There were hints that Ivan was posing. After all, he was an applied mathematics and statistics major enrolled in one of the most selective and academically challenging universities in the country. “Calc AP test tomorrow morning… LEGGO,” he wrote senior year of high school. He also referred to his time on the lacrosse team and his love of the nerdy television show The Big Bang Theory. Ivan worked hard at Hopkins and liked to kick back when he could. “Tonight is my first night of college not having multiple hours of work to do… AND it’s game night tonight. THIRSTY THURSDAY HERE I COME,” he tweeted his freshman year.
As many as one hundred people packed the chapter house that Saturday night for the Halloween party. Although the sisters didn’t wear costumes, many guests did. Gabriela saw two women dressed as the pink-striped bags from Victoria’s Secret, one guy who looked like a duck and another in military fatigues. The floor pulsed with the hypnotic, repetitive beats of electronic “house music,” catchy and wordless, the kind that practically requires you to dance, swaying with your hands held high above your head. Women danced on top of an L-shaped bar. Later, it would be described as something straight out of the movie Coyote Ugly, where female bartenders made their names by dancing on top of a bar in front of drunk men. Maria had been with Gabriela for an hour and a half, and she wanted to spend some time alone with Ivan. It was already 12:30 a.m., maybe later. Maria settled her drunk little sister on a couch and walked over to Ivan’s apartment, which was just next door. She’d be back soon, she told Gabriela.
After her sister left, Gabriela got up and started dancing—something, maybe the high school cheerleader in her who had studied tap and ballet since she was four years old, made her want to move around, even in her drunken state. The next moments became fuzzy. The time may have speeded up or slowed down, the way it can when you’re sufficiently drunk, for the first time in your life, in a strange place, the music enveloping you, so loud that a shout could sound like a whisper.
Gabriela found herself in a dingy bathroom, under harsh fluorescent lights, beer cans littering the floor. Her vision still blurry at times, she saw two skinny men she didn’t know. She could make out their bearded faces and hear the menacing tone in their voices. They took off her clothes and cornered her in a shower stall, one of the men showing her his penis and pushing down her head. She tried to turn away. She was so drunk, she couldn’t move.
“No,” she said. “No.”
“Just do it,” the man replied.
The man pushed her head down and forced her to perform oral sex and, then, intercourse, leaving her raw and bleeding inside. But it wasn’t over, not yet.
The second man took his turn, forcing Gabriela to perform fellatio.
Later, a third man, bearded, heavyset, and wearing a baseball cap, came into the bathroom. Gabriela was slumped on the floor of the shower, leaning against a wall, her leggings stained with semen, her shirt pulled up over her shoulders. Unsteady, she tried to move toward him.
“Why? Why?” she asked.
“Button up your shirt,” he told her. Afterward, he urinated and left her on the floor, scared and alone.
FOR YOUNG WOMEN, the fraternity party has an unspoken set of rules: Stay with friends you trust, especially if you’re drinking; beware the mystery punch in the cooler; watch as your new buddy, the friendly guy at the bar, pours you a drink; and never let that red Solo cup out of your sight to avoid “date-rape drugs,” often reported as slipped into drinks, though rarely proven. It’s no wonder that a woman is most likely to be sexually assaulted in her first months at college, before she knows these rules, has a reliable group of friends, and understands her own alcohol tolerance. There are no warning labels for newcomers. Fraternities, and the colleges that host them, don’t advertise the special danger of these kinds of parties. If they did, the information might include some of the following facts: at one major insurer of fraternities, sexual assault represented 15 percent of liability losses, the largest category after assault and battery. Female college students who go to frat parties are one and one-half times more likely than women who stay away to become victims of what researchers called “incapacitated sexual assault.” Or consider the experience of women living in sorority houses, the population most exposed to frat parties: They run three times the risk of rape.
The danger may have more to do with the binge-drinking of Greek life than fraternity men’s attitudes toward sexual consent. Researchers have struggled to disentangle the two. There is an indisputable link between alcohol and the risk of sexual assault. In most attacks, the perpetrator or victim, or both, have been drinking. After assaults, drinking frustrates efforts to prosecute offenders. Cases become mired in controversy—about memory, consent, the characters of the accuser and the accused. Even if members themselves aren’t responsible for rape, chapters create an environment where sexual assaults are more likely—even “predictable,” in the words of one sociology study—if not by the brothers themselves, then by their guests or a man who slips through the door. In the view of Henry Wechsler, the Harvard drinking researcher, cracking down on fraternity house drinking would no doubt make women safer.
The increasingly fraught debate over campus sexual assault tends to obscure this reality. Members of Greek organizations, law professors—and even some feminists—are asking whether men, and fraternities, are now presumed guilty in campus disciplinary hearings and the court of public opinion. Rolling Stone magazine, most infamously, reported on an alleged gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity—a story that was later thoroughly discredited. There is concern that the definition of sexual assault has broadened to include behavior, such as clumsy advances, that may not qualify. There is debate over the accuracy of the statistic, widely cited by activists and the federal government, that one in five women reports being assaulted over four years of college. No matter the precise number, campus rapes remain more common than previously believed, and the vast majority aren’t reported. The relative handful of criminal prosecutions of attacks at fraternity houses have demonstrated why survivors often don’t come forward. In January 2015, a twenty-three-year-old woman was sexually assaulted after drinking at a party at Stanford University’s Kappa Alpha Order fraternity house; passersby caught a Stanford student named Brock Allen Turner, behind a Dumpster, on top of the unconscious woman, who was only partially dressed. Turner, a champion swimmer who was not a member of Kappa Alpha, was convicted of three counts of felony sexual assault. His lenient sentence—six months in the county jail—and his father’s complaint that his life had been ruined for “20 minutes of action” sparked national outrage over the minimization of sexual assault.
Time and again, the language of fraternity members has made light of, or even seemed to promote, violence against women. At Yale, pledges of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity in 2010 were led through the main freshman quad, chanting, “No means yes, yes means anal.” At Georgia Tech, a member of Phi Kappa Tau sent an e-mail in 2013 with the subject line, “luring your rape bait,” and advising brothers to target “hammered [drunk] women” for sex. At SAE’s Stanford chapter, members cheered on pledges in 2014 as they told the following jokes during a toga party, according to the account of a female student who attended: “What do you tell a woman with two black eyes? Nothing, you’ve already told her twice” and “What do you call the useless skin around a vagina? A woman.” At Old Dominion University in Virginia, members of Sigma Nu hung banners at the beginning of the 2015 school year that told parents: “Hope your baby girl is ready for a good time,” “Freshman daughter drop off,” and “Go ahead and drop off mom too.” Later that same year, North Carolina State University suspended its chapter of Pi Kappa Phi after the discovery of a “pledge book” with comments such as “It will be short and painful, just like when I rape you,” and “If she’s hot enough, she doesn’t need a pulse.”
Undergraduate fraternity members often dismiss such statements as anomalies or bad jokes. The North-American Interfraternity Conference, the m
ain organization representing historically white fraternities, has long noted that it is the nation’s largest sponsor of rape-awareness programs. In 2014, eight major fraternities, including SAE, formed an education initiative on sexual assault, as well as hazing and binge drinking. After each episode, the national fraternities take pains to call the mistreatment of women a violation of their values. SAE, of course, has the True Gentleman creed, which describes a brother as someone “with whom honor is sacred and virtue safe.” Sigma Nu’s creed celebrates “the chivalrous deeds of courtesy, and sealing not our hearts against the touch of tenderness, to win the love and care of some incorruptible woman.”
By stressing traditions of chivalry, fraternities gloss over their long history of demeaning women. In the late nineteenth century, when female students began to be admitted to American colleges in larger numbers, fraternity members, like many male students, excluded and demeaned “co-eds.” At Stanford, which had always enrolled women, a member of SAE was expelled in 1908 for writing “grossly obscene, abusive and scurrilous anonymous letters,” propositioning female students and the school nurse. “You look kind of used up but you would do,” one read. Not surprisingly, in an often hostile environment, female students formed their own sisterhoods, “women’s fraternities,” or sororities. In a quirk of history, SAE did, in fact, have one female member: Lucie Pattie, an honorary initiate of the chapter at the Kentucky Military Institute. Pattie preserved the secret papers of SAE during the Civil War, or so the story goes. In 1888, an SAE member from Louisiana publicly advocated the admission of women. It inspired “considerable merriment in the fraternity” and no serious consideration, according to an SAE history.
In sexual matters, fraternities fostered a double standard that celebrated their own sexual conquests, while disrespecting women considered “fast” or “loose.” Through the early twentieth century, they would engage in chaste, courtly behavior with women they considered social equals and marriage material, while looking for sex with working-class women and prostitutes, according to the historian Nicholas Syrett. After World War II, as premarital sex became more socially acceptable, fraternity men felt increasing pressure to demonstrate their virility with at-times reluctant college women. “Many fraternity men were increasingly forcing themselves on their female classmates,” Syrett wrote. In the 1960s, fraternity men at the University of Texas had what they called “fuck dates” with women they hoped would be “easy lays.” If successful, they would share names with fraternity brothers, who would then pressure the same women for sex. Yale held “pig nights,” where they invited local women into the chapter, so younger members could lose their virginity.
In the most horrifying cases, fraternity members formed groups to prey on vulnerable women. In 1959, eight naked fraternity men from SAE’s University of North Carolina chapter were found in a basement with a woman who was an outpatient from a local psychiatric hospital, according to Syrett’s review of school disciplinary files. Members said they were playing strip poker. In 1978, Esquire magazine reported, a woman on leave from a mental institution was taken to Dartmouth’s fraternity row and passed from house to house for sex. Fraternities have long faced accusations of gang rape. In 1985, the Association of American Colleges identified reports of fifty such campus attacks, mostly at fraternities. In one widely reported case, a woman in 1983 said she was gang raped by five to eight members of the Alpha Tau Omega chapter at the University of Pennsylvania. The men said it was consensual, and no one was charged.
More recently, social scientists sought to document the prevalence of rape by surveying fraternity members themselves. Using questionnaires, psychologists asked men whether they had participated in behavior that amounts to sexual assault without labeling it as a criminal offense. In a variety of surveys, anywhere from 5 percent to 15 percent of college men admitted committing rape. News stories and academic articles often cite two studies in concluding that fraternity members are three times more likely than other male students to commit sexual assault: one in 2007 by researchers from the College of William and Mary; and another, in 2005, at Ohio University. These studies each queried only several hundred undergraduates at a single college; unlike research on excessive drinking at fraternities, the findings are far from conclusive. Other surveys, also based on small samples, have found that fraternity men are more likely to hold what are called “rape-supportive attitudes.” These include the belief that women enjoy rough sex or put up token resistance so they won’t be considered easy or that a man is entitled to sex if a woman indicated interest, “leading him on.”
To fight such attitudes, some colleges are taking aim at all-male organizations. Harvard is challenging single-sex “final clubs.” All but one of the elite student societies—the Porcellian Club, Harvard’s oldest—began as local branches of national fraternities. A 2016 university task force, led by Harvard’s dean, attacked what it called the “sexual entitlement” of final club members. The organizations invite attractive female students to parties, then compete with each other “for sexual conquests,” viewing acceptance of an invitation as “an implicit agreement to have sexual encounters with men,” according to the task force report, which had similar concerns about Harvard’s fraternities. Almost half of senior women who ventured into final clubs—and 40 percent of those participating in fraternities and sororities—reported “nonconsensual sexual contact,” compared with 31 percent of all female fourth-year students. Based on the report’s recommendations, Harvard president Drew Faust, the first woman to lead the university, announced measures designed to pressure all-male social clubs to accept women, though they also applied to all-female groups such as sororities. Starting with the Class of 2021, members of single-sex clubs will be excluded from leading teams and recognized student groups. The college will no longer endorse members for coveted fellowships such as Rhodes and Marshall scholarships. Greek organizations protested the moves as violations of their constitutional rights to freedom of association. To fight sexual assault, Wesleyan University required student groups to admit women, though one fraternity is waging a court fight. Trinity College, one of Wesleyan’s Connecticut neighbors, took the same step, then dropped the idea after opposition from alumni.
At Indiana University, a campus of 38,000 undergraduates known for its Greek life, fraternity parties make sexual assault “a predictable outcome,” according to the sociologists Elizabeth Armstrong and Laura Hamilton, who spent nine months following fifty-five first-year women living in college dormitories. The campus police enforce drinking laws in dorms, while generally letting fraternities serve underage students in the privacy of their chapter houses, their research found. Like Hollywood producers—at times, perhaps, more like pornographers—fraternity members cast women into roles guaranteed to make them sex objects. Women were required to wear revealing clothing at parties with themes such as: “Pimps and Hos,” “Victoria’s Secret,” and “Golf Pro/Tennis Ho.” Fraternities controlled transportation. Pledges conveyed first-year women in cars from the dorms and then could stall or refuse to drive them back, leaving women to choose between staying longer and being forced to find their way home drunk on their own. Many of the female students the researchers interviewed had heard about rapes or had survived attacks themselves. In fact, two of the first-year women they studied were sexually assaulted at a frat party—during the first week of the study.
Indiana University’s own data bolster the sociologists’ research. Even though only 12 percent of undergraduate men belong to fraternities, their chapter houses were the locations of 23 percent of sexual-assault reports. One of the accused was John Enochs, a member of Delta Tau Delta, who was charged with rape at an April 2015 chapter house party. (He later pleaded guilty to one count of battery with moderate bodily injury, a misdemeanor.) The college recently disciplined three chapters for creating “an unsafe environment that resulted in an allegation of sexual assault.” For its part, Indiana University’s administration gives fraternities a wholehearted offici
al endorsement. It promotes Greek organizations as “partners” who help members “lead, serve, build positive relationships and grow intellectually.” Indiana Greek organizations themselves stress their own efforts to address sexual assault. Fraternities, for example, launched a “BannerUp” campaign, representing “Men Against Rape and Sexual Assault,” hanging banners on fraternity houses with such messages as “Real Hoosier Men Should Respect Women.”
Of course, all fraternities aren’t alike. Sociologists at Lehigh University found that safer fraternities featured quieter settings that enabled conversations and a balance of men and women interacting in groups; high-risk chapters threw large, loud parties with skewed gender ratios, which transformed them into meat markets, places where men used loud music as a pretext to invite intoxicated women upstairs for sex. Rebecca Leitman Veidlinger, a former sex-crimes prosecutor in Bloomington who consults with universities, reached a similar conclusion. In her view, chapters emphasizing sexual conquest, such as “hooking up” and bragging about it, create an environment ripe for assault. Fraternities can root out that behavior, she said, or “they can be ‘that fraternity’—the ‘rapey’ one, the one that women talk about.”
SAE CHAPTERS, IN many parts of the country, have developed just that sort of reputation. The film producer Amy Ziering visited college campuses across the nation, asking women where they felt most threatened. Again and again, she would hear about the local SAE chapter. She also asked about fraternity nicknames. Female undergraduates at the University of North Carolina, the University of Connecticut, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Southern California told her that SAE stood for “Sexual Assault Expected,” words they would repeat, to chilling effect, in The Hunting Ground, her explosive 2015 documentary about campus rape and the failure of colleges to bring perpetrators to justice. The camera panned along dark streets, showing SAE’s signature lions and its electrified Greek letters, glowing like a sign in front of an adult movie theater. The movie, hailed for drawing attention to sexual assault at universities, also provoked criticism for a less-than-nuanced presentation of statistics and for relying on some individuals’ cases whose facts have since been disputed. Because no one tracks sexual assaults by fraternity—and the crime is so underreported—it’s impossible to know whether SAE’s houses deserve their nickname. “That acronym is as old as time,” Clark Brown, SAE’s general counsel, told me. “It was around fifteen years ago. It doesn’t mean any more now than it did then. There are a number of acronyms like that for all kinds of fraternities. These are college students being silly. These names aren’t based on any facts.” To get a sense of the possible roots of its reputation, I examined databases of news articles, court records, and disciplinary files over the five school years that ended in the spring of 2016. Because its 2011 hazing-death legal settlement requires disclosure of all campus infractions, that record provides an unusual window into one fraternity’s history of alleged sexual assaults.
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