I wasn’t even going to cover this because the details are profoundly disturbing, but you guys seem to want to talk about it, so here we go. Let me just throw up this NSFW WARNING. There are details of hazing gone wrong in this post. What’s strange (to me) is that this information is only coming out now – Jon Hamm has been famous for years, and it’s only this week that Star Magazine/Radar got their hands on Hamm’s old criminal charge for hazing and assault. Apparently, Hamm was in a fraternity at the University of Texas in Austin in 1990 and he and his frat bros went WAY too far with a pledge.
According to explosive court documents obtained by Star magazine, Jon Hamm was involved in a fraternity pledging incident gone wrong on November 10, 1990, at the University of Texas at Austin. The court documents claim that Hamm and his fellow Sigma Nu frat brothers struck a prospective pledge with a wooden paddle more than 30 times on that night. They also allegedly picked him up by his underwear and “pulled it back and forth in a sawing motion,” causing “great pain.” Hamm even set the pledge’s pants on fire, the documents claim, “and would not let [the pledge] extinguish the flame with his hand but made [him] blow it out.
Next, the documents claim, Hamm “hooked the claw of a hammer underneath [the pledge’s] genitals and led him by the hammer around the room.” He rounded out the night by breaking into the apartment of another pledge, the documents claim, “in order to bring [him] to the fraternity house” to subject him to “similar hazing activity.”
The mother of the first pledge reported the incident and arrest warrants were issued for Hamm and seven other frat members. Three of them were sentenced to 30 days in jail for hazing. Hamm was charged with misdemeanor hazing and assault charges, but they were dismissed in 1995 after he reached a plea deal. A friend tells Star, “The hazing incident was an isolated incident in Jon’s life. Since then, he’s been strong enough to take steps to make himself a better person.”
The Daily Mail has even more details about the assault and the aftermath of the hazing here. It was so bad that Sigma Nu was shut down at UT-Austin?
Is this evidence that sometimes men in their late teens make really awful life choices and they can still grow up to be functioning members of society? Or does this information alter your current view of the now-44-year-old Hamm? Does it put everything in perspective? Do you see him as a bully, still, to this day?
Photos courtesy of WENN.
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