When Krista Millay declined an invitation to participate in a UA fraternity’s philanthropy event, she didn’t think anything of it.
She certainly wasn’t prepared for the barrage of angry emails, phone calls, tweets and Facebook messages she received in the following weeks, after a website aimed at college students and young adults posted a fake news story about the situation.
The post, “Arizona Women’s Resource Center Cancels AEPi’s ‘Walk A Mile In Her Shoes’ Philanthropy For PC Reasons Too Insane To Make Up,” appeared on a national website for college fraternities, Total Frat Move, on Nov. 23.
Days earlier, Millay, director of the University of Arizona Women’s Resource Center, received an email and phone call from a member of Alpha Epsilon Pi, asking if the center would like to participate in the fraternity’s philanthropy event, Walk a Mile in Her Shoes, during which men walk one mile in a pair of women’s high-heeled shoes.
According to its website, the walk “is a playful opportunity for men to raise awareness in their community about the serious causes, effects and remediations to men’s sexualized violence against women.”
Millay called Jack Kaplan, the fraternity member, to decline the invitation, telling him the walk was disrespectful toward transgender people and wasn’t an event the center would support.
“One of the main reasons we disagree with the event is that at this moment in time, a disproportionate amount of our sexual assaults occur in Greek-affiliated houses,” Millay said. “So we don’t we don’t want to support our Greek men doing a fun event around sexual assault.”
A short time later, Kaplan called back to ask if the center would reconsider, and when she declined again, he asked if they’d be protesting the event.
“I told him it’s just not on our radar right now to protest fraternity events. We just don’t have the capacity for that,” Millay said.
Kaplan told the Star that he was later called into the office of the Dean of Greek Life, where he was told the Women’s Resource Center had threatened to protest the event.
“I was ‘strongly advised’ not to hold the event,” Kaplan said. “I took ‘strongly advised’ to mean that I cannot do it.”
Kaplan’s former employer, who runs a Southern California nonprofit, reached out to Millay on Kaplan’s behalf to talk to her about participating in the event.
“She told me we were creating collateral damage and you never say no to young people who are willing to do good,” Millay said. “I explained that that’s not really true. We don’t want to lend our name on something we don’t believe in.”
Kaplan said his former employer told him that during the conversation, Millay spoke negatively about “white males” and “rich privileged children.” Millay denied making those statements.
The fraternity eventually canceled the event, and after hearing about the incident, the author of Total Frat Move’s post, Rob Fox, reached out to Kaplan, who sent him a screen shot of the original email he sent Millay.
The post that appeared on Total Frat Move said the event had been “torpedoed” by the women’s center “for reasons too insane to make up.” The post included the screen shot of Kaplan’s email, followed by a paraphrased conversation between Kaplan and Millay that she says never happened.
“I don’t know if the fraternity understands that it rallied this segment of their population around an issue that wasn’t factually true,” Millay said, adding that Fox never contacted her for comment before publishing the article. “I don’t have the authority to cancel a fraternity event ... and Jack and I have never emailed. I’ve never exchanged an email with Jack, and the whole premise of the Total Frat Move article was based on this exchange between me and him.”
Millay said she received phone calls from parents in other states, including a county prosecutor, reprimanding her for the way she spoke to Kaplan, based on what she called “obviously fake” quotes.
In addition to the made-up quote, the related articles that appeared on the website should have indicated to readers that the story was fake, Millay said.
“I was shocked. I thought, people aren’t even reading the article in context. They’re not even looking at the website,” she said. “They’re not paying attention to the context clues on the actual site itself.”
In the weeks that followed, Millay said she received more than 100 hateful phone calls, emails and messages on social media. Some of the email senders visited the center’s website and copied all of the student staff members’ addresses into the messages.
Although none of the messages threatened Millay’s life or safety, she says a number of people threatened to have her fired.
After receiving the first few emails, Millay came up with a formulated response to send to anyone who emailed her, addressing the falsities and her reasons for choosing not to participate in the event.
She also took the opportunity to present some statistics related to sexual assault on the UA campus, noting statistics from the 2015 Association of American Universities Survey, which says that 40 percent of UA female survivors of non-consensual penetration by physical force were assaulted in a fraternity house.
“Maybe three people wrote back and said, ‘Oh you know, I see that I didn’t have all the information,’” she said.
The messages have slowed since winter break started, but Millay said that she’s still seen a few pop up on Facebook.
Fox did not respond to the Star’s request for comment.
