True Gentlemen

by John Hechinger

  FOR STUART, LEAVING the brotherhood wasn’t easy. When he missed events, members called, texted, and visited his room. Stuart felt intimidated. His father, Henry “Hal” Stuart, a real estate developer, grew angry and protective. A six-foot-one, 260-pound former high school football player, he drove to the school.

  “If they don’t leave you alone, things are going to get real,” he told his son.

  Stuart found news accounts about Georges Desdunes’s death at Cornell and decided he had to do more to alert the administration. In May, he sent another report to the “silent-witness” website.

  “I was hazed by the SAE (Sigma Alpha Epsilon) fraternity this past semester,” he wrote. “It was completely disgusting and you schools should step up your regulation of this.”

  Although his e-mail was supposed to be anonymous, the campus police tracked him down. At home for summer vacation, Stuart told his story by phone. Lieutenant Brian Waller of the Salisbury University Police called his account “credible and truthful” and referred the matter to the city police department, which has jurisdiction off-campus. Waller also knew SAE had been in trouble before. In 2005, the university cited the SAE chapter for hanging “an obscene banner” outside a house where several sorority sisters lived. In November 2010, two women complained that date rape drugs were slipped into their drinks at an SAE party. The university ultimately found insufficient evidence but cited the chapter for alcohol violations.

  “There have been a number of allegations involving this fraternity over the past few years, from hazing to date-rape drugging to harassing a neighbor because of his sexual orientation,” Waller wrote in an e-mail, urging the city police to take action. “I fear that sooner or later there is going to be a major incident, and our past efforts will be under the magnifying glass.”

  The police investigation was brief. Two pledges denied that hazing took place. Stuart’s mother, fearing retaliation by fraternity members, told police she wanted her son to drop the case. Stuart decided it would be futile to move forward.

  That fall, Salisbury University pressed forward with its own investigation and summoned Stuart before its disciplinary board, which includes faculty and student representatives. A pledge who had dropped out corroborated much of Stuart’s account. In all, Salisbury held thirteen hours of hearings over three days.

  Stuart had been promised confidentiality, but his name leaked out. On September 28, 2012, Hal Stuart wrote to Salisbury University president Janet Dudley-Eshbach, lamenting the toll the investigation was taking on his son. “He essentially has been blackballed from any social life, eats his meals alone and is miserable,” Hal Stuart said. “I commend his courage for even coming back this semester.”

  The next month, the board determined that the evidence supported Stuart’s allegations that SAE fraternity members had submerged pledges in ice, confined them in a basement, verbally abused them, and forced them to drink excessively. “The actions of the members of Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity put the members of the pledge class in harm’s way both physically and emotionally,” the board found. One board member told fraternity leaders at the hearing that their protests of innocence rang hollow. “What you said sounds like Disney Channel, when what I’m thinking [is] more like Quentin Tarantino,” the member said.

  Another board member observed: “Not all of your members are True Gentlemen.”

  The chapter appealed the findings on the grounds that members weren’t allowed to have lawyers at the hearing. Citing the Tarantino and “True Gentlemen” comments, the chapter contended that board members were biased. In November 2012, the university denied an appeal from the fraternity and suspended SAE through the spring of 2014. The university revoked SAE’s recognition as a student organization and barred it from campus. A handful of students were also disciplined. Justin Stuart and his father were far from satisfied. They wanted Salisbury to disclose its findings publicly.

  Jen Palancia Shipp, then Salisbury’s general counsel, told Stuart she wanted to hear his concerns. He declined, saying he was preparing to transfer to the University of Maryland and needed to put the investigation behind him.

  “I just want to not deal with this anymore,” Stuart told Shipp in an e-mail. “It’s done, ended, the fraternity members can continue to lock people in a basement. It doesn’t matter to me. I am just going to move on and work on my degree at UMD.”

  Shipp said she understood.

  “I certainly do not want any other student to endure the same thing as you,” she replied.

  THE MEMBERS OF the Salisbury chapter never publicly acknowledged what happened. Daryl Spencer, an SAE member and former wide receiver on the Salisbury football team, brushed off questions about hazing. “Are you asking me if that’s what happened?” he responded to my colleague, David Glovin. “Maybe you should join a fraternity and find out. My memory is foggy.” Espinoza, the pledge educator, referred questions to the fraternity’s chapter adviser. “When I was there, none of this came up,” he said.

  The adviser was Dwight Marshall, who was president of the chapter in the 1980s when he was a Salisbury student. Now in his forties, with a neatly trimmed gray beard, Marshall, known as “Duke,” ran a local insurance agency, belonged to the Rotary Club, and during the holidays, wore a Santa Claus tie when he rang the bell at the mall for the local Salvation Army. “It did not happen,” Marshall said of Stuart’s account. “The quality of guys that are in there—they are outstanding young men.” Marshall maintained the college had found the chapter responsible for underage drinking at a non-fraternity event and for what he considered innocent behavior such as requiring pledges to learn the True Gentleman creed, attend study hall, and wear pins, khaki pants, and white shirts. “I could not belong to an organization that promoted hazing or bullying or whatever you want to call it,” Marshall said.

  Salisbury University said the chapter adviser’s description of what happened was inaccurate. Marshall also had to confront questions about his own behavior. Several months after the fraternity was disciplined, he was arrested for drunk driving. He pleaded guilty to driving while impaired and received probation. Marshall said he had been out having several drinks with friends and then used his arrest as a teachable moment for the fraternity, stressing the “importance of not drinking and driving.” The university, however, continued tangling with Marshall. Salisbury extended the chapter’s suspension for another year after Marshall distributed pledge manuals for recruiting meetings, which had been banned.

  As the university cracked down, it antagonized its most fervent supporters. Marshall was a former president of the Salisbury University Alumni Association’s board of directors, as well as a donor who had a conference room named after his parents. The sanctions angered an even bigger Salisbury booster and philanthropist: Michael Scarborough, who founded the SAE chapter in the 1970s. As a student, Scarborough had been a leader: secretary of the student government, a resident assistant, and a wide receiver on the football team. Norman Crawford Jr., then president of Salisbury, enlisted Scarborough to help bring fraternity life to the university, which had primarily been a commuter school. Scarborough chose SAE and saw the chapter change lives, particularly for teenagers looking for structure and purpose in college. “The True Gentleman rang true to me, as it did for a lot of people,” Scarborough told me.

  After college, Scarborough made his fortune as the founder of a Maryland investment firm, Scarborough Capital Management, which rode the boom in 401(k) retirement accounts. He also rose through the ranks of SAE as a volunteer, serving as SAE’s national president, or “Eminent Supreme Archon.” Scarborough came up with the idea of holding the national leadership school on a cruise ship, more than doubling its attendance. He also started the Inner Circle, an annual gathering that introduced about twenty-five promising undergraduate SAE members to prominent fraternity alumni, such as General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in President George W. Bush’s administration. The Inner Circle met at Scarborough’s three-hu
ndred-acre Maryland estate, where he managed a vineyard. At Salisbury University, Scarborough joined the university’s foundation board and donated $830,000 for the fraternity and sorority center, which opened in 2001 and bore his name. His generosity ended when the chapter was disciplined. He had pledged $2 million for a football stadium, but he canceled the gift. “If they decide that’s the hill they want to die on, then let them,” Scarborough said.

  After Scarborough withdrew the pledge, he decided to invest the money elsewhere—in beer. “Here it is,” he said of the $2 million, when I visited him at his new Calvert Brewing Company in Upper Marlboro, Maryland, east of Washington, DC. Scarborough pointed to the giant vats of hops inside the 25,000-square-foot beer factory, as we settled into a booth in the tap room. Still fit in his early sixties, with close-cropped gray hair and intense blue eyes, Scarborough wore a hooded sweatshirt and still looked like the college athlete he once was. Hints of Greek life were everywhere. As I toured the brewery, I noticed that his company’s insignia featured a lion and a fleur de lis, two of the most important SAE symbols. Even the motto of the brewery sounded like a fraternity slogan. Delta Sigma Chi, an SAE rival, is committed to “Building Better Men.” Scarborough’s company is “Building a better beer.”

  Scarborough was still smarting from what happened at Salisbury. He took no position on whether hazing had occurred, saying he wasn’t there so he had no way to know the truth. He said he canceled the $2 million pledge because of a longstanding complaint he has about universities: students are treated unfairly in disciplinary hearings; lawyers can’t represent them, and anything they say can be held against them later in criminal court.

  “What kind of Communist country are we running here?” he said. “That’s crazy. That’s a real bone I have to pick with Salisbury. I’ve told the kids candidly, if it was me, and I’d done something wrong and I was called before a judicial board, I wouldn’t go. You’re not going to get me to testify against myself.”

  Scarborough, a fraternity traditionalist who rails against the spoiled children of helicopter parents, would like to see the police, not colleges, punish hazers. “If I found a kid who I could prove beyond a shadow of a doubt was hazing, I would do everything I can to put him in jail,” he said. At the same time, Scarborough said colleges and fraternities have started to define hazing too broadly—for example, calling meal runs to McDonald’s acts of “personal servitude.” Like the SAE undergraduates of his generation who participated in the 1978 roundtable discussion, covered at length in the SAE magazine, he considered some sort of hazing inevitable. “Most of these chapters, whether anybody wants to admit it or not, there’s some—quote—hazing, whether it’s benign or its pretty darn serious,” he said. “That’s why part of me says you can’t outlaw some of this stuff.”

  IN THE FALL of 2013, when I first met Justin Stuart, he had already transferred to the University of Maryland, where its fraternity chapters had been doing some hazing of their own. Lambda Phi Epsilon had ordered a pledge to punch a wooden board sixty-four times until his knuckles bled and he fractured the bones in his hand, leaving him unable to drive or type his class assignments. The year before, a pledge at Omega Psi Phi arrived at an emergency room with his buttock muscles so damaged after paddling that a doctor described them as having the consistency of “black leather,” resembling third-degree burns. Stuart wouldn’t have known about these cases, part of a litany of fraternity hazing at the state’s public universities that was later uncovered by the Baltimore Sun. He was now a junior and no longer part of that world. He steered clear of fraternity row when he walked across the College Park campus, near Washington, DC, to the student union, which was also home to the university’s Department of Fraternity and Sorority Life. There, in the noisy food court, he recounted his hazing publicly for the first time.

  “It honestly reminded me of Guantánamo Bay,” he said. “It was almost like torture.”

  Like a police officer testifying on the stand, Stuart, who wore a golf cap from a trip to the Georgia Masters, had a quiet, flat, matter-of-fact way of speaking. His memory was detailed and consistent, both in our initial conversation, and throughout more than five hours of interviews then and later by phone. Stuart could corroborate his account with text messages and provided names of witnesses. It was clear to me why the campus police described him as “credible and truthful” in its report. Stuart’s account helped explain a mystery to outsiders: why pledges put up with hazing. Once it started, he said, he didn’t want to have suffered for nothing. It was the same reason that investors stick with losing stocks. In pledging, you’ve already sacrificed some of your dignity. You’ve already thrown up. You’ve been beaten. Do you want to give up now? Do you want to admit it was all a waste? “You feel like you have so much to lose—it’s worth staying,” Stuart said. “I thought it would pay off in the end.”

  Ultimately, Stuart left in part because he had no interest in abusing pledges when he became a full member. “I didn’t want to be known as the ultimate hazer,” he said. “It didn’t entice me. I didn’t want to do it after what happened to me.”

  The hazing at Salisbury changed the tenor of Stuart’s college experience. At the University of Maryland, he lived at home, commuted to the campus, and didn’t go out much on weekends. Still hoping for a financial career, he joined the investment club. Sometimes, though, he had trouble trusting other students and had flashbacks to his experience as an SAE pledge. “I have dreams of the basement sometimes,” he said. “I hear the yelling. It sounds like they’re about to attack me. Then I wake up from my nightmare.”

  3

  SEXUAL ASSAULT EXPECTED

  “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 guar
anteeing 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.”