will not publish anything that could identify the plaintiff, who is known in court papers as Jane Doe. This applies to text, images, alt text, and linked material.

Policy change, September 29, 2026: Until this date, we did not name the seven student defendants. We changed the policy because their names are part of the public court record and have been published by established news organizations, including The Cornell Daily Sun, CBC News, and ABC News. We added the limits above at the same time, and we are recording the change here, as we said we would.

We link to public documents at their official source rather than hosting copies. Where a document contains details that could identify the plaintiff, or names private individuals who are not parties to the case, we will not link to it directly. For that reason we cite the civil complaint by paragraph number rather than linking to it.

If we get something wrong, we fix it, note the correction on the page where it appeared, and record it in a public corrections log with the date. We do not quietly edit errors away.

To report an error, email info@32north.bm or see the contact page.

This is an independent student project with no affiliation with Cornell University, any party to the case, or any advocacy group. We wrote the site's code with help from an AI assistant. We select all content, check it against its sources, and edit it ourselves.

Every record in the archive has a reference number, so it can be cited and linked on its own: C7-T for timeline entries, C7-E for evidence, C7-C for claims in the Status Tracker, and C7-P for the seven defendants. We assign a number when a record is added and never reuse one, so numbers follow the order in which records entered the archive, not the order of events.