{"id":117094,"date":"2017-09-01T15:17:44","date_gmt":"2017-09-01T23:17:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=117094"},"modified":"2026-04-09T19:40:52","modified_gmt":"2026-04-10T03:40:52","slug":"suzi-at-yale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=117094","title":{"rendered":"Suzi At Yale"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mark Oppenheimer writes<\/a> about the original American campus sex scandal starring a Jewess named Suzi who gave a ton of blowjobs at age 14:<\/p>\n

\n

News that Yale boys had been getting blowjobs from a townie\u2014a freshman townie\u2014was bad news indeed. It could have been worse: She could have been an Italian or Irish girl from New Haven proper, which would have been a ferocious species of kindling for the local anti-Yale element. Better, for local amity, that it was a middle-class Jewish girl from the suburbs. The respectable suburban Jews weren\u2019t likely to riot. Still, this was the kind of thing that Yale might want to cover up. The Yale Daily News insinuated as much in an editorial of Jan. 28, the same day the students\u2019 court appearance appeared on page 1. \u201cWe are all too aware,\u201d read the editorial, \u201cthat the principal concern of the deans and everyone involved in the investigation of the incident was to protect the careers and reputations of students who had, by their complete lack of judgment as shown by their actions, forfeited their right to any such consideration.<\/p>\n

\u201cNevertheless,\u201d continued the editorial, mercilessly, \u201cno successful relationship can be maintained between Yale and the city of New Haven if the chief of New Haven police must be informed of Yale\u2019s \u2018hidden scandal\u2019 by an out-of-town newspaper of more than dubious journalistic reputation.\u201d<\/p>\n

I have not been able to track down the specifics of this charge\u2014the \u201cout of town newspaper\u201d that first brought the story to the city attorney\u2019s attention, nor the evidence that this is how the city learned about what happened. But this charge, along with the evidence that Yale knew what was happening before Jan. 15, suggests that Yale would have preferred to resolve the matter internally. It was not a paramount concern that the men who had received oral sex from an adolescent be prosecuted or even shamed. On this matter, it was left to their fellow students, including those on the newspaper, to be the university\u2019s conscience.<\/p>\n

Of the men I located, Campbell is the one I\u2019d most like to be friends with, I think. Like Frank, he went to architecture school, but his interest is urban planning, which he has taught and written a book about. He\u2019s spent his life trying to improve neighborhoods and revitalize cities, in part by getting cars out of people\u2019s way. His first job in architecture was during the semester he was suspended from Yale, before he was readmitted.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis was a young girl who was going around campus giving blowjobs,\u201d Campbell said. \u201cNobody knew anything about her. The rumor was she visited 800 guys. I am sure that was off by a factor of 20 or something. \u2026 The word was, she was going to somebody\u2019s room in one of the colleges. So I went over there, stupidly, in the middle of the afternoon. It sounded like a great idea. She started to take my pants down, and she had her underwear on, and I decided it wasn\u2019t a good idea. I don\u2019t think I ever touched her.\u201d<\/p>\n

Campbell said that they had a conversation and that he suggested she get some help. \u201cIt was evident to me as soon as I met her that she was a little confused. And she was young.\u201d Some time later, she called him on the telephone in his room. \u201cShe wanted to chat,\u201d he remembered.<\/p>\n

When he heard that men were being pulled before the administration, Campbell went to talk with William Sloane Coffin Jr., the university chaplain. He told Coffin that he was thinking he ought to turn himself in. \u201cI said, \u2018This is what I\u2019m thinking about doing.\u2019 He heartily agreed, said that made sense.\u201d He found a campus cop he knew and told the cop that he needed to talk to a dean about what was going on. \u201cThe dean wanted me to implicate others, and I didn\u2019t really know anybody. I had a roommate involved. I didn\u2019t name my roommate.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt wasn\u2019t fun,\u201d Campbell said, summing up. \u201cBut worse than that was having the Harvard side of the stadium singing, \u2018If You Knew Susie.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n

…Gambrill, a retired lawyer and Episcopal priest, lives in Maine with his second wife. He speaks with the soft, attuned cadences of a pastor. He never met Suzi. But, as he tells it, she changed his life.<\/p>\n

\u201cTwo of them were my roommates,\u201d Gambrill told me. \u201cI lost two roommates out of that deal.\u201d One of them was Jake Blaisdell, the bitchin\u2019 Californian who tore out of town in his VW bus, never to return. The other was the man I\u2019ve called Campbell, the urban planner. It surprised me, although perhaps it shouldn\u2019t have, that Gambrill, the roommate, the bystander, had the most vivid memories of all.<\/p>\n

\u201cI didn\u2019t get involved in it,\u201d Gambrill said. \u201cI am very thankful I didn\u2019t. I think what sticks in my mind is we all knew it was coming. I remember quiet conversations on the phone with this poor Suzi. And they couldn\u2019t wait to have this happen.\u201d<\/p>\n

When it was over, Gambrill and other men who had stayed away would make fun of the men who had been with Suzi. But for Gambrill, anyway, it wasn\u2019t funny, not really.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s one of the things I feel worst about,\u201d he said. \u201cIt changed my life, in a way. I know in my heart that if I had told the two guys I roomed with that this was a bad thing, they probably wouldn\u2019t have done it. I always felt bad I didn\u2019t try to tell them. I felt I failed them. Nobody I know said anything about it beforehand, but afterward, we sort of ganged up on them. And afterward she went to her father, and all hell broke loose.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gambrill remembers a terrifying week on campus, arrests coming every couple of days.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat was very ugly, them sweating, waiting to see what would happen to them,\u201d he said. \u201cFor a lot of us, it really consumed us. \u2026 Some double-digit number were involved in this thing, went out in the car with this girl and got their fellatio, for lack of a grosser word. This was over the course of two or three weeks or something. And it was a source of merriment at first, and \u2018Isn\u2019t this amazing this could happen?\u2019 and \u2018Wow, what a lucky break\u2019 to all of a sudden mockery and remorse.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was a bad time, a bad time. The worst part of my life. I wasn\u2019t really affected. But these poor guys had to go home. They were children, 18 or 19 years old. They didn\u2019t know what they were doing. And a 19-year-old now knows a shitload more than a 19-year-old in 1959.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gambrill seemed certain that he was no better than his friends. Just lucky, that\u2019s all. \u201cI think it was offered to me,\u201d he said, \u201cbut I was sort of na\u00efve\u2014a moralistic child, I suppose. Didn\u2019t appeal to me at all. I\u2019m very glad I didn\u2019t do it. It wasn\u2019t any credit to me. Just that I was scared of my own shadow.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Gambrill remembers it, Jake was too upbeat a guy to spend much time second-guessing his actions\u2014\u201cEverything was \u2018cherry\u2019 or \u2018bitchin\u2019\u2019 if it was good. He said that. He was not an introspective person.\u201d Campbell, on the other hand, \u201cwas haunted afterward.\u201d He remembers sitting in their rooming suite, in Davenport College, while Campbell waited for his father to arrive, before the court appearance. \u201cI remember his father strutting up the path to the room, past the window \u2026 and their shaking hands in a very somber way. He had been awake the whole night before, and he had said to me, \u2018Can you lend me some money so I can help pay for my father\u2019s trip?\u2019 I didn\u2019t have any money.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gambrill had entered college planning to be a lawyer, but the chaplain Coffin\u2019s Sunday sermons in Battell Chapel spoke to him, and they got him thinking about ministry. And the Suzi episode, his failure to stop his friends from going through with it, pushed him in that direction, too. \u201cThis incident made me feel I was more connected with other people than I had acted on,\u201d he said, \u201cand maybe the way to go was to be a priest. So, I became an Episcopal priest and served in churches for 20 years.\u201d<\/p>\n

…Most of the people I have told about Suzi are sure that she was \u201cseriously unbalanced,\u201d to borrow the words that dripped from the pen of Carlos Stoddard, President Griswold\u2019s aide. And maybe she is, or was; it is important to remember that she was only 14, and the men involved were only slightly, if significantly, older, and still in school. All we can know is that she is a secure, unrepentant woman, in a longer, more stable marriage, as far as I can tell, than any of the men I talked to who were arrested for being with her. Insofar as she thinks about her mental state, she judges herself to be well.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m kind of \u2018be here now,\u2019 \u201d Suzi said to me, just before I got in my rental car and drove off. \u201cYou can say, \u2018Yes, I\u2019m happy I did that.\u2019 Or, \u2018I\u2019m happy I went somewhere.\u2019 Or, \u2018I\u2019m happy I met someone.\u2019 But it\u2019s a characteristic of mine\u2014I\u2019m here, it\u2019s a beautiful day, let\u2019s enjoy.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is Oppenheimer’s best work by some distance, and it clarifies why his other work disappoints.<\/p>\n

The difference is that here he follows the subject rather than managing it. He goes to find Suzi expecting one story, a tale of white male privilege and female victimhood, and he finds something that refuses that frame entirely. He is honest enough to report what he actually found rather than the story his coalition would have preferred. That is journalistic integrity and it produces writing that feels alive in a way the Holocaust denial series does not.<\/p>\n

The piece also works because the tacit knowledge problem dissolves. He does not need to explain or broker anything. The characters explain themselves. Suzi is so completely herself, the line about being not just the black sheep but the whole herd, the Berkeley Barb personal ad, the absolute absence of retrospective victimhood, that Oppenheimer barely needs to interpret. He just has to get out of the way. His instinct for scene and character, which is genuinely good, has material worthy of it.<\/p>\n

The Gambrill section is remarkable. The roommate who watched, did nothing, lost two friends, became a priest partly out of guilt, and says with complete honesty that his non-participation was not virtue but fear, that is a fully rendered human being. The line about a 19-year-old in 1959 knowing a shitload less than a 19-year-old today is one of those observations that is simple, accurate, and worth more than most sociology.<\/p>\n

What is interesting is where his instincts still show their limits even here. His framing device, comparing Suzi to Emma Sulkowicz and the Rolling Stone UVA story, is the brokerage move reasserting itself at the end. He feels he needs to situate the piece within the contemporary discourse about campus sexual assault, to demonstrate that he knows the approved framework even while reporting something that complicates it. The piece would be stronger without that scaffolding. It does not need permission from current moral fashion to be what it is.<\/p>\n

The detail that Suzi noticed he was Jewish and immediately opened up about Purim and Jewish identity is doing quiet work that he does not press. She chose him partly because he was Jewish, which meant something to her about how he might read her story. That is worth a paragraph he does not write.<\/p>\n

But those are minor complaints. The piece succeeds because reality was stronger than his usual impulse to soften it, and he had the discipline to let that happen. It suggests that when the right subject finds him, he is a better writer than his career profile implies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mark Oppenheimer writes about the original American campus sex scandal starring a Jewess named Suzi who gave a ton of blowjobs at age 14: News that Yale boys had been getting blowjobs from a townie\u2014a freshman townie\u2014was bad news indeed. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,43206,28,43063],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-117094","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-jews","category-mark-oppenheimer","category-sex","category-yale"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117094","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=117094"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117094\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":180811,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117094\/revisions\/180811"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=117094"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=117094"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=117094"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}