October 20th — The Email
That night, each member of the house left chapter with their own complicated set of emotions: anger, disgust, dissapointment. At the time, chapter adjourned with information about next steps. Title IX was to conduct an internal investigation and reach out to individuals who had been at the house over the weekend. Then, that night, DPS sent a campus-wide email.
I left the meeting for a soccer game, and literally as I’m stepping on, I get a campus-wide DPS email stating there was (1) a sexual assault at Sigma Nu, and (2) there were multiple, apparently 7, reports of drugging and drug related sexual assaults at Sigma Nu. That is when the world flipped upside down.
We go back to the house. Yeah. Do you remember what it was like at the house? Oh, it was like, I don’t even… It was like despair. It was like a… Like a… like a funeral almost like it was all melon like it was just melancholy all around like i remember they tried to have a chapter meeting and you and i were. I don’t remember exactly who else was there but it was like not a large group of us but it was just like silent and no one was saying anything everyone was just sad because i think at that point we realized this is probably like whatever we had like as a brotherhood fraternity this is probably the end of it.
Here is how I would describe the setting of the house: a bunch of kids walking circles in shock, not knowing what to do, and calling their parents for help.
The Sigma Nu fraternity house was in a quiet chaos. There was the sound of a few panicked individuals scrambling to convince Schiff to give them access to the instagram, as members were being doxxed. Many of those who lived in the house were scrambling to pack while on the phone with their parents. No one spoke about it. It felt like there wasn’t anything to say then.
“I thought I associated with rapists, and I didn’t really know how to process it.”
Personally, I too was in shock that night. The first emotion didn’t break through until late that night with XXXX. Like most of the emotions from the past few days, it isn’t easy to define. It was mostly a deep internal pain. Pain that, considering the news of the night, I had been friends with potentially one or more rapists. Pain that I was associated with men who caused the worst days of someones life. Pain that I know greek life was a broke institution, but I was so selfish and insecure that I participated nonetheless. Pain that I thought sigma nu was different yet clearly I was so wrong that I don’t know when I can trust my moral compass again.
