Shortly before he graduated in 2021, Salomonsky filed a motion in Robert’s lawsuit seeking a court order for Robert to stop calling him “John Doe 2” and asserting that he does not need anonymity. The Post is, however, naming the other freshman who was targeted, Jacob Salomonsky. The Post is also not identifying the defendants because, though the police investigated the incident, they were not charged with crimes, and Robert, now 23, did not press charges himself. The Post is identifying the former cadet who filed the lawsuits by his middle name, Robert, because his anonymity as a plaintiff has so far not been denied in court. The waterboarding incident occurred during a “rat mission,” an unsanctioned task, ranging from the silly to the extreme, that freshmen complete at an upperclassman’s order. If the matter does not rise to a criminal charge but is considered conduct unbecoming of a cadet, the matter will be adjudicated by the commandant and/or the superintendent, up to, and including, expulsion from VMI.” If a cadet is found guilty by a court of law, they will be permanently dismissed from the Institute. “Reports of incidents that could constitute hazing are always reported to the Commonwealth Attorney and investigated by law enforcement.
“Hazing has been and continues to be a dismissible offense and a crime,” the college said. In a statement to The Washington Post, a VMI spokesman declined to explain why the students involved in the waterboarding incident were not expelled, saying federal law prohibits the school from discussing specific cadet disciplinary cases. The school routinely expels students who violate its one-strike-and-you’re-out honor code, barring cadets from lying, cheating, stealing or tolerating those who do. “Any individual or organization found to be in violation of this policy shall be subject to disciplinary action, which may include a sanction up to and including dismissal for cadets and termination of employment for faculty, administrators, coaches, and staff,” VMI’s policy states.
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The 182-year-old college, which received $21.6 million in state funding for the 2021-22 academic year, educates about 1,650 students on its Lexington campus.īut with the independent investigation complete and a series of reforms underway, the lawsuit against the five VMI graduates in Roanoke County Circuit Court highlights another controversial component of the college’s culture: its century-plus-old “rat line.”Īt VMI, new students, known as “rats,” are subjected to a roughly six-month initiation process, enduring grueling boot-camp-style workouts and verbal abuse from upperclassmen.īut VMI warns its cadets, coaches and teachers that the school does not tolerate hazing, which can pose a threat to student safety. (Matt McClain/Washington Post)įor more than a year, the hazing lawsuits have been overshadowed by the state-ordered investigation into racism and sexism at VMI. When his case was dismissed in 2020, he immediately filed another suit against the five students in state court, seeking nearly $1 million in damages and legal fees. He filed a federal lawsuit under the name “John Doe” against the college, its senior administrators and five of the cadets in the room. The Facebook photos made the former cadet so irate that he decided to sue. Why, the former cadet wondered, did VMI suspend his tormentor and two other upperclassmen instead of expelling them, allowing them to return to school and graduate? And why was the military commissioning any of them as officers, including two cadets who were in the room and did nothing to stop it? Waterboarding is designed to simulate the feeling of being drowned and became the subject of heated debate when the CIA used it to interrogate al-Qaida detainees after the Sept. The room had been darkened, the feet of the two freshmen were bound with duct tape, and an Islamic call to prayer was played on a speaker to invoke the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal, the police report and the VMI disciplinary hearing transcript show. One VMI official testified that the January 2018 incident, though brief, was one of the worst episodes of abuse against a freshman he could remember at the nation’s oldest state-supported military college, where hazing is prohibited by state law and VMI policy.
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