True Gentlemen

by John Hechinger

  During those five years, I found sexual assaults reported at fifteen of 230 SAE chapters. Few resulted in criminal charges. In January 2016, a nineteen-year-old Worcester Polytechnic Institute student said she was raped at the school’s SAE chapter and left with bruises on the calves and thighs of both legs, as well as a bite on her lip. The school said fraternity brothers alerted them about the alleged attack, and three months later, a nineteen-year-old by then former SAE member and WPI student, was charged with rape and assault.

  Most rape reports later disappeared without charges or any public reckoning. In some cases, fraternity members faced complaints of obstructing investigators. In September 2012, for example, a female student who was drinking at the University of Iowa SAE chapter house reported a sexual assault, was hospitalized, and then dropped out of the school. Later that month, David Grady, the dean of students, said fraternity members had been discouraging potential witnesses from helping investigators and threatened to call the police or expel them if they continued. “I am directing you and members of your chapter not to contact the apparent victim or potential witnesses in any manner at any time for any reason,” he wrote in an e-mail to the chapter’s president. At nearby Iowa State University, a woman reported a member of SAE had sexually assaulted her during a party at its chapter house in January 2015. An SAE member was handcuffed and arrested after refusing to move out of the way when police were executing a search warrant at the chapter house. Several chapters stood out because they faced so many accusations. SAE’s chapters at San Diego State University and California State University at Long Beach were the subject of five separate reports of sexual assault or misconduct in 2014 and 2015. None of the allegations in Iowa and California appear to have resulted in criminal charges. In the ensuing investigations, the universities and the SAE national organization disciplined all the chapters, though primarily for alcohol violations and not sexual assault. Both Iowa chapters and the Long Beach outpost were shut down.

  Of all the chapters, the University of New Mexico left the longest trail of sexual-assault reports, which began well before the five-year period I examined. In 2000, the University of New Mexico and SAE settled, for an undisclosed sum, a lawsuit filed by an eighteen-year-old freshman who said she had unwittingly attended a gathering the fraternity dubbed a “cherry-bust party,” referring to a place for women to lose their virginity. The woman—an athlete on a swimming scholarship—said members at the party slipped Rohypnol, or a “Roofie,” a potent tranquilizer often called a date-rape drug, into her drink. Police accused two members of SAE’s El Paso chapter of taking her to a truck in a parking lot and raping her. In a 2001 trial, the two men were acquitted of the rape charges, though one was convicted of criminal sexual contact. Two other rape accusations—in 2003 and 2006—resulted in arrests but no convictions. In 2007, an SAE pledge was charged with rape related to sex with underage girls, including a fifteen-year-old, though the charges were later dismissed. All along, the university repeatedly cited the chapter for out-of-control and underage drinking.

  The most recent episode began on a Monday night in April 2013. SAE members held a sorority serenade, an event of long-standing tradition when young men try to impress women with sentimental fraternity songs. Afterward, members from four different sororities visited the SAE chapter house. A nineteen-year-old freshman who has identified herself by the initials A. O. later gave the following account of what happened next. (In responding to my public-records request, the University of New Mexico, as is typical, redacted the names of students to comply with federal privacy laws.) SAE members invited her and a few other women up to the balcony for a drink, offering each a shot of liquor—brandy, or maybe rum. Then, they headed to the basement, where A. O. drank beer and vodka. One fraternity member—I’ll call him Sam—talked with A. O. for a while. It was the first time the two had met. Sam invited A. O. up to his room for a drink, tequila and orange juice. A man and a woman came into the room to join them.

  “This is where my memory stops,” A. O. wrote in an e-mail to the university. As for what came next, “I remember it like a dream.”

  A. O. described a series of moments, like movie flashbacks she couldn’t place in any particular order: getting sick in a bucket of ice, going to the bathroom, visiting the balcony. She woke up on Sam’s couch at 9:00 a.m., then spent much of the day there because she had lost her phone, keys, and shoes. Later, Sam drove her back to her dorm. On Wednesday morning, she told her parents what had happened. Her mother, believing she had been drugged and assaulted, took her to the hospital, where both pregnancy and rape-drug tests came out negative. A sexual-assault examination found signs of penetration, and she filed a report with the University of New Mexico police.

  The next month, the university found the chapter responsible for holding an unregistered party and providing liquor to minors. In the harshest punishment available, the school revoked SAE’s charter. The university noted six years of misbehavior: drinking, fighting, hazing, and the incident involving sex with underage girls.

  The University of New Mexico chapter fought against the punishment, saying it was being held accountable for unsubstantiated accusations against past members. “No member of the SAE chapter at UNM has ever been convicted of any sexual misconduct,” it said in its twelve-page appeal to the vice president for student affairs. The chapter said the school’s investigation hadn’t proven that members, rather than guests, gave alcohol to minors and ridiculed the idea that SAE should have kept underage students from drinking: “Neither did SAE check identification or papers, or strip search people as they entered the house.” The chapter complained that SAE was being targeted because of anti-fraternity bias. The university, the chapter said, lacked an appreciation of its ideals and the success of its alumni, “including a recent state governor, a recent U.S. senator, UNM regents, UNM foundation board members, donors and boosters.” They were invoking SAE’s considerable political power. The “recent U.S. senator” was none other than Pete Domenici, the influential Republican who retired in 2008 after the longest tenure in the history of New Mexico; the “recent state governor,” Gary Johnson, who became the 2016 Libertarian candidate for president. It could have been read as a not-so-veiled threat. The university rejected the appeal, saying the fraternity had “failed to learn from its past mistakes.”

  Bryan Ruddy, SAE’s volunteer chapter adviser, told me the national organization and alumni supported the university’s action, noting that the undergraduates shouldn’t have served liquor at all because fraternity houses are supposed to be dry. “We as alumni came down very hard on them,” said Ruddy, an IBM software engineer who had joined the chapter in the 1990s. “It was time to pull the plug there.”

  In deciding whether to punish Sam, the university found witnesses who had seen A. O. stumbling downstairs, slurring her words and staggering. Sam denied giving A. O. any liquor, saying he would have been “too greedy” to share the alcohol. A. O., he said, had voluntarily given him oral sex but stopped because she got sick. A. O. offered a vague memory of perhaps kissing Sam. A member representing the chapter told the university there had been “plenty of alcohol” in the house and confirmed that A. O. had been given shots of liquor, according to an e-mail from a University of New Mexico Greek Life adviser summing up the chapter’s account of the evening. The fraternity member also said A. O. had been “open to sexual activity, ‘sending mixed signals,’” was making out with [Sam, presumably], “giving the green light,” and “acting like a ‘whore.’” In the classic double standard, he denigrated a woman for showing sexual interest, while exonerating a man for his own participation. The fraternity brother suggested, wrongly, that drunken kissing and flirting implied sexual consent and that once a woman gives a “green light” that men can drive through it without stopping, even if a woman is no longer capable of giving consent. The comments represent the “rape-supportive attitudes” described in social-science literature. “I was horrified he had said anything like that,” Ruddy
told me. “Knowing this gentleman personally, I just think he was speaking emotionally. He was trying to defend his friend, essentially. It’s never something we would condone or support.”

  The university, citing witnesses, concluded Sam had violated the student-conduct code: He had given A. O. a tequila and orange juice, when she was already so drunk she had trouble walking, and then lied about it at his disciplinary hearing. But Sam wasn’t found responsible for sexual assault, in part because A. O. couldn’t remember the episode. Despite his ruling, Rob Burford, the student conduct officer, condemned Sam’s behavior: Sam himself acknowledged oral sex with “an intoxicated underage female” and had supplied the alcohol that “caused her not to remember every detail of what occurred.” It sounded at least close to what researchers described as “incapacitated sexual assault.” The school put Sam on probation for the rest of his time at the university and prohibited him from contact with A. O. on penalty of suspension or expulsion. It required him to go to a class on “respectful relationships” and pay $50 to attend a two and one-half-hour alcohol and drug awareness program. In his ruling, Buford indicated that A. O. paid a higher price. She had withdrawn from the school that spring “as a result of this incident, which interfered with continuing her education at the University of New Mexico.” In January 2014, the woman, using the initials A. O., sued SAE and the University of New Mexico for negligent supervision, citing “a dangerous culture” documented in police reports, student complaints, and disciplinary actions dating to 2001. SAE and the university denied the allegations and said they had no legal duty to supervise the operations of the chapter. In April 2015, the university and the fraternity reached an undisclosed settlement with the woman.

  If a single chapter created a dangerous environment for women, so could a single holiday. Over one weekend in 2014, rapes were reported at SAE Halloween parties on both coasts, in Georgia, Maryland, and California. At 10:30 p.m. Friday, October 31, a female student said she was raped in the SAE chapter house at Emory University in Atlanta. The school suspended Greek activities for a month and later said the woman had declined to pursue criminal charges. About two hours later, at 12:40 a.m. on Saturday, November 1, a student at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles said she was raped in the garage of an off-campus SAE house where she had been mistakenly looking for a bathroom. No one called 911 after she ran out of the garage, bruises all over her body, and said she had been raped, according to her parents. The woman left with her friends, who later took her to the hospital. She offered police a detailed description: a white man, six feet tall, 170 pounds, with shoulder-length hair, wearing a white top hat, white shirt, and dark pants. Almost six months after the attack, her parents begged for help. “SAE members claimed it was not one of them, but the party was invite-only,” the parents wrote in the school paper. “It is our understanding that not one person came forward, just like no one helped the night it happened.”

  Of the three Halloween parties—and, in fact, of all fifteen reported sexual assaults—I found only one offering the possibility of a full public accounting. It was the third rape reported that weekend, at the party overseen by Ivan Booth, the Johns Hopkins sophomore and SAE social chairman who had invited his friend Maria Lopez and her sixteen-year-old sister, Gabriela. That was the party where Gabriela was attacked and left in the bathroom of the chapter house in the early morning of November 2, 2014.

  AS THE HALLOWEEN party was winding down, about ten stragglers relaxed in the basement of the Johns Hopkins SAE house. Evan Krumheuer, a junior who belonged to the fraternity, saw someone inside the bathroom. It was a girl, huddled in a corner, just behind the door frame, trembling, so drunk and scared that she could come up with only a few words.

  “I need help,” Gabriela said. “I was raped.”

  Gabriela had managed to put most of her clothes back on. She reached over to collect her white tank top, which lay on the other side of the bathroom. Evan, a champion wrestler on the Johns Hopkins team, put his arm around Gabriela’s back and helped her up the stairs to the first floor. Steven Pearlman, a graduate student, called Gabriela’s sister because Gabriela herself was too drunk to dial. Maria and Ivan rushed back to the house and saw Gabriela, who was crying hysterically. Steven—who didn’t belong to SAE but was renting a room while working as a teaching assistant—noticed no one had called the police, so he dialed 911.

  After Gabriela left in an ambulance, the police investigation moved quickly. She had described her two attackers as skinny African American men with beards. In the historically white fraternity, only a handful of the one hundred guests were black men. Evan, the wrestler who had helped Gabriela up the stairs, offered a lead. He had seen someone he knew near the bathroom before the attack—an African American named Chaz Haggins. When he was organizing the Halloween party, Ivan had invited Chaz. They had gone to high school together in suburban Maryland, and they were friends who shared an appreciation of hip-hop music and muscle cars. Chaz had arrived late that evening with another friend, Ethan Turner, who had graduated from the same high school. They had initially been turned away by the brother at the door. Once the SAE member figured out the connection with Ivan, Chaz and Ethan joined the party.

  Like the two sisters, Chaz and Ethan were unusual that night in the crowd of future Silicon Valley coders and Wall Street bankers. Chaz, who was twenty years old, was a stocker at Walmart, where his mother was a manager. Ethan, who was nineteen, held down two jobs, busing tables at a banquet hall and stocking shelves at a Food Lion supermarket. Six-foot-two, outgoing, and charismatic, Chaz cut the larger figure, and he knew the chapter house pretty well. He had spun albums as a DJ in the basement, sitting in a booth emblazoned with the fraternity’s letters. Ethan was quieter. His family considered him a born “follower,” a five-foot-five video-game enthusiast who loved to play board games with his family.

  As social chairman, Ivan would clearly have been in the best position to help police figure out who was at the party. But during his interview with detectives, just after 5:00 a.m., he volunteered nothing. Detectives asked about African Americans at the party. Ivan told them he had seen one, someone he didn’t know, and there were none on the guest list. Ivan suggested that someone could have slipped into the party. After the first couple of hours, he told the police, control of the door broke down.

  “Tell us about Chaz,” one of the detectives said, finally.

  “He’s a good friend of mine,” Ivan said. “He’s a very genuine person. It would be very uncharacteristic to perform an act like that, to be involved in something like this.”

  “So, possibly, couldn’t he have done this tonight?”

  “You know. I know his character.”

  “So you’re saying he was there, then?”

  Ivan told the detective he had heard Chaz was there when he returned to the chapter house with Maria and saw Gabriela crying.

  “So doesn’t this kind of go against what you said earlier that there was only one African American male there that you knew?” the detective asked.

  “I was answering in terms of what I had seen and, like, people, I had seen at the party.”

  “But you knew he was there. He’s a good friend of yours.”

  “I heard he was there.”

  The detective pushed harder. Had he been in contact with Chaz? Ivan said he had texted Chaz earlier in the week.

  “Was it in reference to the party?”

  “Just seeing if he was free, and if he wanted to come down. He was going to try to, but he wasn’t positive if he could come down or not.”

  “So you texted him about the party?” the detective asked. “So he was invited to the party?”

  “If he were to have shown up when I was there, yes,” Ivan said. “He would have been invited. He was technically invited by me. However, I was unaware of the fact that he was in attendance.”

  Since Chaz had said he might come, why wasn’t he on the list?

  “I’m not going to put his name on the l
ist because he says he’s going to try. I need like actual physical evidence.”

  At the end of the interview, Ivan was asked if there was anything else he could say that could be helpful.

  “No,” Ivan said. “Besides the fact that I would add that Chaz’s apparent presence at the party was completely unannounced to me, and the situation itself transpired while I wasn’t present at the house. So we can’t offer too many details about the situation itself but the prerequisites, and I have the list and everything, and I do have the pertinent information.”