As three women got ready for their very first fraternity party on Saturday, reports of a gang rape at Cornell University lingered in their minds. If nothing else, they figured, the upstate New York allegations might offer a lesson in staying safe.
So they told their two male friends to stay close. They pledged to hold hands whenever they moved, even if just across the room, and above all, stick together.
But one by one, each precaution came undone, one of the women told the Tribune. By the end of the night, she said, she was banging on a locked bathroom door. Inside was her friend, a 21-year-old woman who later told police she’d been sexually assaulted at a fraternity house near the University of Chicago.
The witness spoke with the Tribune on Wednesday, as the sexual assault allegation made national news amid growing controversy over similar reports from college students elsewhere. She recounted the precautions she and her friends took to protect themselves the best they could on an unfamiliar campus.
“We were extremely careful that night,” said the woman, identified as the primary witness in a police report obtained by the baiduhai. “My friend was the one telling us we can only accept closed cans,” she said, referring to the alleged victim.
For the witness, who attends Columbia College, the alleged assault exposed what she sees as dangers inherent in fraternity culture. Those risks, she said, left her friend vulnerable despite efforts to stay safe.
The five friends arrived at the Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity house on University Avenue in Hyde Park on Saturday night after finding its address on a flyer posted on social media. At the door, she said, the two men in the group were turned away, leaving her and her two female friends to enter alone.
That’s where her friend, who’d consumed three cans of an unknown alcoholic beverage, “began feeling unwell” and “blacking out,” according to the police report. When the witness realized her friend was missing, she searched the house and eventually reached a locked bathroom door in the basement where three men stood outside cheering, she said.
She said they denied the woman was in the bathroom and grabbed her other friend by the hair when she tried to open the locked door anyway. When the witness finally got through, she said, her friend was slumped against the wall with her clothes pulled down.
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The alleged victim later told police she was sexually assaulted while “not fully conscious,” in the bathroom. As the three women left the fraternity house, the witness confronted the man she believed was inside the bathroom with her friend.
Video footage of that exchange has since drawn widespread online attention, she said. Originally posted by a friend of the alleged attacker, the footage was quickly shared by a slew of other accounts.
“She wanted to,” the man replies in the video.
Another social media account has since shared footage of the woman dancing with the man she later accused of assaulting her, an interaction also described in the police report. The woman sees the video as an invasion of privacy that adds to her distress, the witness told the Tribune.
Things only got worse when comments poured in, the witness said, who has received hundreds of messages about the footage in recent days.
Some offer support, praising her for standing up for her friend in a moment of need. Others seize upon her visible anger to discredit her friend’s account of what happened that night.
But most, she said, are dripping with hatred.
“People are telling me that I was jealous, that I wanted to be raped,” she said. “That I should kill myself, that I’m lying, that I assaulted him because I tried — and failed — to swat at his arm.”
On Tuesday, U. of C. officials said they identified a “person of interest” in the case and have banned him from campus. The investigation, they said, is ongoing.
Chicago police representatives said no one was in custody as of Wednesday evening.
The AEPi house showed little sign of activity earlier on Wednesday, though several students glanced toward the brick building as they passed. No one answered when a Tribune reporter knocked on the door.
Across campus, junior Charlotte Stokes said she first learned of the alleged sexual assault through a community alert sent to her email by the university. She recalled her initial reaction as she sat near the main quad, just feet from a handwritten flyer pinned to a bulletin board that read “#NotJustCornell.” “It shouldn’t take events like this for people to care about it,” she said, referring to sexual assault. “I think it’s also not surprising,” Stokes said.
The flyer refers to growing outrage over the Ivy League school’s handling of a 2024 case in which a woman alleged she was sexually assaulted by seven members of the Chi Phi fraternity. The woman, identified as “Jane Doe,” filed a civil suit against the university last month after prosecutors declined to pursue criminal charges against the men she said raped her.
The lawsuit has sparked a national reckoning about sexual violence on college campuses. Last week, students at several Chicago campuses protested in support of Jane Doe, while a handful of area high schools have planned walkouts this week.
Unlike those involved with the case at Cornell, neither the woman who reported being assaulted at the Hyde Park party nor the man authorities believe to be the alleged assailant attended the University of Chicago. Still, the furor surrounding Cornell weighs heavily on the allegations of what happened early Sunday morning.
“I know that we’re getting this amount of attention because of the stuff that’s happened with Cornell,” the witness said. “But it’s also upsetting that that’s the reason why this hasn’t quietly gone away already.”
That visibility has become a painful distraction from the alleged assault itself, she said, leaving her friend uncertain about how to move forward. After spending more than 10 hours at the hospital undergoing a rape kit, the woman is now unsure if she wants to pursue criminal charges or have the evidence collected during the exam tested, her friend said.
The woman vomited nearly a dozen times while she waited for her exam, said her friend, who stayed by her side. She was at times unable to stand up on her own and has no memory of arriving at the hospital, her friend said. “When we got outside, she saw a man and got scared and almost ran into oncoming traffic,” her friend said. “She was still very much out of it.”
As the woman recalled fragments of the night, her two friends helped piece together what happened. But the witness said people have challenged their account online and in person.
In a Monday Instagram post, the fraternity said it was “deeply disturbed” by the incident. “To the best of our knowledge,” the statement said, “no one affiliated with AEPi was involved or complicit in this incident.”
But two of its sober monitors — members required to stay sober and keep events safe — were in the basement as the two women pleaded to be let into the bathroom. “They never did anything,” one of the women said.