Back at Baylor University (where he attended in the early eighties, but did not graduate), tea party Senate candidate Rand Paul was reportedly a member of an outlawed secret society, the NoZe Brotherhood, which, as one former member puts it, typically included “90 percent of the liberal thinkers” at the school. That’s not too surprising, really  libertarian ideology and liberal ideology overlap on many issues, and even if he was more liberal back then, plenty of people become more conservative as they grow older. What is surprising is what Paul did with his NoZe brothers, according to GQ.

The strangest episode of Paul’s time at Baylor occurred one afternoon in 1983 (although memories about all of these events are understandably a bit hazy, so the date might be slightly off), when he and a NoZe brother paid a visit to a female student who was one of Paul’s teammates on the Baylor swim team. According to this woman, who requested anonymity because of her current job as a clinical psychologist, “He and Randy came to my house, they knocked on my door, and then they blindfolded me, tied me up, and put me in their car. They took me to their apartment and tried to force me to take bong hits. They’d been smoking pot.” After the woman refused to smoke with them, Paul and his friend put her back in their car and drove to the countryside outside of Waco, where they stopped near a creek. “They told me their god was ‘Aqua Buddha’ and that I needed to bow down and worship him,” the woman recalls. “They blindfolded me and made me bow down to ‘Aqua Buddha’ in the creek. I had to say, ‘I worship you Aqua Buddha, I worship you.’ At Baylor, there were people actively going around trying to save you and we had to go to chapel, so worshiping idols was a big no-no.”



Just … wow. Kidnapping, drug use, sacrilege — how could the Paul campaign possibly explain all of this to its many conservative supporters?

When I asked [Paul campaign manager Jesse] Benton late last week if Paul remembered any of these episodes from his Baylor days, he replied in an email: “During his time at Baylor, Dr. Paul competed on the swim team and was an active member of Young Conservatives of Texas.”



Apparently, they’re still figuring that out.

GQ Exclusive: Rand Paul’s Kooky College Days (Hint: There’s a Secret Society Involved) [Wire/GQ]

Related: Which New York Politicians Have Smoked Pot, and How Embarrassed Are They About It?