A University of Chicago fraternity is facing allegations of sexual assault from a local resident in a lawsuit filed this week.

The 19-year-old woman, who is not a student at the school and is identified in the suit only as “Jane Doe,” alleged that she was raped at a party at the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity house in February after a fraternity member offered her “unidentified alcohol” that made her lightheaded and unsteady. According to the complaint, obtained by MS NOW, the assault occurred in a “secluded room” of the house while the woman was “visibly impaired” and both physically and mentally incapable of giving consent.

Filed Monday in Cook County Circuit Court, the lawsuit comes on the heels of a national reckoning around sexual misconduct at universities, which was sparked last month when allegations of a 2024 gang rape at Cornell University resurfaced in a civil suit.

News of the Chicago lawsuit was first reported by NBC News on Tuesday.

The complaint named just two defendants: the Alpha Delta Phi Inc. national organization, which governs individual chapters and memberships, and the fraternity’s Chicago chapter. Jane Doe claimed that both were negligent in ensuring the safety of guests at the Chicago house, especially given multiple allegations of sexual assault at the same residence, which has been maintained by the chapter for almost 100 years.

According to the complaint, two alleged sexual assaults occurred in the same month in 2009 at the same Alpha Delta Phi house where Jane Doe alleges she was raped. Her complaint alleges that those incidents, combined with the documented prevalence of campus sexual assault, should have put both the national fraternity and its Chicago chapter on notice of the serious and specific risks of sexual assault to party guests like Jane Doe at the Alpha Delta Phi house.

In a statement provided to MS NOW, Gerald McSwiggan, a spokesperson for the University of Chicago, called the allegations “very disturbing to the University community” and said the school was “committed to addressing and preventing incidents of sexual assault.” McSwiggan noted that the university was not named as a defendant in the suit and was prepared to work with the Chicago Police Department as it investigates.

Jane Doe’s lead attorney, Mike Grieco, confirmed to MS NOW that the university was not a defendant but said that following discovery, he could amend the complaint to seek damages from the university as well.

A representative from Alpha Delta Phi’s national office confirmed to MS NOW that the fraternity member accused of perpetrating the assault — who is named in the complaint but is not listed a defendant — has been suspended from the organization. Alpha Delta Phi’s statement described the alleged conduct as “deeply troubling and inconsistent with our values” and said the fraternity takes the allegations “extremely seriously,” adding, “We are committed to the safety and well-being of our members and communities and will cooperate with law enforcement as appropriate.”

Jane Doe alleges in the complaint that the fraternity member left her unconscious in a bedroom of the house, and that other members initially blocked a friend who accompanied her to the party from searching for her until another member discovered Jane Doe unconscious and allowed the friend to enter. Jane Doe alleges that she was “struggling to speak and required assistance to walk” when leaving the room where she was assaulted.

The morning after the alleged assault, Jane Doe allegedly “awoke to blood stains in her underwear” and made a report to the Chicago Police Department, the complaint states. MS NOW obtained the police report, which states the woman said she believed the alcohol she received that night “might have been laced with [an] unknown substance” and that she “does not remember giving consent,” though she remembers asking the man to wear a condom and he refused.

Grieco told MS NOW that Jane Doe went to a hospital and underwent rape kit testing the morning after the assault, which the police report confirms. At the hospital, the woman provided police with a photo of the alleged perpetrator, according to the incident report.

Grieco said he was unaware of whether CPD or the university police ever interviewed the alleged perpetrator or anyone else other than his client. He said he hopes the suit will prod both departments to prioritize their investigations.

The lawsuit was filed just over a week after a second woman alleged she was sexually assaulted at another University of Chicago fraternity house, according to a police report obtained by MS NOW. The 21-year-old woman told police that she attended a party at the Alpha Epsilon Pi house. After consuming about three cans of alcohol, a man she had been dancing with — and whose advances she had refused — followed her into the bathroom. There, she lost consciousness and awoke to find her bodysuit undone at the bottom and her bra removed, according to the incident report. She told authorities “that she was unable to resist due to her altered state of consciousness.” The Chicago Sun-Times previously reported that the woman does not attend the university.

The woman’s friend told police that when she was searching for her, she saw “three to five males standing outside the bathroom door, cheering and appearing to encourage the activity inside,” according to the incident report, which also states that the men denied to the woman’s friend that Jane Doe was inside the bathroom. When the friend demanded entry, one of the men “grabbed [her] by the hair to prevent her from entering,” the report states. After picking the lock, she managed to open the door and found the alleged perpetrator “standing over [the woman] with his pants down” and the woman “not fully conscious” with her shirt undone. The man told the friend that “everything was ‘cool,’” according to the incident report.

According to the report, when the woman and her friends left the residence, they confronted the alleged offender and the men who had been cheering outside the bathroom. The group fled and the woman pursued them until she found university police and filed a report. The woman received a rape kit at a hospital.

The university says it alerted students on Oct. 11 that a sexual assault had allegedly occurred at a frat house near campus that day. Two days later, a second public alert said that a “person of interest” who was not “affiliated with the university” had been identified and banned from campus.

According to a statement posted to the Instagram page of the school’s Alpha Epsilon Pi chapter, the perpetrator “was chased out of the building” and “captured on cameras when they fled.” Both the school’s chapter and the fraternity’s national organization condemned the incident and said they supported the victim and the police investigation.

A spokesperson for the Chicago Police Department said that nobody was in custody in connection with either alleged incident — the one on Oct. 11 or the one described in the lawsuit — and that both investigations were ongoing.

The university held a safety meeting on Wednesday night, according to Grieco and NBC Chicago. But McSwiggan, the university spokesperson, said the meeting had been planned prior to Jane Doe’s lawsuit.

Grieco told MS NOW the meeting highlighted the chasm between the university’s stated policy on fraternities — the institution says it does not recognize them —and officials’ responsibilities to prevent and address sexual assault. That’s why, he said, Jane Doe’s lawsuit focuses on achieving institutional accountability, not criminal prosecution.

Meanwhile, Jane Doe, who was a college student living in Cook County at the time of the assault, is no longer enrolled in school, according to Grieco.

“She is in therapy,” he said, “and focused on her recovery.”

This story was updated to incorporate details from the police reports obtained by MS NOW.

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From MS Now.