‘It’s a Bad Day to Be a Chi Phi’

Hayden Kelner, a senior at Ohio Wesleyan University, was giving a campus tour last month when his group reached fraternity circle, the epicenter of the school’s Greek life.

A chaperone asked which fraternity was Kelner’s. He hesitated, and then told them he was the president of Chi Phi.

The eight high school girls in his tour group took a step back and grimaced. Chi Phi’s Cornell University chapter, hundreds of miles away in Ithaca, New York, is at the center of a lawsuit alleging seven of its members drugged and gang-raped a female student, Jane Doe, in 2024.

“I felt disgusting—not about myself, but about what that name carries now,” Kelner told The Free Press. “It’s hard seeing an organization that I care about so much get tainted by something like that.”

Kelner, 22, has nothing to do with Chi Phi’s Cornell chapter and doesn’t know any of its members. When he first heard about the case, he was at work in the admissions office. His heart sank, he said, thinking of what Doe says she endured and what it took to report it. “It’s terrible what happened,” Kelner said about the allegations. “It’s horrible, but that’s not our chapter.”

But in the weeks since, the case has followed him anyway. A professor stopped him to ask whether his fraternity was the one she had seen on the news, he said. Kelner made his Instagram account private, so his family and partner wouldn’t be targeted. He worries about wearing his Chi Phi letters off campus, where strangers only know the name from the news. “I’m worried about my own safety,” Kelner said.