When the trap house is a frat house

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In fall of 2024, Thomas Robinson, a college senior and “new-member educator” at Penn State’s Delta Upsilon fraternity chapter, pulled pledges aside and asked them to hold out their hands. If their fingers didn’t tremble, he would have them come down to the boiler room of the gabled fraternity mansion, then make them break down bricks of cocaine, cut them with creatine, and bag them. A  supplement popular among bodybuilders, creatine was the cutting agent of choice for “Operation Drugs Unlimited,” because it is a white powder frat bros can buy by the gallon without anyone suspecting a thing. A search warrant would later reveal a safe in Robinson’s room with cash, Adderall, coke, a handgun, and bullets. 

Around the same time, in a house with similar Tudor style detailing, Chi Phi fraternity brothers at Cornell obtained ketamine illegally. Before Jane Doe described being “gang raped,” she worried the frat's ketamine supply might have fentanyl in it, but recalled one of the brothers saying his dealer worked at a Cornell lab. (He denied this. The seven men Doe accused have denied all wrongdoing.) Campus crime logs from the time showed two recent reports of ketamine theft from the university’s veterinary school.

Over the past couple decades, the terms “trap house” and “trap music”  have expanded far beyond their roots in Black Atlanta communities ravaged by the war on drugs. Electronic musicians  produce “trap” beats. People refer to houses where people consume and sell drugs as “trap houses,” all over the world: from white West Virginia neighborhoods to the UK.  

The “trap” is life under criminalization in the illicit drug scene. The prison system is ostensibly a tool of reform, but every time someone entangled in the war on drugs is convicted of a drug related crime, the likelihood they’ll make a living doing anything else diminishes further. The circumstances of the “trap” vary considerably. In the Canadian town of Thunder Bay, recent research revealed that public housing beneficiaries had been coerced into using their residences as drug selling operations. In other cases, trap houses are consensual communities where residents help each other avoid overdose and withdrawal sickness, but nonetheless face the precarity that comes with criminalization and reliance on an unstable drug supply. Old school trap songs document the experience of moving between drug houses, juvenile detention and prison. 

Like a trap-inspired beat in a Skrillex song, the criminal activities at Penn State and Cornell frat houses share some trap aesthetics, but with a sheen of privilege. Even the term “gang rape” has misleading connotations. Criminologists have pushed to shift terminology towards “multi-pepetrator sexual assault,” because “gang rape” leads police and the general public to incorrectly assume sexual predators are likely to be street gangs in back alleys, not acquaintances at parties. When such crimes do come to light at fraternities, perpetrators get extra opportunities to escape or minimize accountability—the system does everything it can to ensure these men have a future, and that those born into the trap lifestyle do not. Frats are elite institutions within elite institutions, and they provide a forceful legal shield. Neither the Cornell accused rapists nor “Operations Drugs Unlimited” were exclusively white—frats  did integrate eventually, but they still filter out low income students through high dues that generally cannot be covered with scholarships or financial aid. 

There are parallels between initiation rituals in fraternities and in gangs that sell drugs, but the circumstances are not comparable. When a college student decides to rush a fraternity, he is making a bargain for both long-term and short-term privileges; easier sexual access to intoxicated young women is an immediate benefit, easier access to Fortune 500 jobs and even seats in Congress comes after graduation. One study found former frat brothers have higher incomes despite worse grades. (How much membership in a frat really changes career outcomes for men who were already very privileged is hard to say—nonetheless, networking is a selling point.) But when teenagers in poor Black and Brown neighborhoods are initiated into gangs, they are often under severe social and economic pressure, not from a group of peers that they met months ago but from communities they may have known their whole lives. 

In extreme cases, hazing rituals in both fraternities and gangs involve actual assault, which can cause lasting psychological damage regardless of context. But the context matters in terms of how these abuses shape long-term trajectories. A post on stophazing.org states “real consent under the conditions of hazing is impossible,” emphasizing that “true choice is distorted,” when young men are driven by “a strong desire to belong,” before comparing hazing with other types of coercion, including sexual violence. But it’s important to remember that pledges can and do refuse to hazing, and that when a pledge does submit, he is motivated not just by fear of what will happen if he says no, but the privileges he stands to gain if he says yes. I say this not to imply that hazing isn’t damaging—it can, in fact, be deadly— but to point out that when a frat boy does crime, judges and commentators are often more willing to consider the circumstances that got him there than they are for other young men with far fewer choices. 

The pledges at Penn State who helped bag cocaine under hazing pressure got a kind of legal benefit of the doubt that would unlikely be afforded to street gang members of similar age or younger, accused of similar crimes. While the leaders of the cocaine ring have been charged with felonies, the pledges got low level possession misdemeanors. Pennsylvania Attorney General David Sunday noted that the pledges were bagging coke as part of their “indoctrination.”  Human trafficking victims with low level roles will get harsher charges, and then have to prove—not just experience, but prove, immediate, unavoidable threats of death or serious bodily injury in order to have those charges reduced. Meanwhile, Thomas Robinson was so sure he’d get away with leading  “Operation Drugs Unlimited" that when he was arrested, he thought he was being pranked. 

Traumatizing, shame-inducing hazing rituals have multiple purposes. They foster unity through shared trauma, they break down individual boundaries in favor of a collective interest; and they also create a shared secret—which can make it easier to pressure members to hide other secrets. Clearly, mileage varies on whether these rituals actually strengthen the code of silence. At Penn State’s “Operation Drugs Unlimited” investigators worked with an inside informant to orchestrate “controlled buys” and gather evidence, a technique that’s common in drug ring investigations. 

In more mundane fraternity life, the shared secrecy leads brothers to conceal sexual assaults, underage drinking and recreational drug use. This silence also isn’t uniform—it was a Chi Phi brother who screenshotted the Snapchat evidence that has generated so much outrage in Jane Doe’s case. Despite the wider outrage, you don’t have to look far to find writers, including in leftist publications, bending over backwards to make excuses for the Chi Phi men. Slate published a piece by Hanna Stotland, who served as a paid crisis management advisor to one of Cornell’s accused. Stotland writes, without evidence, “if everyone had been sober, in the less likely event that the men proposed the same sex acts, it appears she would either have said yes and meant it or said no and been obeyed.”

Substack author Elayne Kalila, who has nearly 6,000 subscribers, wrote “I don’t think these boys are monsters, I really don’t.” Kalila then brings up Fraternity Gang Rape, a book published in 1990 that is one illustration of just how long group rape has been embedded in fraternity culture. According to Kalila, that 1990 text contains not monsters,  but “insecure boys, bonding with each other through what they called getting sex. The real relationship was between the brothers. The young woman became the stage on which they performed their manhood for one another.” As though somehow rape is no longer monstrous if it comes from a place of insecurity and a desire to bond. What kind of rapist, then, would Kalila consider monstrous? 

The accused fraternity brothers are widely referred to as “The Cornell Seven,” a moniker that rings dissonant to me because it harkens back to well-known cases of exonerated convictions. The story of The Central Park Five, the most famous such case, is in many ways the reverse of what happened at Cornell.  While it took years for a prosecutor to seriously consider a charge in the Cornell case, the Central Park Five were all 16 or younger when they were charged in 1989. They were arrested within a day of the assault, then deprived of food, water and sleep until NYPD officers coerced them into confession. The victim was still in a coma through all this, and was left with total amnesia of the attack. There was no physical or eyewitness evidence supporting the conviction—only the coerced confessions of the Black and Latino teens. In the Cornell case, it was Jane Doe who filed an initial police report and later lawsuit. She had gathered her own evidence.

The Central Park Five, now also known as the “Exonerated Five,” were deprived of legal protections, like an attorney or recordings of the initial interrogations. The real rapist, who acted alone, came forward after they had finished lengthy sentences. Meanwhile, multiple levels of legal insulation shielded the Chi Phi brothers from criminal consideration over the last two years. Jane Doe initially reported the assault to campus police, who asked county district attorney Matthew Van Houten to review the claims and determine whether to hand down any criminal charges. Van Houten declined to pursue criminal charges, but would later say he never saw Doe’s full campus police interview transcript. The Cornell police had condensed the interview to a summary that excluded Doe’s assertion that she was raped. Meanwhile, Cornell meted out punishments internally, including expulsions, campus bans, suspensions and essays.  While police in general only investigate a small fraction of reported rapes, campus police departments have the extra incentive of minimizing reported university crime rates.

Now that Doe’s lawsuit has led to a national uproar, and New York Attorney General Letitia James has been appointed special prosecutor in the reopened criminal investigation, signs of further legal protection are emerging. The accused’s lawyers are trying to limit press coverage, and have requested that James be removed from the investigation because of a post she made on social media calling Doe a “survivor.” One of those lawyers is working for Winston Lee, one of Doe’s accused assailants, and the grandson of a former South Korean prime minister. Lee’s lawyer, Teny Geragos, comes from a high-powered family of criminal defense attorneys. She successfully defended Sean “Diddy” Combs against sex trafficking allegations, and her father helped Chris Brown avoid jail time after he pled guilty to battering Rihanna. 

Fraternities and the larger organizations that support them use corporate structuring as well as legal maneuvers to avoid consequences. Since fraternity houses are often owned by alumni corporations that operate as independent corporate entities, the houses stay put even as criminal allegations stack up, sometimes even when universities suspend chapters. 

The history of Penn State’s Delta Upsilon chapter, the main headquarters for Penn State’s “Operation Drugs Unlimited," is telling. Despite two decades of criminal accusations, I could only find record of one eviction, triggered by an unauthorized Wiz Khalifa concert in 2009. The house was already under investigation because a member had fatally overdosed in his own apartment two years earlier, but the university newspaper reported that the concert was the “straw that broke the camel’s back,” and led the alumni corp to give the DU brothers the boot. 

The DU brothers returned to the house just five months after the eviction. In the years that followed, women reported sexual and physical assaults there—one told police in 2017 that she’d been hit in the head with a full, unopened beer can, which broke bones in her skull.  The same year, at a different Penn-State frat, 19-year-old Timothy Piazza died due to severe, hazing-related injuries. This was apparently a great moment of reckoning for fraternity culture at Penn State, but for most frats, the sanctions were relatively mild. Rush was cancelled in 2017, and the university declared it would “strongly enforce prohibition” of underage drinking, and allow “no more than 10 socials with alcohol per chapter, per semester.” Damon Sims, the vice president for student affairs, continued to insist that Greek life was essential to the university’s culture. 

Just a few months later, despite the underage drinking prohibition, DU hosted a party called “a fifth and a friend” where underage guests were encouraged to split an entire fifth just two ways. DU’s official recognition was suspended, and then reinstated less than a year later. Five years after that, far from being reformed, a cocaine drug ring that instrumentalized coercive hazing blossomed in the very same house where each of these other crimes occurred. As of now, that DU chapter is suspended again, but the frat brothers are still there. Throughout all this, the only thing that ever led directly to an eviction was a rap concert.

In more run-of-the-mill drug busts, police often seize property used for criminal purposes, including real estate. But if a drug bust happens in a fraternity, the alumni corporations that often own frat houses can claim they weren’t involved. Even when chapters have been suspended both by the universities and even the official fraternity organizations, these alumni corporations can continue to allow members to live in the houses and pay dues. Higher level criminal networks use similar strategies.

While the Cornell case has yet to lead to criminal charges, it is one of the rare times a frat house has been vacated—perhaps because it is owned not by an alumni corporation, but by Cornell. The house has been dormant since Doe’s accusations led the whole chapter to be suspended in 2024. But this punishment seems too little too late, given that the university had already tried to address a spate of druggings and sexual assaults in 2022; their solution at the time was to suspend all frat parties—for less than a year. Jane Doe’s case has led to perhaps the most widespread call in history to entirely eliminate Greek life from US university culture. But efforts to abolish Greek life face a powerful, well-resourced enemy. The North American Interfraternity Conference, a trade group that advocates on behalf of fraternities for the legal right to bar women, among other things, is one of several lobbying organizations that defends fraternity “self governance.”  Judson Horras, executive of the Interfraternity Conference, waxed on about how these organizations foster a connection to something bigger  and charity work—claiming, as many have before him, that rape goes against what Greek life stands for, despite decades of evidence to the contrary; “That staying power of brotherhood and the positive leadership, which doesn’t make The New York Times, creates this enduring value,” The New York Times reported. 

While people like Horras argue that sexual assault is at odds with fraternity values, the concept of the “red zone,” where young college women face an elevated risk of sexual assault when they’re new to campus, especially in fraternity settings, has been around for decades. Fraternities are dangerous places, for the guests that attend their parties, and for the pledges that die of hazing-related accidents each year. But they’re probably not going anywhere. You’ll hear politicians refer to street gangs as scourges on society, but never frats. Over one hundred thousand young men rush fraternities annually, when they have plenty of other options. Some of them do so with the full expectation they will routinely ply underage women with alcohol, which, in excess, is one of the most dangerous drugs there is—and take advantage of them.  As a country, we are trapped with these institutions that endanger students, the lasting trauma they cause, and the grown men they help breed. 

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