This article draws on the firsthand account of one former Chi Phi brother and is not representative of all fraternity members’ experiences. The article includes descriptions of hazing, physical and sexual abuse, substance abuse, and death by alcohol poisoning. 

George Desdunes, then a sophomore member of Sigma Alpha Epsilon (SAE), was taken to Cayuga Medical Center and pronounced dead several hours later. He died of acute alcohol poisoning.

Desdunes had been kidnapped by freshman pledges as part of a hazing ritual in which new members abducted an older fraternity brother. He was picked up in the early morning and driven to a townhouse, where he was made to answer trivia questions with a shot of vodka for each wrong answer. A fraternity member who was kidnapped alongside Desdunes recalled being fed eclectic foods, including strawberry syrup and hot sauce, and vomiting several times in a garbage pail. After passing out, Desdunes was taken back to the fraternity house and left on the couch. The cleaning staff found his body resting on its side to prevent him from choking on his own vomit. His blood alcohol level was about 0.40 that night, or five times the legal driving limit in New York state. 

Following Desdunes’ death, the Cornell administration withdrew recognition of SAE for a period of at least five years. The Interfraternity Council placed a temporary moratorium on all social events. A new “medical amnesty” protocol was passed to encourage fraternities to call for medical assistance without fear of repercussions. 

The Greek system lived on. 

Despite Desdunes’ death the previous year, there were few logistical barriers to Jared’s participation in spring semester rush. Several members of the golf team were Chi Phi brothers, so the fraternity seemed like a clear pathway towards community. “I just thought it was something I should do, and so I did it,” he recounted this fall. 

At the start of the pledging process, all pledges received binders full of materials related to Chi Phi history and the current brotherhood. The pledges were expected to memorize facts about Chi Phi, notable dates, names of historical fraternity brothers, every current brother’s name, major, and hometown, and more. 

Several times a week, the pledges were instructed to gather at the fraternity house. These meetings were, at first, jovial. The pledges were fed dinner and warmly welcomed to the fraternity. They were seated at a table in front of the older brothers, as if on display. The pledges would be quizzed on their memorization “homework” throughout the night, in a manner similar to boot camp; they were expected to stand at attention and start and end every answer with “sir.” Correct answers earned praise and incorrect answers were lightheartedly demeaned. 

Then, around the second or third week, punishments were introduced. Every wrong answer conferred push-ups to be performed collectively at the end of the night. This became a recurring, intensifying burden; the pledges would line up in the great room of the house while an older fraternity member yelled like a drill sergeant, counting out each repetition. The “wrong answers” were arbitrary; the fraternity members knew in advance how many push-ups they wanted the pledges to do each night. 

A riddle was introduced early in the semester: What is the iota? The new members were told that pledging would be over when the riddle was solved. The older brothers gave various, sporadic hints. Pledging became a game that Jared and his peers believed they could win. The rules, however, were about to change.

On one late night, after a particularly grueling round of push-ups, Jared was standing silently at attention when an older fraternity brother approached him. This man was consistently, belligerently inebriated; tonight was no exception. He was someone Jared described as a “drunken old man” at only twenty years old. “I kind of stared straight through him with this little smirk probably on my face, a little smile, and he hated it,” Jared recalled. 

The brother became enraged. In front of forty or fifty people, he unloaded a profusion of verbal abuse, incoherent insults, “every bad thing you could imagine.” He screamed at the top of his lungs; his voice echoed against the walls of the room. He got so close to Jared that his spit flew on his face.

“You worthless piece of shit, sitting there with your stupid shit-eating grin…you fucking piece of shit! I will fucking kill you! I will kill you! I will fucking end your life!”

The abuse continued for twenty or thirty minutes, even after another fraternity brother told the man to back down. The entire room stood by and watched.

“I [thought] about punching him, but I sort of couldn't—I couldn't do that,” Jared admitted. His body was paralyzed. He reckoned his nervous system had been numbed by the fear, a physiological fight-or-flight response. 

Later, on the 2:00 a.m. trudge home in the cold, other pledges told Jared that the man’s behavior was totally uncalled for. Some insisted that they were moments away from stepping in on his behalf. 

As Jared recalled, “It’s a funny thing, when you’re in that sort of group mind. You don’t have your free will the same way that you normally would,” he said. “If everyone in the group mind has agreed that this is a rule, that you don’t talk back, [then] you don’t talk back. You don’t have that agency anymore. I hate to say it, but it’s kind of the way crowds work.”

“I just felt really bad about the whole thing, and I don't know when—if or when I cried about it—but…at a certain point, you feel like crying. It's just so hurtful.”

He continued, “I still wanted to come back. I wanted to be a part of the group. My parents had gotten divorced when I was in high school, and I was looking for makeshift families.” Fraternity brotherhood had seemed, literally by name, like a viable family. But the dream was getting blurrier. 

The final week, referred to as “hell week”, escalated the existing program to a new fervor. Pledges were expected at the house around the clock for manual labor, lineups, quizzes, check-ins, field trips, and other rituals. In the final few days, Jared recalled being at the house for seventy-two hours straight. The situation was, by design, profoundly uncomfortable, overwhelming, and all-consuming. 

A slice of time might look like a quiz, followed by punishment of hundreds of push-ups, then a field trip to a nearby gorge, then a strange, brief sleeping arrangement, then an early morning wake-up call followed by breakfast, then a performance where pledges would put on costumes and behave like characters in a play, then a break to smoke weed and “relax”, then a session of manual labor, then a workout, then drinking, and on and on and on—for dozens of hours.

Pledges were forced to sleep on the floor. Blaring loud music would sporadically disrupt their rest. “Time” by Pink Floyd was repeatedly used to wake the pledges in the early morning—a shame, Jared noted, because it ruined his enjoyment of the song for several years. 

Once, pledges were blindfolded and driven to a gorge, where they had to walk holding the shoulders of an older brother at what they thought was the edge of a chasm. The older members would suddenly, loudly exclaim in panic, “You’re about to fall, whoa, don’t slip, don’t move!” as they guided the younger pledges down the path. 

When the blindfolds were removed, the pledges realized they had been walking along a one-foot-tall ledge the whole time. It did not soothe Jared’s feeling that he was about to die. 

On the final day, pledges underwent an hours-long circuit of lifting weights and moving rocks up and down a hill, a program designed to spend their bodies completely. Almost completely deprived of food and water for twenty-four hours, the exhaustion induced delirium. At one point, Jared was offered a single green bean by an older fraternity member; he said it was the best green bean he had ever eaten in his life. 

“The only way you can survive is by holding on to this idea that this is meaningful, that you're having fun, it's all in jest. Like, yeah, nobody actually dislikes you. It's just that they really need you to do this slave labor for them, for no reason.”

In the final hours, the pledges were gathered into a small, pitch-black cellar room. With The Beatles’ “Revolution 9” playing on loop, distorted music blurred any sense of time; loud thuds could be heard resounding from above. One by one, they were called upstairs. 

“I was the last one,” Jared recalled, “which tells you that they thought I would be the easiest to break.” He was blindfolded and brought upstairs, disoriented, to a doorway. 

Hands shoved him from behind onto a mattress, from which he was flung up and down vigorously. 

“That's where they then took this ‘mung’....which was this mixture of oatmeal, vinegar, hot sauce, and a lot of spicy cayenne pepper. And they just shoved it down my pants, and really rubbed it in. I mean, they rubbed it all in.”

The ‘mung’ was slathered on his genitals for several seconds. It burned, very badly. Jared began screaming.

He was immediately, vehemently shushed. The fraternity could not afford a noise complaint or any police attention to their house. The sight would get the chapter shut down: dozens of young men, blindfolded, haggard, trapped in a house drenched with filth, pungent with the scent of vinegar and hot sauce. 

The brothers handed him a jug of milk to wash off his genitals, but the hurt persisted. The pain was agonizing. 

Jared was commanded to get on his elbows and knees. Still blindfolded, he was made to crawl up and down stairs until bruises climbed up his legs and arms. In his state of deprivation and exhaustion, the experience was reality-altering, practically psychedelic. 

At one point, he was brought into a small room and the blindfold was removed. Goggles smudged with oil were placed over his eyes, so he had a blurry view of the scene before him. A fraternity member sat in the room surrounded by candles, playing a shaman-like character: “What is the iota?” he asked, in a sing-song voice. 

Jared could only guess. “The iota is… brotherhood?”

“Wrong, wrong, wrong! Go and find two coins, then come back!”

The scenario played out repeatedly; Jared was re-blindfolded and forced on his hands and knees to continue searching for “coins” throughout the house, then would return to offer up an answer to the “shaman”, then would be rebuffed and return to searching, urged on by many voices. His limbs ached. His stomach was empty; his throat parched; his body spent from labor and deprived of sleep; his nervous system sputtering; his mind grasping for an answer to the riddle that he hoped would end the ordeal. 

“I didn’t even believe that I was in that house anymore,” he recalled. “I was in hell. I was in a ring of hell. It’s just total mind control.”

Eventually, he stopped moving. The older brothers banged sticks and roared for him to keep going. 

Jared collapsed and did not get up. 

He was picked up and placed into an open-top coffin. It was lowered through the floor into a secret room—a cellar ringed with benches with Greek letters on the wall. The other pledges were waiting.

The fraternity members pulled Jared out of the coffin, handed him a Dixie cup of champagne, and welcomed him to the Xi Chapter of the Chi Phi Fraternity at Cornell University. And that was all. 

He was made to clean himself, somewhat, and then sent back to North Campus to go to bed. It was a weekend night. “You’ve got to walk home and get back to your dorm, and your body is completely tattered, broken,” he said. “Your mind is scrambled eggs, and you’ve got to get up and go to a dining hall. And then on Monday you [have] classes.”

Jared’s golf game collapsed. Over spring break, the golf team went to Florida for a tournament; at one point during a round, Jared remembered locking eyes with his captain, a senior member of Chi Phi. He was met with a glazed stare. “He looked at me in such a way that was to suggest, you know, we're not going to talk about it,” Jared recalled. “We're going to pretend that there's nothing going on between us.”

At this moment, on a beautiful course, at an expensive, prestigious tournament, Jared forgot how to play. He couldn’t feel his arms or his body. He could not hit the ball. 

He left the tournament humiliated. In retrospect, “I think if [my captain] had pulled me aside and said, ‘Hey man, you know, all that fraternity stuff, it's not that important. This is more important, this is a varsity sport…Just go out there and play, you know how to play.’ That would have gone a really long way.

But he never said anything like that.”

Jared did not make the golf team again in his sophomore fall. 

He began skipping classes that semester, and did not stop in the following years; for the entirety of his Cornell experience, he estimated having missed 30-50% of his classes. Pursuing a lifelong interest in math, he enrolled in a linear algebra course that semester. When he received a poor (but passable) grade, he abandoned the math track altogether. In retrospect, “[that] was a bad decision. It stunted a form of intellectual development that I had been very passionate about, and had been very good at, for all of my childhood. It was something central to my identity.”

As is standard in Cornell’s Greek system, Jared lived in the fraternity house his sophomore year. Several of his housemates were drug dealers; Jared had access to mushrooms, acid, Adderall, painkillers, and more within the walls of his own home. In his view, drugs helped fraternity brothers “deny [their] own emotional truths”.

“[Through hazing], they're training you at a more unconscious level how to act, and the real lesson is that you are disempowered. You do not have power here. You cannot stand up for yourself. You need the other guys to validate you and to allow you to exist…Addiction is one of the only ways that guys and men know how to deal with that situation.”

He continued: “You're not going to discuss that you feel hurt. You're not going to talk about it….But you're going to feel it, and you're going to have to suppress it….and it's helpful to drink, or it's helpful to smoke weed, or it's helpful to do other drugs because then you can feel good again.”

Starting his freshman year, and continuing for over a decade afterwards, Jared battled addiction in various forms, including near-constant marijuana use, as well as cigarettes and psychedelics. “I said yes to everything. That was an attempt to not feel that pain, and it didn't work.”

The fraternity threw parties regularly, where they accommodated their guests with a spacious dance floor, raucous music, and an abundance of alcohol. The expectation was to drink heavily and get laid. “Sexual conquest is glory,” Jared explained. “You're having parties, and the girls are there, and it's very obvious what everyone wants.”

Sexual misconduct was not overt, but it could often be assumed. One gawky older fraternity member would always be seen, at the end of the night, grinding with the most drunk girl at the party. Sometimes he would leave with her. He was an accepted fixture of the space.

Jared described his experience as part of a cycle of violence. “It’s through initiation rites that ritually disempower boys—younger men by older men—and it traps them into shame and silence, where they don't want to talk about it,” he explained. “That in turn enables violence against others, because you're disconnected from your emotions, and that makes you violent. It makes you prone to addiction, and one way that some men handle it is to then enact that same treatment on others…and women are of course, within the male social hierarchy, lower than all other men.”

“Initiation rites are a big part of what [keeps] that whole system running generation after generation,” he continued. “I think the frat culture is one of the most concentrated distillations of this kind of culture that you can find anywhere in society.”

When he was diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder in his early thirties, Jared was compelled to quit drinking and smoking. He switched career paths and found a job in nuclear energy. “Getting sober helped. Finding a purpose in life helped,” he said.

“I have to still keep breaking the cycle, and still keep coming to terms with the way I thought about women, or the way I thought about men, or the way I thought about myself,” he reflected. “I’m very much still in that journey.”

He admitted, “There’s still a lot of things I’m not happy with myself about, but at least I’ve started to gain some tools…everything from meditation, reading books, therapy, exercise, having a good set of family members and friends who support you is all really important.”

“The opposite of this kind of numbness or depression is connection. That’s the thing that can pull us out of it: connection to others.”

“Think of the Greek system as industrial farming…it's a monoculture. And what I'm proposing is stop the monoculture, but then put fertilizer in the ground, give nutrients, offer students the ability to do all these different kinds of growth. There will be many different types of new social scenes that will grow in the void of the Greeks, and that would be phenomenal,” he said.

Since 2011, approximately 5,000 young men have joined IFC fraternities at Cornell. Many have gone on to do terrible harm to others; many have likely experienced abuse themselves; many would view themselves as perfectly fine. But most, unlike Jared, will never talk about what they experienced. 

We don’t know what George Desdunes would say about his time in a Cornell fraternity; he is no longer alive to tell his story. He died after he was forced to drink a lethal amount of alcohol by his own brotherhood. His unresponsive body was left unattended for a cleaning crew to discover. 

Several years ago, Jared found the fraternity experience clarified in I Don’t Want To Talk About It, by Terrence Real, which discusses masculine socialization and the path to healing. As Real asserts, when a man is humiliated and disempowered by other men, as a normalized ritual of manhood, he is forced to defend against his own vulnerability through assertions of aggression, superiority, or control. In doing so, he becomes disconnected from the emotional reality of himself and others. Disconnection feeds addiction, depression, and violence. This behavior is reproduced across generations; within a fraternity, it is institutionalized. 

Regarding the male cycle of violence, Real writes, “We either face it, or we leverage our children with it.” ♦

Read Jared’s recent account in The Cornell Daily Sun.