On Feb. 26, Zoe texted the SAE president to ask to meet with him. At Wall Street Pizza, he recounted what occurred at the initiation. He had no role in the creation of the speech, nor did he approve it in advance, he told her. He downplayed its contents, saying the remarks about her were brief. The purpose of the speech was to poke fun at the brothers and be self-deprecating, not to publicly shame her, he said — reasoning that the chaplains later echoed in conversations with her.

The discussion inside the pizza joint turned to the president’s advice for her. When Zoe told him that her friends had urged her to alert University officials, the president warned her to lay low: bringing the event to the administration’s attention would hurt her already damaged reputation, as well as that of the fraternity. So, too, would continuing to drink and hook up tarnish her image on campus. She could expect phone calls for hookups in the middle of the night, but none to ask her out on a date, he told her. “I gave her my honest opinion and said that I thought that this would not be the best course of action,” the president wrote about the conversation in a statement to the UWC last April. “I did this in good faith, acting as a friend to whom she had come for advice … I in no way intended to threaten her.”

It was after this conversation that Zoe realized she had lost control of the situation.

“If I had found out about these boys talking about me and stuff that they had done with me and things that I had allegedly said about them in the comfort of their own homes, I would not have been surprised,’” she said. “Of course they’re going to talk about me. Girls talk about this all the time. Guys talk about this all the time. That in itself would not have bothered me.” The fact that this was an official initiation event in front of almost two dozen freshman boys, as well as many male classmates she considered friends, was what scared her.

Zoe struggled with the decision to file a complaint. She spoke with her sisters, several of her close friends and the dean of her residential college. “It occupied my mind, every single minute of the day,” she said. She suddenly had the feeling that everyone knew who she was and that they were talking about her. She was simultaneously disturbed by what they knew, but also anxious that all the gossip had twisted the truth of what had actually occurred.

Throughout the spring, she was acutely aware of encounters with SAE members around campus, doing her best to avoid the five men featured in the speech, including one who was in her residential college. She stopped going to classes and going out on weekends. She lost sight of her academic work.

She lost sleep. Her appetite seemed to diminish. She texted her sister in March: “I either report it and get blacklisted by SAE and have a lot of people hate me, or I do nothing and let them get away with it and have people judge me for letting them take advantage of me. It’s such a lose lose.”

But finally, she resolved not to take the president’s advice. She would make a complaint.

Zoe's complaint to the UWC ►



THE INVESTIGATION

On April 21, roughly nine weeks after the initiation event, Zoe filed a formal complaint with the UWC against the fraternity president and the two chaplains. She cited not only the pledge event itself, but also what she considered to be ensuing sexual harassment — from her runin with fraternity members at Box 63 to her conversation with the SAE president at Wall Street Pizza following the initiation. The UWC formally charged the members on April 25.

Over the course of one week, the News sought comment from the three brothers, but they did not respond. Yale SAE as an organization declined to comment on the events of initiation to abide by a confidentiality agreement governing UWC proceedings.

SAE president's statement, answering the complaint, to the UWC ►



According to UWC procedures, the committee responds to a formal complaint by requesting a report from an independent fact-finder and conducting at least one hearing. A five-person panel selected from within the UWC then judges whether or not the respondent has violated University policy. If the panel finds the respondent responsible, it prescribes punishments, which are subject to the approval and modifications of a “final decision-maker,” in this case the dean of Yale College.

Over the course of about a month, the independent factfinder, Miriam Berkman LAW ’82, interviewed Zoe, her friends, the three accused brothers and other members of the fraternity. As a supervisor at the Yale Child Study Center’s Trauma Section, Berkman is not formally independent from the University, as UWC regulations state factfinders must be.

Her investigation was impeded by SAE members’ repeated attempts to shape the account of the events she was seeking to retrace. According to the documents, the two chaplains claimed they had no electronic or paper access to the original speech to submit to Berkman, who then asked one of them to hand over his laptop to Yale Police to see if the document could be recovered from the hard drive. The chaplain replied that he could not do so — he was on a train to New York and flying out of the country the following morning.

The president also advised fraternity members about “sticking to the same story” when talking to Berkman to avoid putting the fraternity at risk, according to the panel report. He maintained that his comment was in reference to the chapter’s violation of SAE’s March 2014 national ban on pledging, but the UWC panel also wrote that it stemmed from an encouragement to lie to the fact-finder. The panel found that “fraternity members were likely to interpret [the president’s] statement as advice intended to dissuade them from being forthcoming and honest … as President of the fraternity, [he] failed to make it clear to members that they were free to cooperate with the UWC investigation and that doing so would not impact their standing in the fraternity.”

“Taken together, these passive refusals to participate in the UWC investigation process indicate at least that members of the fraternity are reluctant or afraid to talk about matters related to the activities of the fraternity,” Berkman stated in her June 11, 2014 report.