“With Whom Honor Is Sacred and Virtue Safe”
Gabriela Lopez let loose, drinking two beers and sharing a bottle of Ciroc vodka, then moving on to shots. The brothers at the Sigma Alpha Epsilon house, like volunteers distributing water to long-distance runners, passed around the Fireball Cinnamon Whiskey (“Tastes like Heaven, Burns like Hell”). Gabriela downed one shot, then another, before losing track of how many. Her vision blurred, and she could barely walk.
“You need to stop drinking,” said her older sister, Maria, who took her into the bathroom to splash water on her face.
The Lopez sisters had arrived about 11:00 p.m., half an hour after the party began. On an overcast night, they walked past the two stone SAE lions flanking the walkway, through the neatly trimmed front yard, by the fraternity brother with the guest list at the front door, and out of the autumn chill. On its corner lot, the fifteen-bedroom chapter house, three stories of beige masonry and arched windows, towered over the Baltimore row houses beside it, just as the Johns Hopkins University gates a couple of blocks away dominated the neighborhood.
Unlike the SAE brothers at the party, Maria and Gabriela didn’t go to Johns Hopkins and, in many other ways, didn’t belong in this world. Their parents had emigrated from Guatemala—their mother, a housekeeper and nanny; their father, a supervisor at a trash transfer station. Maria was nineteen years old and worked as a teacher’s aide for children with autism. Gabriela, the sister with the alcohol wreaking havoc on her nervous system, was still in high school. She was sixteen, though, like many teenage girls, she could pass for older, especially in her outfit that night, a green-and-blue flannel shirt over a white crop top, leggings, and black combat boots, a typical look on a college campus. Legally, both sisters were too young to be drinking. But on that Saturday night in November 2014, no one asked them, or anyone else, for ID.
In fraternity-speak, it was an “invite-only” party, a misleading term for those outside of Greek life. Only men needed invitations. All women—all girls, really, it turned out—were welcome. At the party, which celebrated Halloween a day after the actual holiday, SAE hosted many first-year men, who were being courted as possible SAE material. It would be an easy sell, the convenience to campus, the impressive house, the free-flowing booze, and the “ratio,” as it was often called, the result of the invitation policy guaranteeing that women would outnumber men, often by a lot. In the spring, the university had warned the chapter about serving alcohol to minors, but the message didn’t take. By the simple mathematics of undergraduate life, most of the students drinking that night were underage.
Maria and Gabriela came along with three of Maria’s friends. Gabriela had never been to a frat party before. Even though she was now a high school junior, she had only tasted beer before that night. Smart and athletic, with long dark hair and large brown eyes, Gabriela was a five-foot-five lacrosse player, as well as a cheerleader, strong enough to stand at the base of a human pyramid and light enough to be the “flyer” who was flung off its peak. She was fearless; after graduation, she planned to join the army. So Gabriela, like so many little sisters, seized the chance to tag along. The sisters weren’t crashing the SAE party, not at all. The chapter’s social chairman, a Johns Hopkins sophomore named Ivan Booth, had invited Maria, who told him that her sister, Gabriela, would be there, too. Ivan and Maria had met on Instagram five months earlier. Maria had been to an SAE party before, and a romance may have been brewing.
If so, Ivan’s Twitter feed might have alarmed Maria’s parents. Below the angry-looking grille of a Cadillac sports car was an inset photo of Ivan, wearing ear buds, a blue hoodie, and a backward baseball cap, staring unsmilingly, his lips curled in the faint suggestion of a smirk. He may have been a white suburban boy, but his high school posts sounded tough, as if he were lip-synching off a hip-hop album. “Ass and titties. Ass and titties. Ass and titties,” he tweeted, quoting the lyrics from the Memphis rappers Three 6 Mafia. One of his friends referred to him, apparently fondly, as a “fuck boy,” slang for a particular mix of privilege and misogyny that would be taken as an endearment only in certain quarters. In the fall of his freshman year at Johns Hopkins, Ivan retweeted comments he found amusing: “the 4 b’s of a true party,” presumably a reference to “Beer, Bud, Box. Bitches”; a suggested pick-up line, “There’s no u in I but if we work together I could be in u”; and, even more emphatically: “PUSSY ALWAYS BEING THE SUBJECT. IN ANY CASE.”
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 main 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 official 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.
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 list 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.”
Ivan sounded more like a lawyer defending a corporation than a college sophomore answering questions about the rape of his friend’s little sister. His language was bureaucratic, stilted, and passive. He elaborated on process and gave answers to direct questions as necessary, offering nothing more. Chaz had been “technically invited by me.” Ivan required “actual physical evidence” before putting a good friend on the guest list, a good friend whose character he vouched for, yet whose “apparent presence at the party was completely unannounced to me.” The state’s attorney’s office would later call on many of the people who were there the night of Gabriela’s rape to give testimony for the prosecution: Gabriela’s sister, Maria; Evan, the fraternity brother who found Gabriela in the bathroom; and the graduate student, Steven Pearlman, who called 911. Ivan Booth was the most notable omission. No doubt, the prosecution watched this interview and came to a simple conclusion: the SAE social chairman wouldn’t be much help.
Later that morning, Gabriela’s sister showed her pictures of Chaz and Ethan from her Instagram account. “That’s him,” she said, after looking at each one, before bursting into tears. She later identified each of them at a police photo array. The next month, Chaz and Ethan were charged with rape and sexual assault in Gabriela’s attack. For its role, SAE was punished, too. Johns Hopkins suspended the SAE chapter for one year because it served alcohol to minors and failed to monitor its guests. “It is beyond just alcohol; it’s the overall management of the event and the evening, with alcohol being a big factor,” Kevin G. Shollenberger, vice provost for student affairs, told the Johns Hopkins News-Letter, the student paper. “From what I hear from students, it’s a big part of the culture there.”
The Johns Hopkins campus never found out what had really happened that night. The newspaper accounts made it sound like strangers had somehow found their way into the SAE house. Other fraternities rallied around SAE, as did the News-Letter. In a March 2015 editorial, the paper called the chapter’s suspension “draconian” and “absurd on its face” because the accused weren’t affiliated with SAE and “the brothers immediately called the police and worked with law enforcement.” The article didn’t seem aware that Chaz was, in fact, a close friend of the chapter’s social chairman, who had invited him—at least, “technically,” to use Ivan’s own word. Chaz may not have been a member, but he had been a DJ for SAE. It could be argued that he was, in fact, “affiliated” with the fraternity. The brothers didn’t call police; a graduate student living in the house did. Ivan’s cooperation with the authorities had been grudging, at best. The editorial objected that the Johns Hopkins chapter of Pi Kappa Alpha, often known as “Pike,” had also received a one-year suspension after its own members in 2013 had been accused of gang rape. In fact, Pike hadn’t been punished for that accusation. The police investigated the alleged attack but didn’t file charges; the suspension, like SAE’s, was primarily for underage drinking. More broadly, the editorial conveyed resignation, a sense that such episodes were inevitable on a college campus. “We all know this could have happened to anyone,” the editors said. The punishment didn’t chasten the SAE chapter. Members ignored their suspension and held another party. As a result, that April, Hopkins terminated the chapter’s recognition. It would be years until SAE could even consider coming back—2019, at the earliest.
Sorting out who was responsible for what happened would take years, too, and it would be costly. Johns Hopkins requires each fraternity chapter to take out a $2 million insurance policy that covers host liquor liability, sexual misconduct, and sexual assault. The coverage must protect the university, as well as the fraternity. That July, Gabriela’s family filed a lawsuit against Sigma Alpha Epsilon, Johns Hopkins, Ethan Turner, and Chaz Haggins. Along with alleging battery against the two criminal defendants, the complaint accused SAE and Hopkins of negligence for allowing “untrained, underage members” to throw “regular and notorious parties that involved provision of alcoholic beverages to minors and inebriates that, by virtue of their promotion, creates an environment that made sexual assault and rape likely.” The lawsuit, which Hopkins later settled for an undisclosed sum, sought $30 million in damages. The case against SAE was still pending.
IN FEBRUARY 2016, Ethan Turner’s criminal trial unfolded on the fifth floor of the Baltimore City Circuit courthouse, a grand marble landmark of a building with soaring columns and brass doors. This particular courtroom, at the end of a long hallway and behind a nondescript wooden door, was easy to miss. It was the size of a small chapel, cramped and dreary, paint peeling off the radiators. Inside, on long wooden benches lined up like church pews, Ethan’s friends and family, a dozen or more at a time, made up most of the spectators. During breaks, they expressed their support for Ethan and disparaged Gabriela.
Ethan’s defense attorney, Matthew Fraling, never disputed that Gabriela had been raped. Gabriela’s medical exam had shown she was bleeding hours after the attack and that she had been drunk and incapacitated. The state’s DNA expert said two men had attacked her: Chaz, and another man whose identity couldn’t be determined. Fraling maintained that Chaz was the rapist, but not Ethan, and that alcohol had clouded Gabriela’s recollection. Often, Fraling focused on a kind of unindicted co-conspirator: Sigma Alpha Epsilon itself.
Fraling cross-examined Evan, who had helped Gabriela out of the bathroom. He zeroed in on what he called “overindulgence” at the party.
“Yes, people were drunk,” Evan said.
“How many bars did you have up and running?”
Evan said that there was one in the basement and another to the left of the front door, the one where women were dancing on the bar.
“It’s like Coyote Ugly,” Fraling said, to a sustained objection.
“Was it standard practice for the fraternity to distribute alcohol to sixteen-year-olds?” Fraling asked.
“No.”
Fraling leveled his toughest questions at Gabriela’s older sister, suggesting she had left Gabriela on the couch so she could “hook up” with Ivan.
“This is a frat house, this is a guys’ fraternity—right?—for college guys,” Fraling said. “And you left your sister, inebriated, with more than seventy-five people, and you felt that she would be safe?”
“I didn’t think anything would happen to her,” Maria said, her voice breaking.
The two sisters, once close, were now estranged, Maria struggling with guilt, confronting a relationship that could be beyond repair. How could she have known? Her mother didn’t even know what a fraternity was until she heard her daughter had been raped at a chapter house.
Soon after Maria testified, Gabriela herself walked to the witness stand, passing within several feet of Ethan, who sat behind a long table with Fraling. Unlike the day of his arrest, Ethan, now twenty, was clean-shaven and wore wire-rimmed glasses, a bow tie, and a boxy, dark suit that looked a couple of sizes too big, as if he were a child wearing his father’s Sunday best. Gabriela looked older. For her day in court, like an office worker on a lunch break, she was dressed in a khaki blazer and black pants, and her hair was neatly coiffed. But she was still only seventeen, and terrified. After the attacks, she had been so shaken that she didn’t return to high school. Instead, she took classes on her own and finished early. She put her plans for the army on hold. To keep busy, she worked three jobs—at a pizzeria, a shop selling honey, and a breakfast restaurant. She didn’t socialize much anymore, and she avoided parties with alcohol. She had nightmares and flashbacks about the attack.
Gently insisting on explicit detail, the prosecutor walked Gabriela through what happened that night. She spoke softly, her voice barely above a whisper. In his cross-examination, Ethan’s defense attorney suggested that her family’s $30 million lawsuit gave her a motive to lie. He asked Gabriela to list all she drank that night: the two beers, the vodka, the Fireball shots; and he highlighted the moments she couldn’t remember. Still, Gabriela was never shaken from her account.
The prosecutor asked Gabriela how sure she was that Ethan had attacked her.
“One hundred percent,” she said.
After spending more than an hour on the stand, Gabriela was excused. She stepped outside, then broke down for the first time, her sobbing slowly growing fainter as she walked away from the courtroom.
The defense called only one witness, Alex Stiffler, who had driven Chaz to the house that night. Alex said he was Ethan’s best friend. He answered a question hanging over the trial. Gabriela had said she saw three men in the bathroom, the two who attacked her and a third who told her to get dressed and then left. Who was the third man? Gabriela had seen a heavyset man, Hispanic with a beard. It was Alex, a community-college student. On the stand, he said he had headed down the stairs to the basement that night to smoke pot, when he saw a slender young Hispanic woman pulling Chaz into the bathroom. Later, Alex said, he needed to relieve himself. So he entered the bathroom and saw the same young woman slumped in the shower, unclothed and motioning toward him.
“Why? Why?” he quoted Gabriela as saying.
Alex said he was repulsed.
“I didn’t want to touch her,” he said. “I got out of there.”
In a withering cross examination, the prosecutor, Robert M. Perkins III, who worked with the special-victims unit, suggested Alex was covering up for his friend. He focused on inconsistencies in his testimony when compared with his statement to the police. The prosecutor asked if Alex had spoken with Gabriela’s sister that night. Alex said no. Perkins produced cell-phone records showing calls between their cell phones.
Then Perkins asked the toughest question.
“You see a girl lying on the floor, and you don’t do anything?” Perkins asked.
Alex said he thought the young woman was coming on to him, and he wasn’t interested. It was a curious reaction, especially since Evan, the SAE member who arrived shortly afterward, had immediately realized something terrible had happened to her. Alex’s account was consistent with another possibility: He knew about what his friends were doing in the bathroom with the intoxicated Gabriela. Perhaps it was now his turn, but he thought better of it and left?
As Perkins’s questions became more pointed, Alex grew combative. Like a class clown mouthing off to a teacher, he resisted answers and smiled at the crowd of Ethan’s friends in court. “You said you entered the bathroom to urinate,” Perkins said, as he began to ask a question.
“I said I went in to take a piss,” Alex interrupted.
Did he speak with Chaz after what happened?
“I might have spoken to him. I might not.”
Finally, Perkins read from Alex’s statement to a Baltimore police detective on the morning after Gabriela was attacked.
“Anything to get me out of this,” Alex had said.
Why would he say that? It sounded like someone who might have feared being charged as an accomplice.
“I was scared,” Alex said, “even though I wasn’t involved with this.”
Although he was only in his early thirties, Perkins had prosecuted many sexual-assault cases. He knew he had about as much evidence as any assistant state’s attorney could hope for. Having a DNA match, as the state had for Chaz, would have been helpful, but it wasn’t unusual that such tests were inconclusive. Perkins viewed Gabriela as an especially articulate and credible witness. After her cross-examination, the jury saw her videotaped statement to police on the day of the crime, and it was exactly the same as what she had said on the stand. Her civil lawsuit wouldn’t have been filed until months later. The jury saw a sixteen-year-old girl who vomited into a wastebasket after talking with the police, not someone who was considering her strategy for civil litigation. Still, all prosecutors knew that nothing can spell “reasonable doubt” more than a drunk witness, and no matter the legal standard for consent, many jurors are apt to blame the victim. Before the trial, Perkins had asked prospective jurors if they would be biased against a woman who had been attacked after she had become drunk voluntarily. A female juror stood up and said she would. A male juror, in his twenties or early thirties, also had qualms. “My fraternity was kicked off campus for the same thing,” he said, gesturing toward Ethan. “I don’t know if I could be impartial because it could have been me standing there.” Both jurors were excused. Still, Perkins couldn’t be sure that others didn’t secretly harbor those views, even if they couldn’t admit it to themselves.
In his closing argument, Fraling, the defense attorney, returned to the environment of the fraternity house and Maria’s responsibility for what happened.
“She left her sister alone at a frat party with more than one hundred people,” he said, pausing for emphasis. “At a frat party.”
Fraling gave special emphasis to the word “frat party,” lingering on it, like a kind of epithet. It was as if Fraling were saying “whorehouse,” not the setting of an “invite-only” Halloween celebration at the elegant home of the Johns Hopkins chapter of Sigma Alpha Epsilon. Fraling didn’t have to explain to the jury what he meant. He considered it common knowledge, the fate of a defenseless girl at a fraternity house: Sexual Assault Expected.
IN HER JEANS, plaid shirt, and purple Ugg boots, the forewoman on the jury didn’t look much older than Gabriela. The judge asked her, separately, about the first three of five counts in the indictment, which accused Ethan of being an accomplice to Chaz.
“Not guilty.”
“Not guilty.”
Ethan’s family looked overjoyed. But the verdict wasn’t complete. The judge asked about the other two other charges.
Second-degree assault?
“Guilty.”
Second-degree sexual assault?
“Guilty.”
The judge ordered two sheriff’s deputies to take Ethan into custody. He was handcuffed, his arms behind him. His mother collapsed on the courtroom floor.
The jury hadn’t been told something else because it might have strongly predisposed them against the defendant. The week before, Chaz had pleaded guilty to raping and assaulting Gabriela, and neither side called him as a witness. In his deal, he accepted a twenty-year sentence—though all but five years were suspended. Unlike Ethan, he had been in jail since his arrest, so he was likely to be released in eighteen months, with credits for good behavior and time served. He would have had much to lose in a trial and far less to gain, unless he could have won an acquittal, which was unlikely because the prosecution had matched his DNA to the evidence collected from Gabriela’s rape kit.
Now, Ethan faced the prospect of far harsher punishment. At Ethan’s sentencing in April, the prosecutor asked for twenty years, ten years suspended, or twice the length of Chaz’s sentence. Ethan’s family begged the judge to give him a second chance, saying he had been a quiet child—a “follower” with no criminal record who came from a close-knit family that would look after him if he could stay at home during his sentence. His lawyer said he was less culpable than Chaz.
“I would never hurt a woman or anybody else,” Ethan, now in his prison jumpsuit, told the judge, his voice barely audible. “It’s not in my character.”
“I’m not the same person I was a month ago.”
The prosecutor read a short statement from Gabriela about her terror since the attack. She wasn’t there. She didn’t want to take time off from work—or perhaps to see her attacker again. Her mother, who hadn’t planned to say anything, changed her mind.
“My heart is broken,” she told the judge. “Who is going to give a second chance to my daughter?”
Judge Melissa Phinn, a former public defender who had been on the bench since 2013, said she believed Ethan was a follower and hoped his family could help him turn his life around. But she wanted him in prison.
“I didn’t see any remorse from you,” Phinn said, describing his behavior in the courtroom with his friends and family. “I saw laughing.… One night of drinking and partying. It’s not so funny now. It’s going to cost you.”
Phinn gave Ethan the same sentence as Chaz: twenty years, all but five suspended. To Ethan’s family, it was an eternity; to Gabriela’s, not anywhere close to enough.
AFTER THE TRIAL, Fraling, the defense lawyer, told me Steven Pearlman was the only one in the house he considered to have offered wholehearted cooperation with the authorities. If the non-SAE graduate student hadn’t called the police, Fraling, who had worked twenty-three years as a Baltimore prosecutor, doubted the fraternity members would have done it themselves. “They circled the wagons,” Fraling said. Responding by e-mail to my questions about Ivan Booth’s role, his attorney, Garrett Brierley, called the information I related “greatly inaccurate” but said his client wouldn’t comment because of the pending civil litigation. Pearlman told me he felt sure that one of the fraternity brothers would eventually have called the police. In part, Fraling blamed the alcohol-soaked fraternity environment for the events in the chapter. A year before Gabriela was attacked, SAE’s membership had voted down a proposal that would have prohibited drinking in chapter houses. Doug Fierberg, the plaintiff’s lawyer who has sued many fraternities after deaths and assaults, said alcohol-free houses, along with a responsible adult living on-site, could reduce both drinking and rape. At Johns Hopkins, Pearlman’s presence had, at least, ensured a successful investigation. But he had been living there only by chance, and it hadn’t been his job to supervise the undergraduates.
Almost a year after the trial, when Gabriela was ready to speak with me, she was still struggling with memories of the assaults. Therapy helped, as did frequent visits to the gym. She held on to her childhood dream. Once the civil case was resolved, the former “flyer” on the cheer squad planned to join the US Marines and become a paratrooper. She was already gathering weekly with other recruits for physical training, running for miles, and practicing pull-ups. “I love travel and adventure,” she told me. “I think it will help me physically and mentally, help me become stronger. I’m hoping it will guide my life in the right direction.” She was still distant from her older sister, who was having trouble forgiving herself for leaving Gabriela on her own at the party. “I don’t blame her at all for what happened,” Gabriela said. “I never would want her to feel it was her fault. It wasn’t.”
After watching the trial, speaking with Gabriela and her parents, and poring over evidence that had never fully been disclosed, I saw how the realities of race and class influenced its outcome. Although Gabriela’s family found her attackers’ punishment less severe than they had hoped, it far surpassed the punishment after a similar assault the next year. At Stanford, Brock Turner, the white star swimmer who assaulted the unconscious woman outside the Kappa Alpha fraternity house, was sentenced to six months in county jail; Ethan and Chaz, five years in prison. The California decision sparked outrage from those who said it reflected the privilege of wealthy men and the minimization of sexual assault. The two cases illustrate how white male defendants can pay a lower price than African Americans for similar crimes.
Race and class may have also partly explained why the Johns Hopkins crime, alone among recently reported SAE assaults, resulted in convictions. Gabriela’s attackers were easily identified because they were outsiders, working-class African Americans who stood out at the chapter house. That night, they made up nearly all of the black guests at the fraternity. When Gabriela described the suspects as skinny African Americans with beards, the police could quickly zero in on suspects and get warrants for DNA tests. If they had been white college students, narrowing down suspects at a party of one hundred would have been more challenging, especially if fraternity brothers didn’t volunteer information. The search for the white attacker at the Los Angeles SAE party that same weekend went nowhere. I had to ask myself: What if the men who attacked Gabriela had been white? What if they had been Johns Hopkins students? What if they had been members of SAE?