The hazing files: LSU frats, some now shuttered, have amassed dozens of official complaints [View all]

An LSU student hid in an upstairs bathroom of a storied fraternity house after he finally cracked.

Hell Week was in full flower. Over the past few days, his fraternity brothers had paddled him, pressured him to drink and forced him to stop sleeping. He threw up for five hours straight after they demanded that he stuff a whole tin of chewing tobacco in his mouth.

“I cannot come forward publicly because I am afraid of the retaliation I will receive from active members of the fraternity, but can no longer go through this abuse,” the pledge wrote in a 2016 complaint to LSU. “If whoever is reading this does not believe me, come to the Kappa Sigma house at any point this week and investigate what is going on. … I don't want future kids to be submitted to what I have had to go through.”

The pledge’s anonymous, first-person account was one of more than 40 complaints lodged against 14 LSU fraternities between 2016 and 2019, according to public records the university provided in response to a request from The Advocate. The newspaper has compiled them into a database as LSU’s Interfraternity Council Recruitment — known as rush — starts Aug. 18.

Read more: https://www.theadvocate.com/baton_rouge/news/article_c4c88d82-c04d-11e9-a390-bfe2c2c70732.html