Last week, a series of police body-camera videos from a fraternity basement at the University of Iowa went viral. The footage is a little creepy. More than 50 male underclassmen stand in shorts and sneakers in the grimy storage room of a college house, blinking silently at the camera, caught like hapless deer in the beam of a headlight. Many are shirtless and blindfolded, unknown substances dripping down their chests. The officers tell the boys they can leave. The boys stare blankly back at them. The officers ask if anyone is hurt, and are met with unified silence. Then: “Anyone here that is against their will?” Finally, a ripple of no’s. You can smell the pools of stale beer through the screen.
It was November 2024 at the campus Alpha Delta Phi house, and the boys were in the midst of an initiation ritual. Police showed up in response to a fire alarm, only to find some kind of food fight, ketchup and mustard congealed to the boy’s necks. “Is that blood?” one officer asked. “You want to taste it?” an upperclassman leader replied. After several back-and-forths, an upperclassman told the boys to leave the basement, and they marched silently out and on their way. The university placed the fraternity on interim suspension, before officially deciding that the group had violated campus hazing policies and would be suspended until at least 2029.
But the body-camera footage wasn’t posted publicly until last Tuesday—at which point the internet pounced. In less than a week, it has accumulated over a million views on YouTube, and over 50 million on X. “Crazy what men will do for the validation of other men,” reads one X post with almost 500,000 views. “It’s really a grooming ritual—training members to normalize exploitation, hierarchy, and silence,” reads another. The New York Post called the incident “disturbing.”
