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Hazing News

JMU fraternities have been involved historically in alleged atrocious behaviors and death of Alpha Phi Marisa Curlen

According to JMU’s list of unrecognized fraternities, the sub-rosa chapter involving the deaths of a rushee and two members in 2023 was known under these names at times: List of Unrecognized Organizations: Delta Chi (Also known as: Pi Beta Chi, PBX, Crosskeys Society) – Lost recognition in Fall 2013 due to hazing (forced calisthenics and underage drinking)
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Greek life began at Madison College with the addition of Sigma Sigma Sigma in 1939. Madison College in Harrisonburg, Virginia became James Madison University (JMU) on July 1, 1977. Virginia Governor Mills E. Godwin signed the bill changing the name on March 22, 1977.
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The attached hazing complaint in 2002 was dismissed and was on my list as an outrage for its dropping in 2002–HN
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This JMU Alpa Phi sorority MEMBER death was termed alcohol poisoning but not ruled hazing in 2015: HARRISONBURG, Va. — The death of 20-year-old James Madison University student Marisa Curlen has stunned a New York community who has lost three students from its 2013 class.
Curlen was found dead in her dorm room in Harrisonburg early Friday morning. An autopsy was pending on Friday night, but the cause appeared to be alcohol poisoning, reported WCBS.
“Preliminary investigation indicates no suspicious circumstances or foul play. The investigation is pending per review from the medical examiner,” Harrisonburg Police Department Lt. Roger Knott. The university has not released an official statement about her death.
Curlen was a sophomore and a member of the Alpha Phi chapter. The sorority posted a picture on Instagram mourning the loss of a sorority sister.
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Sigma Chi at JMU was investigated in 2014:
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What JMU’s Sarah Butters Wants Other Women to Know about “Expulsion After Graduation”
Published
Aug 13, 2014
By
NO MORE
What JMU’s Sarah Butters Wants Other Women to Know about “Expulsion After Graduation”
It was an unfathomably lenient decision: In June, Virginia’s James Madison University punished three Sigma Chi fraternity members for sexually assaulting a female student on spring break by banning them from campus—after graduation.
Two of the attackers could graduate on time; the other would stay on campus for another year until earning his diploma.
Really?
The pathetic punishment crystallized the frustration felt by so many victims of campus rape: Why even bother coming forward? News of the punishment, or lack thereof, went viral. Even Jon Stewart mocked the story.
But there’s a victim behind the headlines and jokes: Sarah Butters. Butters, who’s pursuing her undergraduate degree elsewhere—“I’m just not proud to have a James Madison diploma,” she says—asked to share her side of the story with NO MORE.
As Told to NO MORE
I went on spring break in 2013 with a large portion of my school to Panama City. Everyone there was there was from Greek life. My parents’ big thing was, “Don’t go with someone you don’t know,” but I knew everyone there.
We were drinking on the beach. I was with friends, and at some point I blacked out. I ended up back at the condos we were renting with my friends.
Over the next few days, I heard rumors about a video circulating. Friends were telling me, “You need to say something to these guys.” I immediately went up to one of the guys who I was closest to and asked him, “Do you have a video of me?” I was wondering what I could have done.
photo1He told me that there wasn’t a video. He lied to my face, but I believed him. But later, one of the guys showed it to one of my friends and said: “I could ruin her life with this.”
Friends were telling me what to do: I should press charges; I should just make it go away. I was hearing so many opinions and I couldn’t form my own.
Meanwhile, friends had gotten hold of the video. I was concerned, but I also didn’t want to watch it yet. I was too nervous and helpless. I was dating one of the guys in their frat—I was so close to them.
Two weeks after spring break, I finally sent the video to my best friend, who went to Radford. I needed an outsider to watch it, someone who knew me well. She saw it, and she flipped out. “This looks like what happens before a rape,” she told me. I watched it that night. It was a 90-second video. I was in a bathroom, leaning against a wall, and three guys were groping me, pulling me onto their lap. I kept trying to put my top back on and they’d knock it out of my hand, saying, “You look great.” They were grabbing my breasts, touching me.
I have a scar above my bikini line from an ovarian cyst, and one of the guys kept trying to grab my bikini bottoms to see it. When he tried to do that, I let out a yell. It was such a disturbing yell.
The morning after I watched it, I woke up to a text from one of the guys, saying, “Hey, we didn’t mean for this to be a problem. We’re not sending it around. We can meet up and talk about it.”
I met with them, with my roommate, at my house. I wanted to be in my comfort zone. I get so mad at myself now that I let them in.
They said, “This is an inconvenience for all of us.”
I’ll always remember that. It was such an insincere apology.
I was told by JMU’s judicial affairs office that the common punishment for this kind of harassment is suspension. I was told that it’s very rare for someone to get expelled. I didn’t know what to do—I didn’t want to put myself through the misery of taking action. What if I lost? But I was told, if the judicial board had the video and watched it and could tell who was in it, they’d move forward anyway. So I bought a flash drive and handed them the video. They said they’d review it.
I had a really rough summer emotionally. My grades slipped. I got free counseling at JMU, but it didn’t help.
I was venting with my dad about it a lot. He’s a police officer and he contacted JMU’s director of judicial affairs, Josh Bacon. Bacon said he couldn’t tell if what happened in the video was consensual or not. That was really discouraging. JMU had been my dream school since eighth grade. I trusted them. This is where I felt safe.
I felt I had the short end of the stick. I filed a formal complaint in January 2014. It took JMU over a month to schedule hearings. Once the process started, the guys couldn’t talk to me. If I saw them on campus, it ruined my whole day. It was affecting my whole life, but not theirs at all.
There was a separate trial with each of the three guys. I had to be in the same room during it. It was so disturbing. After the third trial, Josh Bacon said that he’d never seen a case so serious. He told me that he wanted to propose an “abnormal” idea—expulsion after graduation—because they’d just appeal any other punishment, and graduation was coming up anyway. I just started bawling when I heard that. It was not OK. Who would punish them? Who would even know if they were on campus? What if they were tailgating? Or at a reunion? I was told that I’d have to identify them and tell campus police. If they recognized them, they’d be escorted out.
But the burden to identify them was on me. I was devastated.
Bacon went ahead with the expulsion punishment anyway. I read the student handbook; this wasn’t what was supposed to happen. The judicial board had caught them in lies—one guy said he hadn’t grabbed my bikini when clearly he did on the video—it was such crap.
The guys changed their attitude when expulsion was presented. They said they’d earned their diploma and paid for it. They were embarrassed not to be able to bring their kids back to their alma mater.
A local reporter covered my story; it aired locally that June. I didn’t expect it to blow up nationally. I thought it would draw attention to the area but not nationally. The Huffington Post wrote a really fair story about it after that.photo4
When you hear about sexual assault, it’s only recent that the term is “survivor.” It used to be “victim.” I felt like a victim. I felt I never got closure. I never got to move on. But I also got support—from other people who saw the stories, from my sorority who told me how strong I was. My Facebook blew up. Twitter blew up with #standwithbutters. I hadn’t wanted to show myself in these stories, but then I realized if it would help someone else to put a face with the story, I wanted to do it. It helps for people not to read a generic story, but to see who I am.
I filed a federal civil rights violation complaint with the school. That process is going through now. It’s a drawn-out process, but I did it because I don’t want another girl to go through this. If my case was the most serious they’d seen, and I had video evidence, and they still didn’t even get suspended—what would happen to someone else? How could anyone else feel comfortable coming forward?
As for where I am now, I withdrew from JMU. Whenever I used to see a JMU sticker, my heart got happy. But I had to break up with my school.
I’m taking classes at a community college now. I love working with kids, and I want to be a teacher. I’ve always worked to put myself through school, so I need to take one step at a time.
But I’m finding myself through all this. When I saw the NO MORE PSAs, I recognized all the excuses: “She was asking for it. She was drunk.” So I wanted to share my story here.
These are not excuses. I want other women to know—you cannot be bullied into silence.
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James Madison University faces a federal lawsuit due to its unusual punishment of “expulsion after graduation” for three students it deemed to have sexually assaulted a female undergraduate in 2014.
As previously reported by The Huffington Post, JMU found three men responsible for the sexual assault and harassment of Sarah Butters during spring break in 2013, and declared that the students would be punished by not being allowed back on campus after they had graduated.
Jay Kyle Dertzbaugh, Michael Joseph Lunney Jr. and Nicholas John Scallion, who at the time were members of the Sigma Chi fraternity, filmed themselves taking turns groping and fondling Butters and circulated the video to other students on JMU’s campus, according to the suit and legal documents and correspondence Butters provided to HuffPost.
Butters filed a federal complaint against the university in 2014, prompting the Education Department to open an investigation into how the school handles sexual violence. The university said that until now, federal privacy law prevented it from giving its side of the story.
“Now that the plaintiff has filed a civil lawsuit, the university will be at liberty to share the facts and circumstances in the case through the normal channels of litigation in due course,” JMU said Friday in a statement. “As the university already stated, rest assured that as this process unfolds and is resolved, you will see that JMU handles such serious matters with integrity and compassion.”
The university has not made any apology for the punishment that prompted outrage among many in the community. The school has also not elaborated on how it came up with the sanction, except to say it follows guidance from the Association for Student Conduct Administrators, a higher education professionals group that many schools turn to in order to form conduct policies. Higher education policy experts have said they are not aware of any other schools that have used “expulsion after graduation” as a sanction.
Butters’ lawsuit says that the three men assaulted her while she was visibly intoxicated during a spring break trip to Panama City, Florida. After returning to campus, she learned that video of the incident was circulating among members of Greek life. The men initially denied that such a video existed, but Butters obtained a copy, which is now under seal as evidence in her lawsuit.
“We feel really bad and apologize for the drunken stupidity,” Scallion wrote in a text message to Butters shortly after the spring break trip, prior to her filing conduct charges against them with JMU. “We’re not bad guys and we really didn’t mean to disrespect you like this.”
As Butters pursued adjudication against the three men, the chapter president for Sigma Chi expelled the men from the fraternity.
The lawsuit contends the school did not issue a final decision in her case until 396 days after the assault happened. Meanwhile, Butters said in her suit that she “failed all of her classes, lost her financial aid, [and] severed ties with many of her peers” as a result of the incident and how the university handled the adjudication, which she said exacerbated her stress. In May 2014, she dropped out and moved back to her Virginia hometown to work at a hotel.

By Hank Nuwer

Journalist Hank Nuwer tracks hazing deaths in fraternities and schools. Nuwer is the Alaska author of Hazing: Destroying Young Lives; Broken Pledges: The Deadly Rite of Hazing, High School Hazing, Wrongs of Passage and The Hazing Reader. In April of 2024, the Alaska Press Club awarded him first place in the Best Columnist division and Best Humorist, second place.

He has written articles or columns on hazing for the Sunday Times of India, Toronto Globe & Mail, Harper's Magazine, Orlando Sentinel, The Chronicle of Higher Education and the New York Times Sunday Magazine. His current book is Hazing: Destroying Young Lives from Indiana University Press. He is married to Malgorzata Wroblewska Nuwer of Warsaw, Poland and Fairbanks, Alaska. Nuwer is a former columnist for the Greenville (Ohio)Early Bird and former managing editor of the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner in Alaska.
Nuwer was named the Ohio Society of Professional Journalists columnist of the year in 2021 for his “After Darke” column in the Early Bird. He also won third place for the column in 2022 from the Indiana chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. He and his wife Gosia, recently of Union City, Ind., have owned 20 acres in Alaska for many years. “The move is a sort-of coming home for us,” said Nuwer. As a journalist, he’s written about the Alaskan Iditarod sled-dog race and other Alaska topics. Read his musings in his blog at Real Alaska Daily--http://realalaskadaily.com and in his weekly column "Far from Randolph" in the Winchester Star-Gazette of Randolph County, Indiana.

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