Looks like the white- and white-adjacent-tears cup brimmeth over this week. After a Syracuse University engineering frat was expelled by the school for appearing in videos that showed members using racial slurs, making light of sexual assault and mocking people with disabilities, five of those members are now suing the school for “injury to their reputation.”
As Syracuse.com reports, the lawsuit was filed anonymously on Tuesday, a week after the school shared videos of Theta Tau frat members taking an oath to always “have hatred in my heart for niggers, spics and, most importantly, the fucking kikes.” Because this is 2018, the frat brothers apologized, but not before claiming that the oath was a “parody oath” intended to roast a conservative frat member. The Theta Tau members claim more broadly that the videos released of them are full of “satire.”
But the university thinks the Theta Tau chapter is full of shit, and expelled the frat and suspended 18 of its members after the videos of the incident went viral. Five of the members, furious at this disciplinary action, insist that the videos were simply “a time-honored Chapter tradition that builds unity by satirically and hyperbolically depicting brothers,” according to the lawsuit they filed.
In other words, it was just a friendly satirical roasting session. You know, between assholes brothers.
The five Chads (who are referred to as “John Does” in the suit) are suing the school for $1 million in damages apiece for the “ridicule and scorn” they suffered, accusing Syracuse of branding them as “racist, anti-sematic [sic], sexist, and hostile to people with disabilities.”
“All that [SU officials] have done is overract, speed to judgment and portray the students as ‘criminals,’” the only-satirically-racist men said in their complaint.
The suit also alleges that Syracuse has “threatened their academic success and survival.”
Ah, yes. Survival. Because this is Lord of the Flies for douche nozzles, apparently.
Apart from money for damages, the outraged Chads are demanding that the university stop disciplinary proceedings against them and let them return to class.
Theta Tau’s offensive videos were published last week in Syracuse’s school newspaper, the Daily Orange, where they quickly became a national story. The frat brothers not only use racial slurs in the video but also make Holocaust references.
At one point during one video (there were two), the brothers also simulate forced oral sex on a disabled person. One of the brothers can be heard saying, “He’s drooling out of his mouth because he’s retarded in a wheelchair.”
“Yankee is totally unaware of this light rape that’s occurring,” a frat member says.
According to the complaint, the suing Chads are “ethnically diverse”; one Chad is black, another identifies as Indian American, and another is a citizen of a Central American country. One of the brothers in the video is Jewish, the complaint says, and 28 out of 48 Theta Tau members are “diverse”—as if this somehow changes the context of their disturbing videos.
For now, Syracuse University isn’t budging. Syracuse’s associate vice president for communications, Sarah Scalese, said that the school stands by its disciplinary measures, which it took “to protect the well-being of the campus community and maintain a respectful and safe learning environment.”