Rand Paul's Wacky College Days of Kidnapping, Pot, and Paganism
Kentucky Senate candidate Rand Paul — the one who's scared of Meet the Press — had such an exciting college experience. Once, he kidnapped a lady and forced her to take "bong hits" and worship a water god. Kids!
Paul, who's largely ignored national media after making stupid remarks everyday for a week in the wake of his Republican primary win, is the subject of a brief GQ profile on his college days at Baylor University. (Rand Paul managed to get into Duke Medical School without completing his bachelor's degree at Baylor, by the way. Does that make him the smartest man alive?)
He was a member of an elite society called the NoZe Brotherhood, which lampooned the school's religiosity with a variety of silly, harmless pranks, such as kidnapping ladies.
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."
Nearly 30 years later, the woman is still trying to make sense of that afternoon. "They never hurt me, they never did anything wrong, but the whole thing was kind of sadistic. They were messing with my mind. It was some kind of joke." She hadn't actually realized that Paul wound up leaving Baylor early. "I just know I never saw Randy after that-for understandable reasons, I think."
GQ asked the Rand Paul campaign about this anecdote, and they offered a useless response.
When I asked [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.
But how many ladies did the Young Conservatives of Texas kidnap during Paul's tenure?
(For the inverse of this story, in which a conservative politician-in-waiting college student kidnaps a lady in order to celebrate Christianity, do check out the tale of Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal performing an exorcism.)
[Image via AP]