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.