Boston University Paper’s April Fools Issue Gone Awry: Rape Jokes Immediately Draw Backlash, Force Apology
Boston University’s independent student newspaper, The Daily Free Press, printed their annual April Fools edition. The theme: Disney. The Disney Free Press. Adorable in theory and so many possibilities, right? For reasons unclear, the paper decided to print a lead story entitled “BROken egos: BU fraternity suspended for assaulting female student.” A tale about rape that — even neglecting the recent allegations against BU’s hockey team — is far from funny.
The paper (which I wrote for during my time at BU, and is known on campus as the FreeP) tweeted a teaser before the edition was available:
Want a laugh? Pick up the FreeP tomorrow for our annual April Fools issue and your dreams will come true.
— The Daily Free Press (@dailyfreepress) April 1, 2012
The story, which was not posted online, caused a stir beyond the BU bubble not long after the issue became available. It draws from familiar Disney references, but it’s essentially joking about rape and roofied sorority girls. The leading sentence is, “Seven frat dwarves were arrested last night after they allegedly drugged and gangbanged a Boston University student in an Allston Village cabin.” Later in the story comes this:
“BRO has bro0ed itself out,” said Gaston, the Chairman of the IFC. “No one drinks like the BROs, no one shoots like the BROs and definitely no one rapes like the BROs.”
You can read the whole story over at Jezebel. The story beneath that one had the headline, “Cinderella in political prostitution ring, stepsisters vie for throne.” Picking up on the outrage, the FreeP again took to Twitter: “We want to apologize for our ill thought out April Fools issue and are so sorry for offending our readers.” Another tweet followed up: “We know an apology does not make up for the callous decisions we made, but please look out for a letter from the editors in tomorrow issue.”
Turns out the paper just released an apology. “Our decisions were juvenile and insensitive. We deeply regret our heartless behavior and did not mean to personally offend anyone,” the letter reads. It continues:
We want to stress that all of the ill-conceived jokes in Monday’s issue in no way represent the true values of The Daily Free Press or any of its staff members. While we do not support any of the stereotypes that we wrongly spread in the issue, we know that by publishing the material we inadvertently proliferated them. We know that even though the stories were meant to be jokes, simply writing them perpetuated rape culture.
An apology was inevitable given the reaction. Why this was originally considered a good, or funny, idea — or why they thought readers would appreciate it — is beyond me. More so given the serious sexual assault charges haunting the university’s hockey team. It’s disappointing. In the FreeP‘s own words, it is callous and insensitive.
