I spent the last 3 weeks binging on Mad Men, and after seeing Jon Ham waltz around as the suave Donald Draper this news doesn’t surprise me whatsoever. I mean look at this guy:
Does it surprise anyone that underneath that calm exterior is a guy who likes to make pledges cry by setting their pants on fire? Granted, Jon Hamm isn’t necessarily Donald Draper, but come on. The guy plays the character effortlessly (or so it seems), so is it really shocking to anyone that Hamm reportedly hazed the shit out of a bunch of kids while he was a Sigma Nu at the University of Texas Austin? According to Radar Online,
According to explosive court documents obtained by Starmagazine, 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.”
After the mother of the first pledge reported the incident to police arrest warrants were issued for several Sigma Nu members, including Hamm (obviously). While Hamm’s charges of misdemeanor hazing and assault were dismissed in 1995 after he reached a plea deal, not all of his brothers were so lucky: three of them were sentenced to 30 days in jail for the incident.
From what it looks like Hamm’s come a long way since I’m ASSUMING he hasn’t done anything even close to this since then, and of course we aren’t all the same people we were while we were in college. For example, I was a stupid shithead who can’t do math and…wait…
Oh.
[H/T Radar Online, header image via Shutterstock]