This is Part III of our series "The Price of Sex at USC"
"WE WILL NOT GO QUIETLY INTO THE NIGHT! DO WHAT YOU WILL! AND FUCK WHO YOU MUST!"
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"Fuck who you must." That was the advice delivered to a room of cheering men before a fraternity party at USC last November. A video, which documented the speech and the party that followed, was viewed hundreds of thousands of times on YouTube and Total Frat Move before completely disappearing from the Internet (along with any mention of the company that professionally produced it) in the days before this article was published.
This story examines the culture of aggressive philandering displayed above, and the dominant culture that allowed that video to remain on YouTube undisputed, unchallenged, and unspoken about by anyone, including USC officials who repeatedly refused to comment on the video's existence. It also suggests several solutions.
In a series of wide-ranging questions for this article, I asked USC's Media Relations Department: "How does the university respond to such disturbing details [in the video]? What was the reaction in the Provost's office and what if any action took place when the video was made public several months ago? Has USC punished anyone in connection with the video?" Those questions were explicitly ignored.
Last month, results were released from of one of the largest college sexual assault studies ever undertaken. Sponsored by the American Association of Universities, 150,000 students at 27 universities including USC and every Ivy League school (except Princeton) participated.
Dr. Ainsley Carry, the Vice Provost of Student Affairs, announced the findings in a conference call with USC's media organizations.
"We are within the national averages on everything," he said. "We are not an outlier on any side of the points I will mention here today."
Except for one of the largest segments of the study: the prevalence of sexual assault, defined by the study as nonconsensual penetration or sexual touching. At USC, 29.7 percent of female respondents reported being sexually assaulted since enrollment. Contrary to Carry's statement that USC is "well within the national averages," USC had the second highest rate of sexual assault for undergraduate women among the 27 participating universities.
The national average was 23.1%, and to say USC isn't an outlier is at best misreading the data, and at worst completely dishonest.
This is not a post-crisis story. It is the story of an ongoing epidemic of sexual assault at USC. Francesca Bessey, who graduated from USC and now works at USC's Center for Women and Men, which provides therapy services for victims of gender-based violence, summarized the progress this way in recent Facebook post:
"At USC, we have seen change, most of it hard fought for and won by students. We've seen policy updates, better investigations and training of our campus security staff. With student help, clinicians at our crisis and advocacy center have launched an amazing outreach program on sexual and gender-based harm. But sexual assault is still happening at an alarming rate in campus communities."
Any rate of sexual assault on a campus is too high, especially when it is supported by backwards-looking administrative policies that seek to minimize financial damage to the institutions that stand to lose money and prestige from forcefully confronting these crimes. Nowhere are these policies more present than at the USC, where a misleading reading of survey results is only the latest milestone in a tradition of ignorance.
Take, for instance, the 121-member California Delta chapter of Phi Kappa Psi, the host of the party where a fur-clad man told a room of nearly 100 people, "Fuck who you must." They provided Neon Tommy with the following statement:
After 15 minutes of Google searching, I had more questions. First, I was able to access the video of the party until October 25, 2015, almost 11 months after Dalton said it was removed from YouTube.
Second, Dalton said the individual, whom several people familiar with the fraternity identified as Alec Fisher, was never affiliated with the chapter and had been banned from attending any future chapter events.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Fisher has been in Phi Psi at USC since August of 2013, and for at least a year was the budget manager of the entire chapter.
Fisher also began his speech by saying, "Sons of Phi Psi, my brothers…"
I called back Dalton and asked him to clarify the details. He said:
"The man in the video is Austin Fisher. He is Alec's twin brother. He has never gone to USC and is not affiliated with Phi Psi. The video has been taken down since November to my knowledge."
-Duke Dalton, President of Phi Kappa Psi, October 28, 2015
Austin Fisher did not respond to several requests for comment about the video. In another video released this September and produced by the same company that made the video of the Phi Psi party, the Fisher brothers appeared again.
Titled "The Running," the video captured this year's "Bid Day," an annual event in USC's Greek system where women who participated in rush are told which sorority selected them and run the several blocks from campus to USC's Greek Row. At one point, someone in the video refers to the day as "the running of the bitches." The video also disappeared from Youtube on Oct. 25, 2015, the same day the video from Phi Psi's party vanished.
As for Dalton denying the video's existence on Youtube for the last ten months, denial is the norm when it comes to dealing with sexual violence at USC. One frat's actions are a single piece in a much larger puzzle.
Inside this complex web of organizational failure lies a deep, dark form of cultural bankruptcy that minimizes accountability at the institutional and individual level. It's a "go with the flow," "that's the way it has always been," "our organization will survive this" approach to sexual assault. It permeates universities, it breathes in fraternities and sororities, and it flourishes because of its deep roots in our culture. And it has to stop.
Annenberg Media