A 29-year-old Secret Service agent is under house arrest facing three felonies over an alleged hazing at a Kappa Alpha Psi alumni chapter in Miami. According to the arrest warrant, two pledges were beaten with paddles and canes over four nights after missing questions about fraternity history. One required skin grafts and, per authorities, would have died of kidney failure. Another was intubated.
Today, two men who lived it.
Pastor Ted Wensley pledged Kappa Alpha Psi and spent years inside it before renouncing it. He is now a pastor, chaplain, and speaker on faith, family, and biblical manhood.
His first reaction to the charges wasn’t shock. It was recognition. It’s part of the culture, he says — and it won’t stop until the culture is dismantled.
Then he tells his own story, and it’s the reason to watch this one.
On turn-back night, his chapter took 121 strokes. Not at once — ten at a station, back in line, ten more, and between the stations other things were done to you. At one of them a cane came down across his hand, severed the nerve and the tendon, and he didn’t notice until the next morning because of the adrenaline. He shows the hand on camera. Thirty years later, he still can’t grip properly with it. He wore the cast afterward as a badge of honor.
Then he explains what it bought him. On campus he’d walk around in a suit carrying a briefcase with nothing in it, and skip class so people could see him. And the night after he crossed, when a brother finally showed him the secret grip, it was three squeezes on the hand. He asked: that’s it? And the brother told him yes — now you have to pretend it’s more than it is.
A briefcase with nothing in it. A grip that isn’t a grip.
He walks John through what pulled him in at nineteen — a good father who worked full-time and wasn’t hands-on, a second-grade teacher who was the first man to call him “son,” a blood brother sixteen years older who one day told him to leave the room because they had business he couldn’t hear. And what pulled him out: a night he heard an audible voice telling him three times he was about to go somewhere he wouldn’t come back from, a Bible study he walked into that same evening, and the woman teaching it, whom he married.
And then leaving. He argues the strongholds were oaths — so he told his wife the meaning of Phi Nu Pi, the secret he’d sworn to keep. His best friend, the dean of his line and godfather to his only child, called and warned him: I’ll have to tell your brother, I’ll have to tell everyone on the yard, and you’ll have to watch your back.
Wensley’s answer: For the next four hours I’ll be in a lawn chair in front of my house, in a t-shirt, jeans and Timbs. Anybody has an issue, come see me as a man.
Nobody came.
Then Stefan Height, a former youth pastor and real estate professional who also pledged Kappa Alpha Psi and has since renounced it.
He knew he’d pledge before he finished high school. His uncle pledged at Georgia Tech — successful, good to his wife, a family man — and at seventeen he assumed the fraternity was where that came from. He says now it was his uncle’s own character and work ethic all along.
He talks about the years after, what he calls the dark path and the womanizing, the morning he woke up in a young woman’s bed and heard a voice ask what he was doing there, and the second year of his marriage when he says the Lord finally broke it. His term for what the fraternity was: spiritual prostitution. A golden calf.
