Waterboarding and spicy cheeseballs: ASU frat faces hazing lawsuit

Last fall, a woman sued an Arizona State University fraternity for victimizing her in what she called a “sex-crazed” hazing ritual that involved frat brothers allegedly distributing a naked video of her. Now, the same fraternity — the ASU chapter of Sigma Alpha Espilon, or SAE — has been hit with another lawsuit over its alleged hazing practices.

On Jan. 21, former pledges Devin Stevens and Spencer Brajevic filed a 76-page complaint in Maricopa County Superior Court against the SAE chapter and the national organization, accusing it of negligence, intentional infliction of emotional distress and more. Fifty-four individual SAE members are also named as defendants in the suit.

The lawsuit contains myriad claims about what Stevens and Brajevic said was a three-month hazing ritual for pledges hoping to join SAE at the start of 2024. The two students say SAE brothers beat them with wooden paddles, compelled them to buy drugs and alcohol for frat members, required them to complete rigorous physical exercises and also forced them to eat “extremely spicy cheeseballs” with little water.

According to the suit, pledges were forced to binge drink and consume cocaine, ketamine and mushrooms while completing excessive exercise and memory tests, which it says often resulted in vomiting and memory loss. Pledges were also routinely required to purchase similar drugs and alcohol to be used by fraternity members.

The suit claims that Stevens and Brajevic suffered severe injuries, including lacerations, contusions and swelling, on top of “tremendous emotional and mental stress and psychological illness, including aversions to certain foods.” Both students say they have struggled with substance abuse and nicotine dependence as a result of the hazing, and the suit says that Stevens was forced to withdraw from the school “due to severely compromised grades and attendances directly attributable” to the frat’s hazing.

Attorneys for the ASU chapter of SAE, the national fraternity and ASU did not respond to messages seeking comment from Phoenix New Times. Jeremy Goad, the attorney for Spencer and Stevens, declined to comment.

Hazing details

The lawsuit offers an incredibly detailed depiction of the pledge process at SAE, describing a litany of ways pledges were bossed around and exploited. Some alleged hazing practices are fairly run-of-the-mill, such as being forced to set up for and clean up after parties and being required to clean the Greek Leadership Village on ASU’s Tempe campus. Other alleged hazing incidents are more eye-catching.

The two students claim the frat forced them to receive lap dances from a stripper, who then whipped their “bare buttocks” to the point that they “received welts.” In other instances, the suit says, pledges were forced to consume “live fish and raw meat” and ingest “excessive quantities of nicotine.”

One alleged hazing ritual involved the forced consumption of what the complaint describes as “extremely spicy cheeseballs” that registered 2.2 million Scoville heat units, which is hotter than the infamous Carolina Reaper pepper. The suit says the roughly two dozen pledges were given only a half-gallon of water to share during the ritual and, as a result, experienced vomiting and stomach pain. Despite that, the pledges were then forced to do burpees, calisthenics and “brother squats,” in which two pledges face each other in the squat position while holding hands and saying, “I love you.”

Pledges were also regularly forced to binge drink, per the complaint. During one of these binge drinking episodes, one pledge allegedly became so severely drunk that he became unresponsive on the ground. The complaint says other pledges had to beg older fraternity members to let him receive medical attention. The pledge eventually ended up in the hospital, the complaint says, and “later indicated he would have died had he not received emergency medical care.”

That same evening, the complaint says, Brajevic was forced to drive a pledge home while intoxicated and was stopped by police and arrested for drunk driving. Tempe Municipal Court records show Brajevic eventually pleaded down to a charge of reckless driving, a class 2 misdemeanor.

The suit also describes several instances in which pledges were put through demanding physical tasks. Per the suit, pledges were routinely forced to perform physical exercises such as squats, situps and pushups as punishment for failing certain tasks or pledge tests. 

One ritual involved being forced to perform a “human bridge,” in which they assumed plank positions while other pledges “walked across their backs, placing compressive force on their spines.” Afterward, the complaint says, Stevens was forced to “complete a second workout at the Muscle Factory Gym” that caused him “severe abdominal cramping, loss of bowel control and chest pain.” He was taken to the emergency room and was allegedly told not to inform medical personnel that he was pledging with the fraternity. 

Another ritual involved filming so-called “Weatherman Videos,” in which pledges “were forced to film themselves being struck by eggs launched with hockey sticks while wearing only their underwear, submerging themselves in bodies of water at temperatures well below freezing, diving naked into swimming pools, being subjected to electric shocks from tasers, and being doused with flour and other substances.” The complaint says the videos were filmed “to provide sadistic amusement and entertainment” to fraternity members.

During one ritual described in the complaint, some pledges were sent into a bathroom — which brothers allegedly called “Auschwitz” — where they were “water boarded,” which the complaint describes as “standing in a cold shower, having water sprayed into their mouths, having their mouths covered with a rag, and water poured on the rag.” Several pledges were also allegedly injured in a “jousting” event during the frat’s “Beer Olympics,” with one pledge suffering a serious back injury after falling from another pledge’s shoulders and a second falling into and shattering a glass window. 

In addition to binge drinking and physical punishment, the complaint says pledges had to essentially work as personal assistants for older members, acting as their chauffeurs for dates, picking up food and paying for alcohol and supplies for fraternity-hosted events. Pledges also had to clean the fraternity house, which was left in “squalid and biohazardous conditions,” and do older members’ laundry. The complaint says one pledge spent “in excess of $8,000 in out-of-pocket costs” buying things for older members, including “controlled substances.”

Hazing controversies with SAE at ASU aren’t new. In 2012, 19-year-old pledge Jack Culolias drowned in the Salt River after binge drinking at a pledge event. A few months later, another fraternity member was dumped at a hospital with a note after a tequila-drinking contest that nearly killed him. The 20-year-old student had a blood-alcohol level of 0.47, nearly five times over the legal limit.

The two high-profile incidents led to ASU expelling the chapter from the university in 2013, revoking its university recognition. The following year, the national fraternity instituted a ban on hazing. According to the suit from Spencer and Stevens, the national fraternity “knew or should have known” the extent of hazing at its ASU chapter.

Related lawsuit

Goad, the attorney for the two students, is also representing the female student suing SAE over sharing her nude photos. The new lawsuit makes oblique mention to the first one, saying that pledges could avoid the frat’s bed-making requirement if a woman had slept over — provided a pledge “record(ed) the female in his bed and transmit(ted) that to” frat brothers.

“The females recorded were not informed they were being filmed,” the complaint says, “nor that the recordings were disseminated.”

That first lawsuit is still working its way through court, though one of the brothers named in that suit — there’s a great deal of overlap among the defendants in both lawsuits — has responded in court. (New Times has not named the parties to that first suit due to the sexual nature of the claims it involves.)

In a 148-page response and counterclaim against the woman who filed the lawsuit, the SAE member claimed he and the woman had an “intimate, sexual relationship” and that she consented to his taking the video and sharing it with a few friends, which he said “was not an uncommon request.” He said the couple was “comfortable being nude around each other” and “documented much of their lives through their phones,” which included taking and sharing photos of each other at “various stages of undress.”

“These types of risque photos were typical for their interactions,” the court filing reads. “The photos were mutual, reciprocal, co-produced and consensual.”

The video in question was a short, two-to-three-second clip taken on Snapchat of both of them naked from the waist up. The short video alternated between the two of them in frame, and she was “looking directly at the camera and leaning into and against (him). She was not asleep, unconscious or unwilling,” the frat member’s response says.

The woman’s lawsuit did not claim she was unconscious or unaware she was being filmed. However, it did say about the video-sharing ritual generally that even if “the subject of the illicit photo or video consented to their photograph or video being taken, that does not mean that they also consented to their intimate photo being shared with hundreds of strangers on campus as part of a long-standing hazing ritual.”

The man claimed he was not responsible for sharing the video with the fraternity, saying he didn’t save the video after sending it and had assumed it was “gone and long forgotten.” In a separate response in court, another fraternity member who allegedly shared the video in an SAE group chat also denied that he received it directly from the man who took it.

Instead, the man who filmed the nude video claimed that the woman and her current boyfriend, who is allegedly one of the plaintiffs in the second lawsuit, launched a “campaign to destroy his reputation and future at ASU” over the video. After the video was shared in the group chat, he claimed that he and people who supported him were met with a “campaign of harassing, intimidating and bullying” by the couple.

Due to the fallout, he left the fraternity in March 2025 and withdrew from the university two months later. He’s since enrolled in online classes at Southern New Hampshire University to complete his degree, per court records.