Zoe’s relationships with the five SAE brothers described in the speech occurred from September 2013 to the following February. Her involvement with two of the men lasted from September to December, and the other three occurred in quick succession in January. She described these encounters as “consensual, casual relations.”

Following her involvement with the men, Zoe commented on some of their sexual performances in conversation with the fraternity president, a junior at the time. He was one of the five fraternity brothers with whom she had sexual relations, but she had come to regard him as a friend. Zoe said she felt they had come to trust each other. As they were both sharing details about their sex lives over the course of multiple conversations, Zoe told him that one brother climaxed quickly, another was enthusiastic about giving oral sex and a third enjoyed cuddling. He later passed along those comments to the group of the other four brothers, according to the University-Wide Committee on Sexual Misconduct panel’s report.

Zoe’s comments spread “like wildfire,” one of the chaplains later told an independent factfinder assigned to investigate the incident. “She had provided intimate and private details about these encounters to others,” he wrote in a statement to the UWC last April. “Our encounters had become public knowledge to many in the Yale community.” Embarrassed that multiple peers had teased them about their sexual performances, the chaplains decided to address the comments publicly. Their roast became their platform.

Inside the fraternity house, the chaplains spoke in mock Spanish and Arabic accents, introducing Zoe as someone who had engaged in sexual relations with five members of the fraternity. The names of those members were listed, followed by description of their sexual performances based on the comments allegedly made by Zoe. Some of the comments mentioned in the speech were fabricated, according to Zoe, including remarks about the pubic hair of one brother.

Though the brothers had previously gossiped about her ratings, many of the freshman pledges had not heard her name before, according to SAE brothers present. Meanwhile, some of the older members who knew her sat in the back, presiding over the soon-to-be new brothers lined up in the middle of the room. No one interrupted.

The speech was a “ridiculous five minutes,” the SAE president told the fact-finder. By the end of the night, SAE had initiated 22 new members.

THE RUMORS

Zoe went to Box 63 with some friends on the Friday night after initiation. It was Valentine’s Day. Undergraduates flooded the dark dance floor, clustering around the bar and waving credit cards to pay for beer and hard liquor served in plastic cups. Amid the crowd, a freshman SAE pledge slipped his arm around Zoe and went in for a kiss. According to the UWC’s report, she pushed him away, but he continued flirting: “I know you like SAE boys.”

Zoe withdrew from his embrace and rejoined her friends on the dance floor. But another group of young men approached her, dancing close to her and trying to touch her. “We know you like SAE boys,” at least one of them said before an older member of SAE told them to back off. She had never indicated interest in them.

Zoe was never meant to find out why she was suddenly attracting so much attention — chapter rituals are supposed to be secret. But, on Feb. 24, her roommate sat down on her bed to recount the rumors that had been swirling around campus — about her sex life and its role in the SAE initiation.

In that moment, however, Zoe did not grasp how those rumors would consume her life at Yale over the next year.

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.

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.

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.

The panel’s report is timestamped July 14. It concluded that the president and the two chaplains had violated Yale’s sexual misconduct policy by engaging in sexual harassment — the two chaplains in their speech and the president in his failure to stop it, as well as in his subsequent behavior. The president had impeded the investigation, and though he had not threatened Zoe, his remarks to her had the effect of perpetuating a hostile climate based on her gender, the panel found.

“In general, [the president’s] actions after the … event were focused on protecting … the fraternity and on shielding it from any responsibility for the speech in February rather than on stopping or repairing the damage caused by it,” the panel wrote in its report.

All three brothers were put on probation, which was noted on their academic records. The two chaplains, who graduated that spring, would receive their diplomas, but their probation would remain on their academic records. The panel recommended the president receive “training on leadership and sexual harassment.”

Further, the University was to implement sanctions against the fraternity as a whole. These included a ban on on-campus activities, a ban on communication via Yale email systems and bulletin boards and a prohibition on the use of the SAE name in connection with Yale for a period of two years, ending August 2016. The panel also recommended that the SAE national headquarters “take appropriate disciplinary action — beyond the action already taken by Yale — against the local chapter.”

The president and one of the chaplains filed appeals with Yale College Dean Jonathan Holloway, the final decision-maker in the case, protesting the UWC’s findings and requesting that he reduce the recommended sanctions. But Holloway endorsed the panel’s recommendations on July 22.

On July 30, Zoe was informed that the president had appealed Holloway’s decision to Provost Benjamin Polak. On Aug. 18, Polak rejected his appeal.

Meanwhile, SAE national headquarters did not receive notification of the incident until administrators contacted them in August 2014, roughly five months after Zoe filed the formal complaint, at which point they launched an investigation to learn more details about what may have happened, said Brandon Weghorst, a spokesman for SAE national. “We cannot validate what may have been said between various members or between members and nonmembers,” he wrote in an email. “Regardless, we absolutely expect our brothers to act as gentlemen at all times and do not condone demeaning or derogatory language. The headquarters imposed a number of sanctions on the chapter.” He did not respond to subsequent inquiries seeking specific details of the sanctions.

But as it would become clear in the fall semester, those measures — in addition to the sanctions imposed by the University — did not carry much weight. 

Hundreds of Yale students had received a Facebook invitation to the event reading, “après-ski / verb/ (Turkish: getting drunk before reading week, after skiing): going out, having a good time, dancing and socializing after skiing … Skiing experience optional, ski attire, required.” The Yale European Undergraduates, Yale Arab Student Association and the “brothers of SAE” were hosting, according to a screenshot of the event invitation. The event was typical frat bacchanalia, nothing out of the ordinary. SAE traditionally throws “Late Night” parties on Thursdays, offering beer from kegs and punch to anyone with a Yale ID. The event was later deleted from Facebook.

Administrators were unaware of the event at the time, only later learning of it when Zoe brought it to their attention as a violation of the terms of the University’s sanctions against SAE — they were co-hosting an event with Yale organizations, failing to comply with restrictions on using their name in conjunction with the Yale brand. SAE said they did not know it was a breach. “We were not aware it constituted a violation of the sanctions,” the brothers said in an emailed statement to the News. “The Apres Ski party was financed and planned entirely by the [Yale European Undergraduates]. It was merely held on our property.”

The News could not find evidence of any concrete measures taken by the University to monitor SAE’s compliance with the terms of their probation, which had minor effects on the everyday operations of the fraternity. “The punishment was a slap on the wrist,” said a student who was a brother at the time. Because SAE’s house is off-campus, the on-campus ban had virtually no impact, like imposing rules on residents of one state and expecting them to apply to residents across the border. SAE could advertise its functions via Facebook or Gmail rather than Yale email. On the day after the sanctions were handed down, some of the brothers created a map with locations of where SAE could host parties and events because they could not do so on Yale’s campus or Universityowned properties, according to two students who were SAE brothers at the time. “They were not accepting the spirit of the punishment,” a former brother said. “Just the letter of the punishment.”

Meanwhile, the administration tried to implement cultural reform within the fraternity to varying degrees of success, reflecting a history of fraught relations. Holloway said the administration has continuously questioned keeping Greek life as a whole — nine fraternities and three sororities — at arm’s length. “Some say we really need to strengthen our ties because then we can control them better,” he said in an interview about how the University interacts with Greek organizations. “Others say we don’t want this risk. This is out of control. They are a liability. I don’t think Yale has really made a firm commitment.” Indeed, Holloway said the power of the University to regulate an off-campus group with Yale affiliation, such as Greek organizations, is “limited.”

“But as individuals in the organization, they are still Yale students,” he added. “So if a Yale student is found in violation, we have the full power of the University.”

Hannah Peck DIV ’11, director of student affairs and Yale’s designated Greek life liaison, had engaged fraternity leadership in ongoing conversations throughout the fall 2014 semester, “trying to build trust amongst the organizations,” as Holloway explained. The brothers confirmed in an email that they “have been in constant contact with the administration, both to ensure that the sanctions are being followed and to assist … in moving past the incident of last spring.”

But the purpose of these discussions was not to emphasize SAE’s punishment; it was to ensure members were making strides in creating a more positive sexual environment. The intent was “educative,” as Holloway put it. With no clear sense of how violations would be punished, however, the fraternity was given little motivation to follow the letter of their restrictions. They pushed its limits. “It is an us-against-them mentality with the administration,” the former brother said.

When contacted for further comment about the University’s dealing in this specific case, Holloway said in an email that he “simply cannot comment on this now that your story has taken this turn.”

Some fraternity members attempted to lead an internal push for reform in the wake of the sanctions, which roiled the fraternity despite their limited effect on day-to-day operations. Some of the brothers learned only in the fall that the president at the time of the spring initiation had told Zoe to keep her head down and ride out the rumors. His stance did not reflect the views of the fraternity as a whole; rather, other members condemned how he had handled the conversation with her, according a student who was an SAE brother at the time.

Meanwhile, Zoe continued to push the administration to uphold, as well as to publicize, the terms of the sanctions against the fraternity. She corresponded with administrators on seven different email threads in the fall semester and met with University Title IX Coordinator and Deputy Provost Stephanie Spangler to address the aftermath of the hearing. In fact, it was only weeks after the hearing that Zoe suggested in a meeting with UWC chair David Post that SAE write an open letter to the student body apologizing for the incident of sexual misconduct.

But during the fall semester, administrators instead encouraged her to meet with Melanie Boyd, assistant dean of student affairs and the director of the Communication and Consent Educators, peer educators who runs workshops on sexual consent. As a result of conversations with Boyd, Zoe made a presentation to a group of CCEs explaining the process of filing a UWC complaint and describing the details of her story in confidence.

On Dec. 3, she pressed administrators to elaborate on their efforts to enforce the sanctions against SAE. “I strongly feel that my peers should know that the SAE suspension has been imposed, let alone what the fraternity members did to warrant such a punishment,” she wrote in an email to Post and Dean of Student Affairs Marichal Gentry.

She wrote again on Dec. 11, emphasizing a formal letter’s importance in informing the student body that the fraternity had been sanctioned for sexual misconduct. Post replied later that day: “We have not finalize [sic] the final wording but we will considered [sic] both a ‘violation of undergraduate regulations’ and ‘a violation of sexual misconduct policy’ … I understand your point of view and concerns but we have additional privacy concerns we have to balance.”

In further emails, administrators promised to send the letter at the beginning of the spring semester. It was on Feb. 13, 2015, that Holloway finally addressed the Yale community in an email, prefacing a letter of apology signed by “The Brothers of SAE.” A full year had passed since the SAE initiation event. Zoe had no advance warning and was shocked to find the letter in her email inbox when she awoke that morning.

Post offered this explanation of the decision to send a campuswide email: “At times, when the sanctions in a particular case affect the way that an individual or organization interacts with the community, the University may share information about those sanctions with the affected community.”

He added in reference to the revelation of details of a UWC case, “I am deeply disturbed by this breach of confidentiality. Confidentiality protects the parties and the process. Publishing the details of cases discourages reliance on the UWC and undermines the ability of the UWC to provide a fair and thorough review of very serious matters.”

Holloway’s campuswide email marked the first time the University had brought public attention to the case. The account included sparse information, as dictated by the University’s confidentiality requirement for UWC proceedings. According to the UWC’s statement on confidentiality, “The purpose of confidentiality is to encourage parties and witnesses to participate in UWC proceedings and share all the information they have to offer, which is essential to reaching a fair outcome.”

The message described the event as “a presentation that was found to be in violation of the University’s policy on sexual misconduct” and revealed that members had made “attempts to impede the investigation.” The brothers outlined their reform efforts: They had adjusted their new member initiation process to “more clearly reflect the values of our organization” and had initiated meetings with the CCEs. The brothers had received professional guidance on “promoting good citizenship and creating a more positive sexual climate.” They had used chapter funds to send three officers to national leadership training last fall. Finally, they had met with an institutional psychologist who emphasized culture change.

“We believe we have made significant progress in this area,” the brothers said in the statement emailed to the News.