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 aske
d 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.”
“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.”
&nbs
p; 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.”
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