More than 25 years later, Hugin’s association with the club has come under scrutiny as he takes on Menendez. | Alex Wong/Getty Images Menendez jumps on Hugin’s past opposition to allowing women, gays into elite Princeton club

When New Jersey Republican Senate nominee Bob Hugin was a senior at Princeton University, he made it clear that gay students weren’t welcome at the Tiger Inn, the elite eating club he led as president.

If a member of the club was found to be gay, a 21-year-old Hugin told the Central Jersey Home News in 1976, “he wouldn’t last long,” according to an article circulated Friday by the campaign of Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.).


"I'm proud to say that my views are a lot different than they were 40 years ago. On this issue I was probably more influenced by my kids than anything else. They had insight at a very early age on the issues of equality and fairness that made me re-evaluate the way I saw the world,” Hugin said in a statement to POLITICO on Friday. “Personal growth should be seen as a strength, and more elected officials should embrace and be open to discussing it in their public lives. As Senator, I will be a leader on issues of equality from day one."

But Hugin’s association with the Tiger Inn — one of the oldest and most prominent “eating clubs” at Princeton, which for over a century have been part of the university’s social scene — didn’t end when he graduated. He took a leadership role on its alumni board and in the early 1990s, when he was in his late 30s, fought a woman’s 13-year attempt to make the all-male club co-ed in state and federal court.

After settling the case in 1992 — a year after the club finally admitted women — Hugin was quoted accusing the plaintiff, Sally Frank, of “politically correct fascism“ in a Philadelphia Inquirer article.

More than 25 years later, Hugin’s association with the club has come under scrutiny as he takes on Menendez — a two term Democrat who just survived a corruption trial over his relationship with convicted Medicaid fraudster Salomon Melgen.

Hugin on Thursday sought to head off criticism over his role at the club during a roundtable discussion on women in the workforce — hours after, it turned out, a reporter had asked him about the controversy, and as it was clear that Menendez’s campaign had dug up the information.

“Everyone evolves over time. I view many things differently today than I did 25 years ago,” Hugin said in a statement released Thursday night. “The Tiger Inn becoming co-ed was a very positive development for the organization and has strengthened it on every level. The decision, made by the undergraduate members, to admit women back in the early 90’s was without question the right thing to do. Personally, I wish I had taken a leadership role in making it happen sooner.”

Hugin has spent millions slamming Menendez over the Melgen case and the Senate Ethics Committee’s finding that Menendez broke Senate rules and federal law. The Menendez campaign has already fought back on one front, highlighting Hugin’s record as the top executive of the pharmaceutical company Celgene as it dramatically raised prices on a cancer drug.

Now Hugin’s association with the Tiger Inn has opened up a new front for Menendez to attack as the race heats up. While Hugin said he regretted not taking a leadership role in allowing women into the club, he did not mention that he took a leadership role fighting against it. The case had gone on for 13 years — all the way up to the New Jersey Supreme Court. Even after the club finally admitted women in 1991, it filed a federal lawsuit to preserve, as Hugin put it at the time, "the right to determine our own membership."

It’s a potentially politically potent line of attack for Menendez, especially as Hugin seeks distance from President Donald Trump — for whom he served as a delegate at the 2016 Republican National Convention, after Trump’s own comments boasting of groping women were leaked.

“This wasn't youthful naïveté. Hugin was in his late 30's and married for five years at the time. Nothing about his disdain for women seems to have changed,” Menendez campaign Chairman Michael Soliman said of Hugin’s fight against allowing women into the club. “Since then, he's given hundreds of thousands to candidates who have fought to roll back women's rights, he supports extreme Supreme Court justices who would reverse Roe v. Wade, and he was a delegate for a presidential candidate who bragged about sexually assaulting women.”

Menendez, as a member of the House in 1996, voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, which denied federal benefits to gay couples. He announced his support to repeal it in 2011. Menendez, however, has touted his work in New Jersey’s Legislature to pass a bias crimes law that included sexual orientation.

Hugin’s comments about gays not being welcome at the eating club came during a fractious time at the university over gay rights. The newspaper article in which Hugin made the remarks tells of how students from the Gay Alliance of Princeton hung a banner with their organization’s name on it hoping “to lead to a greater understanding of gay rights — instead they got eggs, rocks and stink bombs,” the article says.

Hugin told the newspaper at the time that the Tiger Inn was circulating a petition urging the student government to rescind a resolution that called for the university to include “sexual or affectional preference” in its official non-discrimination policy. Hugin instead called for the university to hold a referendum on “something as controversial as this.”

“Bob Hugin was in a position to show real leadership on advancing the causes of women and the LGBTQ community and failed, instead perpetuating a culture of discrimination and hate,” Soliman said. “Bob Hugin can’t erase his past. He is a disgrace and unfit to represent New Jersey and all its vibrant diversity.”

Princeton’s eating clubs aren’t just where most of the university’s juniors and seniors take meals, according to Ben Dworkin, director of the Institute for Public Policy at Rowan University. Dworkin, a Princeton graduate, was a member of a co-ed eating club, Tower Club, in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

“Think of them as co-ed fraternities. A handful, generally just the elected leadership, will live there. And they are places where collections of student members will host parties and have their meals and generally be their hangout,” Dworkin said.

Dworkin said that it’s important to put Hugin’s comments — both as a man in his late 30s and a college senior in his early 20s — in the context of the times.

“The 1990s were still very different. We didn’t have bullying laws. We have changed as a society a lot since then,” he said.

But it’s still politically damaging, Dworkin said. And he doesn’t think voters will cut Hugin more slack for what he said in his early 20s than what he said in his late 30s.

“All that having been said, placing it in context of the time, this is obviously a negative for Hugin because it’s going to feed a narrative from his opponents that he is out of the mainstream and that he is not representative of where America is today,” he said.

Hugin has retained connections to Princeton’s eating clubs culture. In 2011, his family’s charitable foundation donated $513,315 to the Princeton Prospect Foundation, whose stated mission is to "stimulate and encourage the love of learning and pursuit of knowledge” at the clubs. In 2015, when Hugin was a trustee of the Princeton Prospect Foundation, The Daily Princetonian outlined how even though the IRS audited the foundation and “put in place tailored regulations to explicitly prevent the disbursement of funds for non-educational purposes,” the charity “aggressively interpreted the regulations” and “routinely funded the construction of social spaces, even though those are specifically barred by its agreement with the IRS.”