by Mark Bowden
What almost certainly happened that night at the ATO house was that a troubled young woman came to the party tripping on acid. She got even higher drinking. Despite the brothers’ later accounts, it must have been evident to everyone who saw her that she was not acting in a normal, sober way. There are two things one can to do with a person in this state: either help her or take advantage of her. What happened appears to follow the classic pattern described in sociological studies of gang rape—absent any overt display of violence. The leader of the group asserted control and set the pattern for what followed. The men proceeded to act out the standard scenario, having sex with her one by one, observing each other in the act, relying upon peer pressure to overcome any moral repugnance. They felt obliged to do so. Several of those involved who did not have intercourse with Laurel nevertheless allowed their brothers to assume they had, right up until the university brought charges against them, and it became, no matter how injurious to their egos, important to confess. It is probable that Laurel, in her condition, protested weakly. She may have even actively participated.
Although the absence of violence in the ATO incident makes it substantially different from traditional rape scenarios, the definitions of rape are changing—socially and legally. A woman no longer has to show cuts and bruises and broken bones to be considered a victim. It is now sufficient that she is intoxicated enough so that she cannot consent and that the man knows it. The very idea of six or seven men having sex with one woman begs explanation more from the men than the woman—especially when she later alleges rape.
At about six thirty a.m., Moran walked Laurel downstairs and showed her out the door. She was upset about losing her sunglasses. She could not see well without them. Daubert remembered watching from an upstairs window as she walked off toward her dormitory. Then he lay down at last to sleep.
The sun was up. Inside the ATO house there were mostly good feelings.
“At that point it was, like, we had had a real good party, if you know what I mean,” Groh says, “the first good one that semester.”
Joan Vila, one of Laurel’s two roommates, saw her later that morning.
“Laurel looked horrible. Her face was really bloated, really really bloated, like after having cried hours and hours, when your tear ducts have been operating for so long and all the fluids are in your face and the blood rushing around and everything looks all mottled and terrible.”
Joan said, “Are you OK? You look terrible.”
“Really?” Laurel seemed shocked.
When Laurel gave Joan the black sweater she had borrowed the night before, they both noticed a gaping hole under one arm. Laurel apologized and offered to buy Joan a new one. She said she had fallen down during the party and torn it. Joan wondered how a person could tear the armpit of a sweater falling down, but she didn’t ask. No sense making Laurel feel worse.
Laurel came back to the ATO house that afternoon to search for her missing sunglasses. She prized them. They resembled a fashionable and expensive brand.
The brothers were shocked when she came in. They weren’t sure how to act or what to say. Al Mitchell helped look for the glasses and remembered being bothered by Laurel’s apparent indifference to what had happened. He gave her a beer and asked how she felt. He said she answered, “Fine.” Very casual.
“No, I mean, how are you feeling deep down inside?”
He recalls that Laurel answered slowly, saying, “I want to feel like I’m embarrassed, but I can’t right now.” And then she talked about the four hits of LSD she had taken before the party and how she had a headache now and felt ill.
Andrea walked in then. She didn’t know yet what had happened. She had just stopped by to schmooze with the guys that morning. She didn’t know Laurel, but she remembered her from the party. Andrea recalls how bad Laurel looked that day. Her eyes were red and her skin was puffy. Andrea joked to Laurel that she had seemed really into the party the night before, and then added, knowingly, one girl to another, “Oh boy, I can remember times when I’ve been drunk and I’ve lost things and I’ve woken up with bruises and I didn’t remember where the hell I got them from.” Laurel showed Andrea some bruises and scrapes she had picked up the night before. Andrea remembered in particular a vicious bruise on the inner part of Laurel’s upper arm. As she and Laurel and Al talked, a few of the other brothers gathered. Even though she thought Laurel was a little weird, Andrea was trying to be nice. It was clear from Laurel’s conversation, which Andrea and the brothers found so strange, that this girl lived on the outer edge of even their permissive social world.
Andrea was worried about her. She encouraged Laurel to stop by the Penn Women’s Center to see Carol Tracy, the head of the office, who counseled women at the university. Laurel then left, after jotting down her name and phone number in case her glasses turned up.
It was not until after Laurel left that Andrea learned of the sexual episode. She was saying how troubled the girl seemed, and Roush said, “She got boned last night.”
“Several times,” Daubert added.
They called what happened “group sex.” Andrea was revolted. Their attitude—these were her friends!—galled her. She didn’t want to believe it had happened. She asked for details.
The brothers asked her why she wanted to know, and her response was the first time they heard the accusation. They recoiled angrily when Andrea said the word “rapists.” Rape?
“Hold on just a minute, Andrea,” Mitchell said, anger and surprise steeling his voice. “Don’t go jumping to conclusions and calling things rape when you don’t know the facts.” His sharp tone rebuffed Andrea, and she backed off.
Andrea was used to playing House Feminist for ATO. The title was half joking and half not. Andrea had these two natures—she calls them her “Jekyll” side and her “Hyde” side. On the one hand, as a nineteen-year-old sophomore, she was just coming into her own as a feminist. Andrea was articulate and intelligent and ambitious. That was what she called her Jekyll side. Andrea was also a looker, something that had not escaped the boys in ATO. She was shapely and pretty, with pale green eyes and dark blonde hair. If she liked a guy enough, she would sleep with him. She had gotten involved with three different ATO brothers over the past year. That was her Hyde side.
Jekyll Andrea was often outraged by the macho posturing of her friends at ATO, but Hyde Andrea was flattered by their eager attentions. She enjoyed challenging them. Here was this chick who had the potential, on any given night, of putting out, but who demanded to be treated as an equal. Andrea made their double standards uncomfortably obvious. Whereas if one of the brothers got it on with three different women in one semester he might be a hero, a woman who got it on with three different ATO brothers was supposed to steal off quietly into the night. They had gotten something off her, right? But Andrea wasn’t even shaken. She was thinking about moving into the house that summer. Who was getting what off whom?
Andrea was drawn up in this double game. She knew the guys had two ways of seeing women. Steady girlfriends were respected. Other women, the kind the brothers were always trying to make, were called “hos,” a sort of chuckling little word of obvious derivation that doubled as an ATO cheer when they did the house circle dance or scored a goal in intramural sports. Girlfriends and hos. Andrea, who was then nobody’s girlfriend, wanted it clear that she was nobody’s “ho” either.
So, over the next few days, Andrea kept asking questions. And the more Andrea heard, the more her gut response seemed right. There was something grotesque and unnerving in the arrogance of these guys. No. Something was wrong. Andrea wasn’t sure yet what the word for it was, but the more she heard, the more she thought the right word for what happened might be “rape.”
She had been keeping an account of the incident from the first day she learned of it, writing it all down, disgustedly, in her diary. Now she wrote,
They vehemently insisted it wasn’t rape, that no one forced her, & and that she in fact told them that that was what
she wanted. She was saying, “F— me! F— me!” I can’t believe that! Besides, she was so screwed up she probably couldn’t have said her own name. If they had sex w/ her they were really taking advantage. I can’t believe that any woman could want that. It’s beyond me how she could ask for something like that. Maybe she was too screwed up to care, but it seems more likely that she was too screwed up to know what was happening to her at all & if that’s the case it’s not group sex, but rape.
A voice in the back of her head whispered, “Talk to Laurel. Talk to Laurel.”
Will Gleason awoke Friday morning wondering why Laurel hadn’t called. All night the phone had sat silently inside his bedroom door. She had said she would call him. He was miffed.
He finally called her at five p.m. She apologized and told Will she wanted to go to a dance that night. When he stopped by her room to meet her, he was surprised to find her still in bed.
“I walked in and kissed her on the cheek. She was very out of it. I remember saying to her, ‘You smell like sour milk.’
“She said, ‘Thanks a lot.’
“‘What happened? Are you still hung over? I mean, what happened?’
“She goes, ‘I got beat up at the party last night.’
“I said, ‘Beat up!’
“She told me she was tripping, and I thought about when I met her, and I thought about how big those guys are, and then she said, ‘I got beat up. Pushed around. They ripped my sweater.’”
“It didn’t cross my mind that she could have possibly been raped. I say, ‘How did it happen?’
“And she said, ‘They locked me in the room and wouldn’t let me out. And they kept pushing me around, and I kept telling them, ‘Leave me alone! Leave me alone!’
“And I said, ‘Oh, great.’”
At that point Will didn’t want to hear any more. If there had been an ugly scene, he didn’t want to know about it.
They went to the dance but left early. Laurel complained she was too sore to dance. The next evening, Saturday, they went to another party, tripping on mushrooms. Will had never taken a drug like that. It unleashed powerful sensations. Great gusts of energy whirled in him, and he felt a passion for Laurel that was overwhelming. He was still high when early that morning in bed she told him.
“She says to me, ‘What happened at ATO the other night, I was raped.’ It’s like four in the morning or five in the morning, and she says it to me. ‘I’ve been raped.’ I flipped. I mean, this is the girl I just decided I loved, regardless. I mean, it was the first night I was able to go, ‘Ahh, I love you! I love you! I love you!’ and grab her and say, ‘I love you! I love you! I love you!’ And it totally wiped me out. I mean, I got up out of bed, and I was walking from room to room, and I couldn’t touch her, and I was revolted, and it was really awful.
“‘How many guys?’
“She goes, ‘I don’t know.’
“‘You don’t know! You were raped? Well, call the police! We’ll call the police now!’
“She goes, ‘No, no.’ And she’s trying to make light of it—this was the reaction she had, you know, put it out of her mind. She said, ‘GIRL GETS ABUSED—these things happen.’
“I’m going like, ‘Take this seriously! This is awful! This is horrible! Take this seriously! I want you to be grieving like I am! I don’t have to grieve all your pain for you! This is what you should be feeling!’ And I was, like, in anguish . . .”
On Tuesday morning, Andrea spotted Laurel sitting with her roommate, Joan Vila, in the Hardee’s in Houston Hall, hunched over a crossword puzzle. She sat down at the table with them and broached the topic by saying, “I spoke to the guys after you left.”
Andrea remembered Laurel seemed surprised. She asked what the brothers were saying.
“Don’t worry about that, but how are you?”
“Not great.”
“Do you feel you were taken advantage of?”
“Yes, of course. I was raped.”
Joan was furious. She told Laurel that she had known something was wrong that morning when she saw her. The three young women huddled. Laurel’s version wasn’t like the brothers’ story at all. She had only vague recollections of the night, but from what she remembered and Andrea knew, the women were able to piece together the incident and identify the players. Laurel complained that her glasses had been taken early on, so in addition to being out of it on the acid and beer, she couldn’t see well. She talked about how a group had trapped her in a dark room and spun her roughly. Laurel said that she had been carried upstairs, and that she remembered the brother who did that. She didn’t know how many of the brothers had had sex with her, but she remembered what some of them looked like.
Andrea didn’t know how much to tell Laurel. The girl seemed so sad and isolated. She told her not to worry about being pregnant, because the guys said they all used rubbers.
Laurel was distressed that the brothers had been talking about the incident, and in such detail! She wanted to know what else they were saying. Andrea told about the in-house ragging and the rumors of a “train.” Laurel was furious. Joan said Laurel could not let them get away with it, and urged her to press charges. Joan was hot. Andrea tried to calm things down.
“Look, you’ve got to get yourself some attention. You’ve got to get yourself to a doctor. You need medical and psychiatric attention immediately. Don’t even think about pressing charges right now. That’s not important. What’s important is that you get yourself some help.”
Laurel was still reluctant. She didn’t want to get anyone in trouble.
“Don’t worry about them,” Andrea said. “You have to worry about you right now.”
She urged Laurel to see Carol Tracy at the Penn Women’s Center. Her office was in the same building upstairs. As soon as the women parted, Laurel mounted the steps and made an appointment to see Tracy.
That night Andrea wrote in her diary, “How can Laurel understand as I do that the guys had no idea of the kind of damage they did w/out realizing it. They are so ignorant in my eyes, so malicious in hers. Like Bags said, ‘We were drunk. What do you expect us to do? Carry her home?’ They have no idea how much hurt they can do despite their lack of bad intentions.”
The Penn Women’s Center, founded ten years ago after a gang rape on campus, is an unusual agency. Carol Tracy and the three women on her staff are part of the university administration, but they are designated “advocates,” charged with bringing a feminist perspective to campus issues. Tracy, a soft-spoken but hard-minded woman in her thirties who became head of the center six years ago, is in her last year of law school at Temple University. A fair woman with brown hair, Tracy eschews makeup and welcomes controversy—it makes people think.
She had already been tipped off about the “train.” A student had told her that there was talk going around the men’s locker rooms. It sickened her, but experience had taught her not to expect much. A young woman in that position would be unlikely to come forward. The pressures were just too much.
So Tracy was surprised when Laurel appeared that afternoon. Her heart went out to the student. She seemed utterly broken, so nervous and fragile. Her voice cracked with emotion, and her hands trembled—clearly, a young woman in deep trouble. Tracy could sense how Laurel had wrestled with the ordeal, first pretending it didn’t happen, then sliding out of shock into less anger than pain. It sounded to Tracy like rape. Mindful of procedures for reporting a crime, she phoned Ruth Wells, a campus police officer, and asked her to come over. It was late when Wells arrived, near dark. As Laurel recounted the tale, she began to stutter. First a little, then more.
Throughout, Laurel told Tracy, she kept asking them to leave her alone, to get off her, to stop. She displayed the bruise on her arm and showed where the backs of her arms were raw from rubbing the rug.
Tracy didn’t want details. She tried to calm Laurel, assuring her that she would get help. Wells told Laurel that the next step was a police report. Laurel said she didn’t want to prosecu
te. Tracy didn’t want Laurel pressured, so she quickly interjected that she understood Laurel’s reluctance to go that route. It would be terribly difficult. Still, both women told the girl that the incident must be reported, even if it went no further.
“It was a felony, and we were obliged to report it,” Tracy said. “Laurel would have to go to the hospital.” Wells phoned Bill Heiman, head of rape prosecution for the district attorney’s office. Laurel repeated her story to Heiman. Tracy remembered Laurel insisting that she did not want to prosecute. Before he hung up, Heiman told Tracy he would not take action unless he heard from them again. Before she left, Laurel agreed to let the rape unit at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital examine her the next day. There, as part of normal procedure, she would tell her story to police.
But when Laurel left, Tracy suspected that if anything would be done about this incident, it would have to be done on campus. Laurel had dropped the matter squarely in Penn’s lap.
* * *
On Wednesday, Laurel went to Jefferson Hospital to be examined and interviewed. The University of Pennsylvania began its investigation.
Laurel had told Carol Tracy about Andrea, and Tracy sent word to Andrea that she wanted to see her. Andrea came over right away. She explained her mixed emotions to Tracy. The older woman listened sympathetically and then told Andrea firmly that, no matter how she felt about the fraternity, she would have to tell whatever she knew to Ann Hart, the campus judicial inquiry officer, whose job is to investigate misbehavior by students and recommend punishment.
So Andrea talked to Hart, who seemed disgusted. In a way, it was a relief for Andrea to find a mature response that seemed to validate her own anger. When she had tried to explain her anger to the brothers, they told her that she was acting like a silly child. At last Andrea began to feel that her first reaction was appropriate.
