Jewish UCLA Fraternity Sued Over Sexual Assault

By JTA August 24, 2018

(JTA) — A female student at the University of California, Los Angeles has sued the Zeta Beta Tau fraternity there and one of the fraternity’s former members, accusing him of sexual assault.

The accuser, who is remaining anonymous in the lawsuit, says that Blake Lobato, a ZBT brother, forcibly penetrated her while she was drunk after a party in August 2016, according to the Daily Bruin, UCLA’s student newspaper. Lobato had allegedly pressured her to drink to excess, then convinced her to go to sleep at the fraternity. The student says in the suit that she physically resisted Lobato and screamed at him to stop.

The student says she reported the incident to the then-president of ZBT, but the fraternity did not investigate the issue. Subsequently, Irving Chase, a lawyer who sits on the ZBT board, allegedly attempted to dissuade the student from reporting the incident to the school. ZBT is a historically Jewish fraternity.

The suit, filed Aug. 10 in Los Angeles Superior Court, names ZBT, UCLA’s Interfraternity Council, and Sigma Alpha Epsilon, where the party in question took place, for negligence. The student is also suing Lobato for assault, battery and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

This year, we have stood together in strength and sorrow. Our Forward team has worked around the clock to help you find clarity amid the chaos.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO