ITHACA, N.Y. (The Daily Whatever Press) — I was editor-in-chief of my high school paper, and the toughest battle I fought there was over a headline. We’d written a feature about Chris Jones, a junior who was a phenomenal debater, and wanted to run “Chris Jones Master Debater” as the headline. Our advisor refused. We negotiated and eventually he relented and approved our use of “Chris Jones: Masters Debate.” Or maybe it was the other way around. I’ve been an adult for a long time now, and I still can’t tell you why one of those was acceptable and the other wasn’t.
That was my hill.
The editors of The Cornell Daily Sun picked a much, much bigger one.
Last month, according to Editor-in-Chief Sophia Dasser, the paper’s lawyer looked at their plan to print the names of seven fraternity men accused of gang rape and called it “kind of a risk.”
Dasser and team printed the names anyway, in a red box on the front page, under a headline Dasser came up with during her constitutional law class: “Cornell Won’t, We Will.”
Somewhere, Ben Bradlee is lighting a cigarette.
Give these warriors all the flowers they’re due and maybe a Pulitzer, too.
The least I can do is echo what they did, so here are the names, as the Sun ran them: Matthew Ingalls. Johnathan Newell. Winston Lee. Gillio Lopes. Diego Sarabia. Scott Norris. Scott Kretzschmar.
All seven are defendants in a civil lawsuit filed in September by a former Cornell student who says they drugged and gang-raped her at the Chi Phi house in October 2024. None of them has been criminally charged. The district attorney previously found insufficient evidence but now plans to take the case to a grand jury. Kretzschmar’s lawyer told the Sun, “We wholeheartedly deny the allegations in the complaint against Scott Kretzschmar.” The Sun couldn’t reach the others for comment.
Cornell knew about all of this. It ran its own investigation, decided what it decided behind closed doors, and moved on. The Sun broke the lawsuit story on September 21, and it could only do that because one of its reporters had refused to let it go for nearly two years.
That reporter is Cereese Qusba, a 22-year-old senior. She started chasing the story in November 2024, when a campus sexual assault alert went out and she decided it deserved more than an alert. She spent 23 months on it. She earned the trust of the woman at the center of the case and her lawyer. She sat across from administrators and asked how they discipline students accused of assault. When she left to study abroad in Sydney, she called the incoming editor-in-chief from the other side of the planet to make sure the story stayed alive while she was gone.
23 months. Nearly half her college career spent in pursuit of the truth.
Then came the part I’ll be telling my daughters about. On September 19, the Sun was celebrating its 146th birthday. In the middle of the party, Dasser asked the room: “Can we just put the names on the front page of the paper?”
That’s what a newsroom sounds like when it works.
Someone asks the scary question, and the room answers it instead of tabling it until next semester. They called the lawyer. They heard the risk. They weighed it against the alternative, which was letting Cornell’s silence stand as the final word. “Our main obligation is accountability,” Dasser said. I’ve watched grown media executives with corner offices fail that test faster than you can rewind a VHS tape.
Dasser didn’t make the call alone, either. She signed the editorial alongside Associate Editor Sophia Romanov Imber ’28 and Opinion Editors Zara Cheek ’28 and Rayen Zhou ’29.
On September 18, 2026, they shipped that story. Four bylines, four names on the line, and every one of them still had a transcript, a GPA, and three more semesters at the school they had just called out by name.
I’m in awe of their audacity.
Just look at what they were up against. Cornell sent its Vice President for University Relations to say the university takes sexual violence “extremely seriously,” then explain that federal privacy law kept it from saying much else. One side had a crisis-communications apparatus and a privacy shield. The other side had an off-campus office (the Sun keeps its headquarters off university property to stay independent), a staff so bleary-eyed that week that at least one reporter skipped class to get the paper out, and the nerve to do the damn job anyway.
Then the dominoes started falling. The district attorney reopened the criminal case. Governor Hochul announced that Cornell has agreed to an independent review. Chuck Schumer wants an exhaustive investigation. Letitia James’s office took over the case. None of it happened during the two years Cornell spent taking things “extremely seriously.” All of it happened within two weeks of a student newspaper hitting publish.
And then the part that should keep every administrator in Day Hall up at night: Dasser’s and Qusba’s inboxes filled with emails from other students describing their own assaults and their own Title IX dead ends. One front page story, and suddenly a whole campus realized there was somebody who’d listen.
I’m raising two daughters who will walk into institutions that promise to take them extremely seriously. What I want them to know is: sometimes the cavalry shows up in a hoodie with a reporter’s notebook and a lawyer saying “kind of a risk.”
Cornell wouldn’t take it. So they did.
Hi, I’m Dana. And I Write Out Loud.
I Write Out Loud is my primary home for cultural memoir, personal essays, and live conversations about the strange, brave process of becoming yourself in midlife. If you like essays with a point of view and a pulse, you’ll find plenty to read there.
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I said it on another thread and I’ll say it here:
Cornell better buckle up and lawyer up, esp those Admins that decided only two students needed expulsion and that ANY essay could be good enough to “mitigate” consequences.
Every institution that receives federal money must turn ALL reports of assault, sexual or otherwise, over to the actual police. Campus “police” should only deal with non-violent offenses. They are a school’s HR dept., not actual law enforcement.
Dana, your reporting on this is excellent