BREAKING: A terrorist plot to attack the Texas Capitol was foiled.
The suspect told his friend that he was angry at AIPAC and that “these people have to be exterminated.”
The rhetoric pushed by Abdul El-Sayed is directly inciting violence.
EXCLUSIVE: The Cornell 7 Lawsuit Served the Wrong Person. Now He’s the Target of an Internet Mob.
Mom of the mistakenly identified Matthew Ingalls begs vigilantes to leave them alone. ‘My family’s been terrorized, threatened, and harassed.’
@FrannieBlock reports for @TheFP
At 8 p.m. on Saturday night, Victoria Ingalls heard a banging sound at her front door.
There was a man standing outside her house in upstate New York. “Is Matthew Ingalls your son?” he asked.
Victoria’s son is an active duty sergeant in the Marine Corps. “My heart went in my throat,” she told me. She assumed she was about to hear the news that every military family dreads.
Instead, the man handed her an envelope with a 101-page lawsuit inside, accusing her son of being among seven Cornell university students who allegedly raped and sexually abused a female student, identified as Jane Doe, over the course of seven hours at the Chi Phi fraternity house in October 2024.
But Victoria’s son, 23, never attended Cornell. The court, the family soon figured out, had served the wrong Matthew Ingalls and had added the Ingalls’ home address to the official docket.
Online vigilantes targeting the alleged perpetrators of the alleged gang rape didn’t know that. They began searching Matthew Ingalls’ name as soon as the lawsuit was filed, and when they found details about Sergeant Ingalls and his family, they started posting the family’s details, including their phone numbers, on the internet.
In one post on X, an individual posted her son’s address with the caption: “This is definitely NOT Matthew Ingalls’ new phone number and address!. . . . Posting this for public awareness so people know to NOT reach out.” In another post, Victoria said she came across posts with her son’s name on them, with pictures of woodchippers and captions like “we can’t get caught if they can’t find bodies.”
Victoria’s daughter, 26, received a text message with a photo of the Cornell student Matthew Ingalls and a screenshot of a Google Earth image of her brother’s house. Her mother said she had no idea what it meant at the time, but she now understands it to be a clear threat. Then, Victoria said, the texts became more extreme: “Do the world a favor and go kill yourself,” read one. “Get fucked in the ass to death bitch” and “Kill yourself,” read others.
“My family’s been terrorized, threatened, and harassed,” Victoria told me. “I am just amazed at the way people behave. I can’t believe that people will just look someone up on the internet, take a phone number, and start texting someone or calling someone and saying the vile things they’re saying. You don’t even know if you have the right person. You’re creating more victims.”
Boston Mayor Michelle Wu is facing backlash after it was revealed that the city has been using taxpayer funds to teach immigrants, including those without legal status, how to politically organize for progressive causes. https://t.co/iDpAbfOQ9L
I’ve held my tongue for a while, but being from Ithaca, a Cornell alum and a former criminal defense attorney, and seeing how out of hand this story has gotten, I am compelled to comment on the lawsuit alleging a gang rape at Cornell.
I cannot purport to know what happened one night at a frat house in October 2024—any more than you can. However, here are a few basic principles much of the public appears not to understand.
A lawsuit is a series of allegations made by the plaintiff. It is not proof. Allegations made in lawsuit turn out to be untrue all the time, either due to mistake, intentional misrepresentation, or flat-out lies. Unfortunately, people often misrepresent the truth in lawsuits due to monetary and other incentives. In the past, there have been instances of fabricated rape allegations. About a decade ago, Rolling Stone published a piece about an allegedly horrendous rape that occurred on the UVA campus that garnered similiar outrage to this incident and turned out to be entirely fabricated.
I have read the DA’s press release and the lawsuit itself. According to the cited portions of Jane Doe’s statements to police shortly after the incident, crediting it as entirely true, there was simply no basis to charge the alleged perpetrators. Everyone involved was apparently extremely intoxicated. Jane Doe gave consent to the encounter at the beginning and does not explicitly recall any activity occurring after consent was withdrawn. It is possible that, due to her inability to recall, she had not given consent for some of the activity towards the end, but possible is not a basis for a district attorney to file criminal charges.
Her current lawsuit is fairly consistent with her initial statement—except it omits the portions where she told the police she gave consent. Is she lying? Did she later remember something she didn’t initially? Is she mistaken? I do not know—and again, neither do you.
What I do know is that if we are to live in a society of laws, going after the jobs and reputations young men who may have participated in an entirely consensual incident, and the DA who made the correct decision not to charge, is mindless mob justice. We actually want prosecutors to decline to seek indictments when there’s insufficient evidence of criminal wrongdoing.
None of this is to say I approve of what happened as reported in the initial statement to police. That’s a cultural and parenting issue, though, not a matter for law enforcement. I encourage people to let the DA’s office handle the case going forward, and not to participate in the witch hunt against either the prosecutors involved or the young men who, as of now, have not been charged or shown to have committed any crime.