A University of Miami fraternity was shut down Friday after video surfaced of an off-campus pool party that showed members of the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity jumping up and down and singing about having sex with a dead woman.
“It made my skin crawl. It was horrible,” said a UM sorority sister who didn’t attend the pool party, but her friends did and were shown the video. The student asked that his name not be used for his own protection.
The song, which is popular among fraternities across the country, features sexually explicit and disgusting lyrics about a woman dying by performing fellatio. The fraternity hosted the pool party, an event they call “Adult Swim,” after the adult-oriented cable channel of the same name. The party took place at a house about 15 blocks west of the Coral Gables campus.
A video obtained by UM Hurricane, the student newspaper, shows Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity brothers singing about having sex with a dead woman at a pool party they hosted. The UM chapter of the fraternity closed Friday afternoon.
Heather Matthews, a spokeswoman for Sigma Phi Epsilon’s national headquarters, said Monday that her organization received information that students had violated policy and engaged in actions outside the bounds of the fraternity’s values.
“We expect SigEp chapters to provide their members and the campus community with a safe and supportive environment. This is the cornerstone of a positive fraternity and college experience, so we take this expectation seriously and maintain our chapters with this standard,” the statement said.
He did not say exactly what policies or boundaries the fraternity brothers had violated and what values they had deviated from.
UM spokeswoman Jacqueline Menendez declined to say whether the video of the pool party led to the fraternity being kicked off campus. He said UM had received a video that violated university policy, but did not respond to the Herald’s questions about the video.
Sigma Phi Epsilon has been at the university since 1949. An article in the Miami Herald archives reported that the UM chapter of Sigma Phi Epsilon was closed in 1993 for four years. Menendez said he could not comment on what happened at the time because he said university records only go back to 1998.
‘A madhouse’: a neighbor calls the police
The pool party was the first major off-campus party hosted by Sigma Phi Epsilon since the pandemic. The meeting on Saturday afternoon, October 1, was in a large ranch-style house in the 7100 block of Southwest 62nd Street, not far from the UM campus.
Aerial view of home in the 7100 block of Southwest 62nd Street on Monday, Oct. 10, 2022, in Miami, Florida. The house is where the UM chapter of Sigma Phi Epsilon hosted a pool party on Oct. 1 after which a video surfaced showing frat brothers singing about having sex with a dead woman. The fraternity closed Friday afternoon at UM. MATIAS J. OCNER mocner@miamiherald.com
It quickly became rowdy and a neighbor, Garrett Flake, called the police. He lives across the street from the corner house, which sits on a large lot and has a pool and basketball court in the backyard. No one answered the door of the house on Monday.
“I called law enforcement and said, ‘You all have to come and shut this thing down because it’s an insane asylum,'” Flake said. “Girls were urinating in people’s yards, the music was really loud, cars were blocking the street.”
A lot of cars tend to come and go from the house, Flake said. He believes the house was sold to an investor who rents it to UM students. Miami-Dade County property records show the home is owned by a Wyoming holding company.
In the video, the fraternity brothers, who organized the party, chanted a sexually explicit song about a woman who died during fellatio: “We dig her up every now and then, yo-ho, yo-ho. The we dig up every now and then. Fuck her once, we’ll fuck her again.”
At least one version of the song features frat boys having sex with a woman and her death while performing fellatio, then digging up her body and committing necrophilia, or having sex with a corpse.
The student newspaper a UM, The Miami Hurricane, first reported the news on Sunday. In its story, the newspaper quoted a girl who attended the party as saying she noticed a white substance in their drinks and that the girls there suspected they were being drugged.
None of the girls in the Hurricane story said they believed they had been sexually abused, and both Coral Gables and University of Miami police said they were aware of the story, but that no one ‘had contacted no possible wrongdoing until Monday afternoon.
“We moved very quickly”
Video circulating on campus shows a group of men holding cans and partying in the backyard of a house, with two giant inflatable slides and bounce houses, and a black Adult Swim poster in the background. A fraternity member shouts that they own the school.
Menendez said the university received the video Friday morning and immediately issued a disciplinary order for the local fraternity chapter to cease operations. He also sent the tape to the fraternity’s national headquarters, he said. The national headquarters suspended the chapter Friday afternoon, Menendez said.
“We moved very quickly. We have the video; we issued the cease operations order and then we contacted the national organization and they closed the chapter,” Menendez said.
In a written statement, Patricia Whitely, UM’s senior vice president for student affairs who partially oversees Greek life at South Florida’s largest private university, said the fraternity chapter “violated university policy and participate in behavior incompatible with the values and expectations of the university community and its national fraternity”.
“We have been associated with Sigma Phi Epsilon for 73 years and support their decision to close the chapter effective immediately,” Whitely wrote.
Ethan Robbins, the president of UM’s Interfraternity Council, declined to comment Monday.
Reaction on campus Monday afternoon ranged from “disgusting” to “gross” and “this is SigEp’s notorious reputation,” according to a group of six sorority and sorority members, who declined to give their name for fear of reprisals. They met in the Mary B. Merritt Panhellenic Building on UM’s Coral Gables campus, which is where most of UM’s Greek organizations have their offices; they don’t have houses
On the second floor, no one answered a knock on Sigma Phi Epsilon’s red door.
The red door of Sigma Phi Epsilon’s campus headquarters inside the Panhellenic building at the University of Miami on Monday, October 10, 2022 in Coral Gables, Fla. MATIAS J. OCNER mocner@miamiherald.com
Miami Herald staff members Monika Leal and Tess Riski contributed to this report.
Jimena Tavel covers higher education for the Miami Herald and the Nuevo Herald. She is a bilingual reporter with triple nationality: Honduran, Cuban and Costa Rican. Born and raised in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, she moved to Florida at age 17. He graduated from the University of Florida in 2018 with a degree in journalism and joined the Herald soon after.
