The Case of the Vanishing Blonde

by Mark Bowden

  If there was any question in Andrea’s mind about where she stood in all this, whether she was trying to stay friends with the ATO brothers and accept their version of what happened or whether she was conspiring to have them punished, indecision vanished that afternoon when she stopped by the house. Posted on the second-floor landing were minutes of the last weekend’s house meeting.

  Brothers had recorded “highlights” of the previous week’s exploits, sexual and otherwise, full of allusions to the incident.

  “Things are looking up for the ATO sisters program,” the first item read. “A prospective leader for the group [whom Andrea deduced meant Laurel] spent some time interviewing several Taus this past Thursday and Friday. Possible names for the little sisters include ‘The ATO Little Wenches’ and ‘The ATO Express.’”

  It turned Andrea’s stomach. Another of the items referred to one of the brothers involved, a Catholic, noting that he “started Lent on the right foot by making sure he had fish on Friday.” Posted with the highlights was a recent letter from the Fraternity/Sorority Advisory Board, which regulates the affairs of these groups, regarding the forthcoming service awards. On it someone had written, “We serviced Laurel.”

  Andrea was infuriated. The glib crudity confirmed her worst instincts about what the guys had really thought. She had heard the stories circulating in the men’s locker rooms. She had heard of the sign placed above the lockers of two ATO members that read “39th Street Station,” a reference to the location of the ATO house and the “train.” She had wanted to believe that her friends were above all this, but after seeing the “highlights” she knew which side she was on. That clinched it. There was no turning back.

  Andrea plucked the “highlights” paper and the letter off the wall and stuffed them into her pocket. She was trembling. On her way out, she ran into a few brothers, so she sat down on the outside steps with them, afraid she would somehow appear conspicuous by just striding past. When one of her friends walked by, Andrea shouted across to her, asking if she was going to a women’s conference meeting the next day. One of the brothers turned and grabbed Andrea playfully and gave her a gentle push down the steps.

  “Hey, none of that women’s stuff,” he said.

  Andrea took advantage of the shove to leave the steps. She turned and, with what she knew he would interpret as play anger, answered haughtily, “We’re discussing violence against women!”

  She walked directly over to Houston Hall, photocopied the papers, and took them to Ann Hart. In her diary that night she wrote, “Ann seemed pleased w/ me, disgusted w/ the guys.” And after Hart had repeated what she knew to the campus police officer Ruth Wells, and after Andrea had shown Wells the “highlights” paper and the letter, “the consensus was in, these guys are sick,” Andrea wrote. “I felt a little embarrassed. I mean I’ve been partying w/ them all year & they’re my good friends. I guess I’ve lost my perspective of what constitutes normal behavior. I know rape is wrong. But I’ve had some good times there. Sometimes partying ’til you drop seems to be the thing to do . . . this is unreal.”

  The trouble broke out at ATO house the next day. Until now the brothers had enjoyed quiet notoriety from the incident. The one or two who felt bad had kept their remorse to themselves. Andrea’s carping was just a bother, just what they had expected from their House Feminist.

  But that afternoon the slap of Andrea’s initial accusation was multiplied a hundredfold. One of the brothers described the scene:

  “We were sitting around about four o’clock, you know, late afternoon, just sitting around talking, and Moran comes in looking like he’s been shot through the heart or something like that. He’s got some paper in his hand, and he says, ‘We’re in trouble, we’re in such big trouble. You guys won’t believe it. Boy, this is really bad.’

  “And we said, ‘Well, what is it?’

  “And he shows us the charges, you know, these charges against us.”

  Moran had been summoned out of class and served with two letters from the administration. One tersely informed him that a complaint had been made to the university against him and eight other ATO members. Their names were listed on the bottom. It instructed him to be in Ann Hart’s office that very hour with a copy of the minutes of the last ATO meeting—the one that produced the infamous “highlights,” which, unbeknownst to Moran, Andrea Ploscowe had already turned over. The letter said appointments with Hart the next day should be arranged for the other brothers named. The second letter, from Alan Thomas, the acting director of fraternity and sorority affairs, asked him and the same list of brothers to contact the campus security office immediately to arrange interviews with the Philadelphia Police Department. The Philadelphia Police Department?

  Moran was astonished and frightened. He could deduce what the complaint was about, but it was confusing. A few brothers listed had not been involved in the incident. One had been out of town when it happened. He wondered what kind of story had been given to the administration. Without knowing what he was charged with, he wasn’t sure what he should say. It was frightening. He stopped at a phone booth to phone a friend on the law school faculty. His friend advised him to say nothing until he conferred with a lawyer. But Moran’s first impulse was to tell the truth. He believed that he and others couldn’t get in trouble once the school knew what had really happened. So he went to see Hart.

  He no sooner started talking to her, though, than he felt he had made a big mistake. Right off he admitted some things that could prove damaging. He acknowledged he had had sex with Laurel that night, and others in the house had too. And he got the impression that this was all Hart really wanted to know.

  Hart had butted heads with ATO before over milder complaints. The brothers didn’t like dealing with her. The year before, a fraternity member allegedly involved in a fight had taken Hart and the university to court over disciplinary action she had taken against him. He won the case. Most of the brothers figured that Hart, if not the whole university, had it in for them. Maybe they should get lawyers. But lawyers cost money.

  Panic spread through the house that evening. Moran had the brothers named in the complaint signing up for half-hour sessions with Hart the next day. Despite his misgivings about Hart, he argued that once the truth was known, they would not be in any trouble. After all, the charge—rape?—was ridiculous, right? A few of the more skeptical brothers weren’t buying it. They were busily trying to contact lawyers. They were convinced, the more they thought about it, that Hart would try to make them sacrificial victims to a feminist crusade against fraternities.

  Then Maury Rath had an idea. One of the faculty members they had phoned for advice had suggested that if they didn’t trust Ann Hart, they should go over her head. Why not go straight to the top? The matter was certainly serious enough. The more they talked about it, the more the brothers agreed. So a delegation was chosen to see the university president, Sheldon Hackney. Right away.

  * * *

  Hackney had been at Penn for just over two years. In keeping with his goal of making the sprawling university more of a cohesive academic community, Hackney was the first Penn president in the twentieth century to live on campus.

  Five ATO brothers walked through the cold night to Hackney’s renovated mansion and rang the bell at about ten p.m. A student waiter, dressed in a tuxedo, answered the door and told the brothers the president had dinner guests. The brothers said they had to see Dr. Hackney right away.

  The student disappeared inside for a moment, then returned to say that Hackney would see them later that night.

  The phone rang about a half hour later, and the group trudged back over to meet with the president. Hackney is a dark, handsome man, tall and slender. If his position and impeccable appearance were intimidating to the brothers, his gracious Southern manner put them quickly at ease.

  They came in, a group of about five or six. Hackney said later, “They were quite somber, sober, so I knew something was worryin’ them. And they described the
ir version—they did not go through everything—but they described some version of the incident.”

  The group told Hackney that a number of brothers had had sex with Laurel the night of the party. They characterized Laurel as the aggressor and said her charges were absurd.

  Hackney listened, disturbed. He had not heard of the incident.

  “They said that they came to me for advice because they had been contacted by the judicial inquiry officer and asked to come in and talk about this. And they did not know much about the system, the judicial system, and were really unsure about whether they should trust it or not. They simply wanted my advice. I told them that they ought to go and talk to the judicial inquiry officer and tell the truth, and they would come out all right.”

  Hackney meant, of course, that if they cooperated with the procedures, they would be treated fairly. None of the group was happy with this advice. They expressed their worries about Ann Hart and about how, with Carol Tracy’s involvement, this whole investigation had the look of a feminist lynching to them. The process seemed to be moving too fast, at any rate, and they were uncomfortable with it. They didn’t really understand what was going on. Hackney told them that if they wanted some assurance about the system or some information about how it worked, they could talk to George Koval, Ann Hart’s boss, the acting vice provost for university life. He said he would help arrange a meeting.

  Hackney said later that this offer amounted to nothing. The students could have asked for a meeting with Koval on their own and would have gotten it.

  But the brothers were delighted. They knew that Koval was Hart’s boss. They felt that the president had intervened on their behalf. Hackney’s offer to call the vice provost and arrange a meeting had, as far as they were concerned, pulled a string that placed Hart’s investigation on hold, indefinitely. Koval would listen to reason.

  None of them kept their appointments with Hart the next morning. Over the weekend they got their stories together and hired a lawyer.

  The story broke in the Daily Pennsylvanian, Penn’s student newspaper, on March 7. An administrator had leaked the news over lunch to editor Peter Canellos just a few days after Laurel reported it.

  Canellos had the story nailed down within a week. One of the people he asked about it was Carol Tracy, but she wasn’t helpful. The break came when an ATO brother, evidently under the impression that the newspaper knew more than it actually did, agreed to tell what he knew if his name was not used. After that, Canellos called Tracy. The Women’s Center director had talked to Laurel after Canellos first came snooping by.

  “I told her that I would not give out any information, but that the story was likely to break anyway,” Tracy said. “I asked her if she wanted me to speak in her defense, when and if it did. She said yes.”

  So Tracy listened to the ATO version that Canellos’s reporters had gathered. She found it very predictable. It was, of course, all Laurel’s fault. She had been willing. She had been the aggressor. If she had been gang-raped, why would she have come back the next day? Why did she wait four days to report it? Tracy explained how rape victims usually begin by trying to pretend that nothing had happened. Laurel’s reaction had been typical.

  What they didn’t seem to understand was that even if Laurel had seemed willing—and Tracy found that hard to believe—it could still be rape. Tracy had thought about little else for the last two weeks. More than she wanted to see anyone at ATO punished for what happened, she wanted them to understand this: It was rape because of the state Laurel was in. It was rape because she was unable to consent. Tracy had studied the statute, and it was pretty clear about that. She didn’t feel sorry for the ATO brothers at all. She didn’t believe that men’s sexual passions could get so aroused by a woman in that condition that they couldn’t control themselves. She saw the brothers’ story as a standard male myth, a rationalization of behavior. This was a girl who had taken acid and drunk all night and who was looking for a place to lie down. The guy who took her upstairs had first helped to dress her. She couldn’t even dress herself! And then he and the others proceeded to have sex with her. The kind of frenzy or whatever that’s associated with group sex is something that Tracy couldn’t begin to identify with. The right thing to do should have been simple enough. They should have taken Laurel home. Instead, they had taken advantage of her, ruthlessly. Tracy had talked to enough people who were there that night and who saw the state Laurel was in. But there was this standard problem with rape, one that almost ensured that anyone but the most overtly violent rapist would go unpunished. Rape is not treated in graduated degrees the way murder is. Tracy knew enough about what happened at the ATO house that night to realize that this was not the kind of rape that was intentional or premeditated, the kind that was easily prosecuted in court. It was not like five men attacking a woman on the street, dragging her into an alley, and raping her at knifepoint. No, the law didn’t allow for gradations with rape, but this was rape just the same.

  So Tracy sounded off. The story led the campus paper that morning with a big headline: “Student Charges Gang Rape / U. investigate incident at ATO party.” Tracy had gotten the last word.

  Tracy said the fraternity should be removed from campus and called the alleged incident “the single most awful event ever reported to me in 15 years at Penn. It was uncivilized, inhuman, reprehensible behavior that should shock the conscience of the university community . . .”

  * * *

  Two friends who saw Laurel that day described her as being “numb” and “in shock.” The newspaper had called her the night before to tell her that the story was being published the next day and that she would not be named. But nothing could have prepared her for the big headline and the furor that followed.

  Her father showed up that afternoon and took her home.

  In the two and a half weeks between the day the Daily Pennsylvanian story broke and the day ATO got a formal hearing before the Fraternity/Sorority Advisory Board, the brothers became notorious nationwide.

  The incident provoked an instant, virulent response that stunned the fraternity members. As they learned more about Laurel, about her drinking problem and her drug problem, most of the brothers felt bad about what had happened. A few, discussing it among themselves, decided that they had not done the right thing that night. But none of the brothers believed that the incident could be even remotely considered rape. If they had taken advantage of Laurel, and in retrospect it seemed that they had, they had not done so knowingly. Far outweighing any feelings of remorse, however, were feelings of bitterness and anger—toward the feminists, the press, and the university officials who they believed were persecuting them. Still, they had been advised to keep their mouths shut. They just had to take it.

  Three days after the story broke, students organized a rally to protest violence against women. More than five hundred people crowded into Houston Hall to register disgust. Among them was a group of ATO brothers who considered themselves as anti-rape as anyone. They winced when the first speakers denounced their fraternity and called for them to be thrown off campus. They felt like guests of honor at a slow lynching.

  As for the facts, each of the brothers had taken a lawyer along for the interviews they had rescheduled with Ann Hart. One by one, they repeated the same denial: “I did not have forced sexual contact with the young woman.”

  Hart’s findings were presented late in the afternoon on Wednesday, March 23, before the Fraternity/Sorority Advisory Board, which is composed of faculty, alumni, and fraternity and sorority members. The board would decide whether any infraction of the university’s rules had occurred. The hearing continued in a warm room well into the night. Photographers and reporters waited in the hallway outside.

  The university’s complaint against ATO was based on the agreement under which Penn recognizes chapters of national fraternities. Under this agreement, fraternities are obligated to “accept collective responsibility for the activities of individual members” if misbehavior by
those members “is knowingly tolerated by the members of the fraternity and is in violation of the University’s Code of Conduct.”

  “By the end, we had heard, basically, two separate stories,” one of the board members recalled. “In the version prepared by Ann Hart, the young woman was drugged and drunk and clearly out of control. She was taken advantage of in that state by a number of fraternity members. In the ATO version, the young woman appeared to be in full control of herself and initiated sexual activity with a number of brothers over a two-and-a-half-hour period that morning. The fraternity characterized it basically as a series of separate sexual encounters that took place voluntarily.”

  There were two questions before the board. Did the fraternity members do what they were accused of doing? And if they did, did they act responsibly?

  “My feeling was, I was upset because I didn’t have all the information,” the board member said. “I didn’t feel like I knew enough to make a reasonable decision, because each of the two stories was so different.”

  Nevertheless, the board voted to recommend that ATO be suspended until January 1984, which meant that it wouldn’t be allowed to recruit new members, or “rush,” until then or to hold parties or benefit dances. The board also recommended that all officers of the fraternity and any members directly involved in the incident be thrown out of ATO, and that direction of the fraternity be turned over to ATO alumni. That penalty, the board members felt, was severe enough. Later, the ATO brothers said that penalty would have been mild. They would have been delighted with it.

  Koval, however, went further. On Friday, March 25, he withdrew recognition of ATO, the most serious penalty the university can impose on errant fraternities. The national organization could not reapply for recognition until September 1984. And even if recognition were granted then, all current members were barred from joining any future ATO chapter at Penn. Further, the brothers were all ordered to move out of the house by the end of the semester. For all practical purposes, ATO was dead.