Straight up from me to you: I don’t know if this is true or a hoax or political gamesmanship, but it’s starting to get a lot of play. An article at GQ reports that as a college student at Baylor, Rand Paul was a member of a secret society known as the NoZe, a group officially banned by the university. The article goes on to report from an anonymous source (saying she doesn’t want her name disclosed for professional reasons) that Paul and a NoZe friend kidnapped her, bound and blindfolded, took her to an apartment where they tried to force her to smoke pot then moved her against her will again and forced to knee in a river and worship “Aqua Buddha “.
Here’s the part of the article that has everyone abuzz:
The strangest episode of Paul’s time at Baylor occurred one afternoon in 1983 (although memories about all of these events are understandably a bit hazy, so the date might be slightly off), when he and a NoZe brother paid a visit to a female student who was one of Paul’s teammates on the Baylor swim team. According to this woman, who requested anonymity because of her current job as a clinical psychologist, “He and Randy came to my house, they knocked on my door, and then they blindfolded me, tied me up, and put me in their car. They took me to their apartment and tried to force me to take bong hits. They’d been smoking pot.” After the woman refused to smoke with them, Paul and his friend put her back in their car and drove to the countryside outside of Waco, where they stopped near a creek. “They told me their god was ‘Aqua Buddha’ and that I needed to bow down and worship him,” the woman recalls. “They blindfolded me and made me bow down to ‘Aqua Buddha’ in the creek. I had to say, ‘I worship you Aqua Buddha, I worship you.’ At Baylor, there were people actively going around trying to save you and we had to go to chapel, so worshiping idols was a big no-no.”
Nearly 30 years later, the woman is still trying to make sense of that afternoon. “They never hurt me, they never did anything wrong, but the whole thing was kind of sadistic. They were messing with my mind. It was some kind of joke.” She hadn’t actually realized that Paul wound up leaving Baylor early. “I just know I never saw Randy after that—for understandable reasons, I think.”
Anything that comes from an anonymous source is automatically suspect, but the odd part of the story is that Rand Paul’s people are deflecting questions rather than issuing an outright denial. They are calling the story National Enquirer journalism about Paul’s “teenage years” and citing Paul’s participation in various political and athletic activities while at Baylor.
The whole article is here. And a WaPo update is here.
UPDATE: The anonymous woman in this story now denies that she was kidapped “in a legal sense” by Rand Paul and his friend. Interviewed by WaPo, she now says,
“I went along because they were my friends. There was an implicit degree of cooperation in the whole thing. I felt like I was being hazed…[They] came over to my house as friends that I knew…They immediately said, `We’re going to tie you up and go for a ride.”
More from WaPo:
She reiterated that they took her to a room filled with pot smoke and told her to partake, but she emphasized that she hadn’t been forced. “He did not drug me,” she said. “He did not force me physically in any way.”
She said they then “took me out to this creek and made me worship Aqua Buddha.” And she added that the whole thing was so “weird” that afterwards she ended relations with Paul and his friends.
Paul’s campaign team continues to non-respond to the general basis of the story, but claims vindication on the “kidnapping” aspect.
Contributor, aka tidbits. Retired attorney in complex litigation, death penalty defense and constitutional law. Former Nat’l Board Chair: Alzheimer’s Association. Served on multiple political campaigns, including two for U.S. Senator Mark O. Hatfield (R-OR). Contributing author to three legal books and multiple legal publications.