If you want to know the meaning of Betsy DeVos’ indifference to sexual assaults on campus, you should read John Hechinger’s engrossing book TRUE GENTLEMEN: THE BROKEN PLEDGE OF AMERICA’S FRATERNITIES.

It was reviewed in the Washington Post by T. Rees Shapiro, who wrote:

“Here is how Hechinger details one young woman’s experience inside an SAE house in the fall of 2014 at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where she found herself on a dingy bathroom floor littered with beer cans. “The man pushed her head down and forced her to perform oral sex and, then, intercourse, leaving her raw and bleeding inside. But it wasn’t over yet,” Hechinger writes, continuing the account using the woman’s real name with her permission. “The second man took his turn, forcing Gabriela to perform fellatio.” The encounter ended with a third man entering the bathroom and finding the young woman helpless, Hechinger writes. A savior he was not. “Gabriela was slumped on the floor of the shower, leaning against a wall, her leggings stained with semen, her shirt pulled up over her shoulders,” Hechinger writes. “ ‘Button up your shirt,’ he told her. Afterward, he urinated and left her on the floor, scared and alone.”

“Interestingly, the men who assaulted Gabriela were not members of the fraternity, Hechinger notes, questioning whether SAE acted negligently in allowing conditions for such a brutal attack to transpire amid a party at an SAE house.”

Hechinger writes that between 2011 and 2016, sexual assaults took place at 15 SAE houses out of 230 across the country. Insurance companies, Hechinger notes, “have rated fraternities just above toxic-waste dumps because of claims related to drinking, hazing, and sexual assault.”

Would Gabriela have been able to find witnesses to back up her complaint of sexual assault?