BUZZThe editor of a Boston University student newspaper resigned this week after publishing an April Fool’s article that made a joke out of rape:
Under the spoof banner “The Disney Free Press,” one story reported the arrests of “seven frat dwarves” for allegedly drugging and raping a female known as the “fairest of them all.”
Chelsea Diana, the sophomore journalism major who edited The Daily Free Press, apologized Monday in a letter that called the edition “callous and ignorant.” She declined to comment further Tuesday, when the newspaper’s board of directors asked for and got her resignation.
The newspaper also had a story about Cinderella’s prostitution arrest, and another reporting that a woman named Alice had bought LSD from the “Lost Boys fraternity.”
The mock edition followed the recent arrests of two of the school’s male hockey players on sex-related charges and was published three days after a campus rally against sexual violence.
Diana’s apology said that while the stories were meant as jokes, “simply writing them perpetuated rape culture.”
In December, police arrested a Boston University hockey player who allegedly forced his way into a female student’s dorm room and groped her.
In February, authorities arrested a different player they accused of raping a female student. Both pleaded not guilty, and the arrests sparked the university to form a task force to investigate the hockey team’s “culture and climate.”
