Penn State Whistleblower Claims Frat Put Him Through Sick Hazing Rituals
On the same day that 38 members of Penn State’s Kappa Delta Rho were expelled from the fraternity over a private Facebook group where they traded secretly-snapped photos of nude women, the member who blew the whistle on the group filed suit against KDR for hazing.
The Facebook group “2.0”— which featured “regular posts ... of photos that were embarrassing to women, including the aforementioned photos of unconscious or sleeping subjects,” according to the university—had 144 members. According to court documents, one member of the frat reported the group to police and let them use his Facebook account to investigate it.
As a result, the university and the frat’s national office agreed in March to shut the offending chapter down for 3 years, followed by an announcement Monday stripping 38 of the participants of their KDR memberships.
The whistleblower, James Vivenzio, announced in a press conference with his lawyer that he’s now suing KDR over a slew of horrifying alleged hazing practices, and suing Penn State for taking no steps to rein the frat in after he first came forward in August 2014.
Vivenzio, who is no longer enrolled in school, says he’s now suffering from PTSD and anxiety as a result of his experiences with the fraternity.
His complaint claims he and other KDR pledges were forced to endure “‘line ups,’ during which pledges were called to line up in the basement of the fraternity house, often in the middle of the night, and then to perform a number of ‘ritual’ activities, including: drinking large quantities of liquor while performing wall sits and push ups until passing out; force-fed drinking from a bucket filled with a concoction of hot sauce, liquor, cat food, urine, and other liquid and semi-solid ingredients, the smell of which was often enough to induce vomiting.”
Vivenzio also accuses the fraternity of operating like a gang— “obtaining some of its funding by converting the pre-paid food plans of its pledges and confiscating and selling their prescription drugs. These funds were then used to pay for countless socials, presocials and parties at the fraternity house at which underage students were plied with alcohol and, in some cases, with drugs to facilitate sexual assault and abuse.”
“I hope nobody gets in trouble because nobody did anything worth getting in trouble over,” an anonymous, moronic member of Penn State KDR told Philadelphia magazine in March.
[Photo: AP Images]