UCLA Women Get Threats in Aftermath of Alleged Rape

Three UCLA women who published letters in the student newspaper supporting a student who allegedly was raped at a fraternity house have themselves become targets of threats.

The letters, which appeared earlier this week in the Viewpoint opinion section of the Daily Bruin, were written in response to an anonymous letter in which a woman student said she had been raped by two fraternity members during a frat house party last April.

The woman said one of the men plied her with drinks of “tasty pink punch” until she was too unsteady to fight him off. After raping her, he brought along a fellow fraternity member to join in the assault, she wrote.

The letter writer, who did not name the fraternity, said fear and shame had stopped her from reporting the alleged rapes to authorities. Besides, she said, she would not be able to provide enough proof to convict her attackers.

Five days after the woman’s account ran in the Daily Bruin, the newspaper published signed letters from students who expressed support for the woman and outrage at the alleged rape. That night, three women students whose letters had appeared found threatening messages left on their answering machines.

The anonymous male voice identified himself as a fraternity member, told the women they were “screwed in the head” and invited them to attend a fraternity party so “I can teach you a lesson.”

“At first, I was very frightened,” said Eileen Hunt, 20, a junior English major who received one of the messages. “But after you calm down, then you are angry. Now, I’m almost laughing at him. . . . It was a lunatic thing to do.”

In her letter to the Daily Bruin, Hunt had said the woman’s account of alleged rape made her cry, and she implored the woman to “Please fight. Please .”

Mary Dooley, 36, a graduate student in public health, was both angered and alarmed by the call on her answering machine, an invasion she compared to the act of rape. In her letter, she had offered to stage a candlelight vigil outside the fraternity house.

The third woman, Elizabeth Larson, 21, a senior Russian studies major, reported the call, which she labeled “cowardly,” to campus police on Friday.

Larson, who had advocated castration of rapists in her letter, said her boyfriend responded to the threat by changing the greeting on her answering machine: “All whining frat boys calling this number will please be asked to have enough courage and manliness to leave their names and numbers and geek affiliation.”

Student and faculty advisers to UCLA’s estimated 60 fraternities and sororities said they had not received a formal complaint about the alleged rape or the phoned threats but would investigate the matters if they did.

Chris Fishburn, director of the university’s fraternity and sorority relations department, said the person who made the calls is a “misguided man”--but not necessarily a fraternity man.

“We all know there are a good many nuts out there in the woodwork,” she said. “This could be anybody. We have no way of knowing.”

Added Gary Hobart, president of UCLA’s Interfraternity Council: “If it (the rape) did occur, we definitely feel sympathy (for the alleged victim) and would ask that the evidence be brought to the criminal justice system.”