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There was no evidence in the Central Park Five case except confessions NYPD officers coerced out of the teenage boys, depriving them of food, water and sleep.They didn’t have lawyers. The real rapist came fwd years later. Jane Doe did the detective work for own case, gathered her own evidence.

Friendly reminder that you can revive a stale baguette by getting it a little wet (I mist it with a spray bottle) and putting it in a 400 degree oven for 5-10 minutes.

“The Cornell Seven” moniker rings dissonant to my ear bc it’s reminiscent of “The Central Park Five,” who were exonerated. The two cases are not comparable. The Central Park Five were wrongfully arrested within days of the attack. It’s been 2 years and the Cornell frat bros haven’t been charged.

Then there are the private lawyers these guys’ families hire. A past Korean prime minister’s grandson is of one of Cornell’s accused—Winston Lee. Lee’s lawyer, Teny Geragos, helped clear Diddy on sex trafficking charges. Her dad, also a lawyer, kept Chris Brown out if jail for beating Rihanna.

There are many levels of legal insulation at play in the cases at both Penn and Cornell. Often when there’s a drug bust, police will seize the “trap house” property because it was instrumental to the crime. But when a drug ring runs out of a frat, the alumni board owns the house so it’s shielded.

The pledges would cut the cocaine with creatine, a supplement popular among bodybuilders. They chose creatine because it’s a white powder frat bros can buy in bulk without anyone suspecting a thing.

A concrete example: At Penn State’s Delta Upsilon chapter, a senior frat bro and cocaine trafficking ring leader would pull pledges aside and ask them to hold out their hands. If they were steady, he’d order them to the boiler room to help bag cocaine. Those pledges got low level misdemeanors.

Killer lede on this excellent piece.

I understand that there are psychological mechanisms at play during hazing that can make it feel impossible to say no. But there is something maddening about how the law and public narratives treat the consent of a pledge rushing to gain status compared to, say, the consent of a drunk woman.

Which, maybe they should! Hazing is obviously bad for people. But when a frat boy does crime, you’ll hear a lot of he was pressured, he was insecure, he was hazed. He’s a victim of male loneliness. Every man who joins a frat knows he has plenty of options. Not the case for street gang members.

There are striking parallels btw initiation rituals in frats and street gangs. Violent hazing (which is not universal in either case) is meant to break down individual discretion, & foster shared trauma & secrets. When it happens to frat boys, people wring their hands about coercion & consent.

That’s rough! Good job though. For me it was a clog not a leak.

If you like high stakes puzzles might I suggest taking the plumbing in your bathroom sink apart and putting it back together. You can thank me for the great fun time later.

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I can only imagine how intense those group sessions must have been. The men in this study were HIV survivors who struggled with feelings of hopelessness and helplessness, in part due to past trauma. So it makes sense there were a lot of comorbidities, like BPD and recent heavy polysubstance use.

The inclusion criteria for identity were rigid: only cisgender, gay English speaking 50+ men. The justification for these exclusions was to create a communal group dynamic in a short time. But the study included ppl w psych conditions that would have barred them from most psychedelic trials.

The one study on psychedelic therapy for ppl living w HIV includes group sessions as a key component. It’s a fascinating read for a number of reasons. The authors mention potential cost cutting as part of their reasoning for group therapy, bc it lowers the number of hours billed per person.

objectively pro-diarrhea regime