Content Warning: this article contains references to sexual assault.
Editor’s note: Yale University has since expunged the suspension for sexual misconduct from Daniel Tenreiro-Braschi’s Yale College disciplinary record, and Tenreiro-Braschi ended up graduating from Yale on time. Click here to learn more.
On Dec. 1, 1955, on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man.
On Nov. 18, 2016, on a charter bus to the Yale-Harvard football game, Daniel Tenreiro-Braschi ’20 — originally ’19 — allegedly got super drunk, stumbled over to a couple of women and grabbed their breasts and buttocks while whispering “I want to fuck you” in their ears, leading Yale to suspend him for sexual misconduct throughout last year.
Andrew T. Miltenberg, Daniel Tenreiro-Braschi’s original lawyer in a suit against Yale claiming that his suspension represented reverse gender discrimination, called his client “somewhat of a hero” and said the case was a “Rosa Parks moment.”
Clearly, comparing Daniel Tenreiro-Braschi to a civil rights activist like Rosa Parks is ridiculous. Rosa Parks didn’t have the courage to grope even one person on the bus.
We should all learn from Daniel Tenreiro-Braschi’s bravery. And now that his unjust two-semester suspension is over and he is free to re-enroll at Yale this semester, we should welcome him back with open arms.
When our hero was suspended for one year after the University-Wide Committee on Sexual Misconduct found him responsible for three separate counts of groping women, did Daniel Tenreiro-Braschi let that get him down? No! He dusted off his Regent Fit Sharkskin 1818 Brooks Brothers suit pants and sued Yale for suspending him.
It is high time that somebody gave Daniel Tenreiro-Braschi a voice (in addition to the Yale Daily News, which published 17 of his columns; his parents, who have stood staunchly by him through his suspension for sexual misconduct; and his excellent legal representation, first at Nesenoff & Miltenberg and then at The Kaplan Law Office and Fleischer Law.)
Every great activist needs a great lawyer. Rosa Parks had Fred Gray, a preacher- turned-attorney who became the first African-American president of the Alabama State Bar. Before he switched lawyers and tragically dropped his case against Yale, Daniel Tenreiro-Braschi had Miltenberg, who defended such civil rights giants as “John Doe,” other “John Doe” and that guy who sued Columbia after his ex-girlfriend’s art project alleging that he anally raped her hurt his feelings. A man after Atticus Finch’s own heart.
Daniel Tenreiro-Braschi has been deeply oppressed not only by Yale, but also by the Yale Daily News. The News had the audacity to use Daniel Tenreiro-Braschi’s full name in their coverage of Daniel Tenreiro-Braschi’s groping allegations, which could leave a negative impression of Daniel Tenreiro-Braschi when Daniel Tenreiro-Braschi is Googled by Wall Street recruiters.
The News also failed to mention Daniel Tenreiro-Braschi’s excellent explanation for his breach of conduct. Daniel Tenreiro-Braschi’s statement to the UWC noted that the Yale-Harvard bus trip occurred only one week after the election of Donald Trump, and that Daniel Tenreiro-Braschi felt socially isolated and rejected by his classmates on the bus because of his conservative political beliefs. Well, in that case, grope on, Daniel!
Think of everything Daniel Tenreiro-Braschi lost just because he allegedly put his hand on a woman’s butt three times outside a Paris nightclub while he was studying abroad, allegedly groped the breasts and buttocks of two women on a crowded Yale-Harvard bus and allegedly created a hostile academic environment.
Rosa Parks was taken to jail for the crime of not giving up her seat. Similarly, according to our brave martyr’s LinkedIn profile and 53-page court filing decrying his suspension, he was tragically prevented from completing his second consecutive summer internship at Goldman Sachs and instead had to settle for an internship at True North Capital Advisors.
Daniel Tenreiro-Braschi’s suspension also represented an immeasurable loss to campus culture. For 12 full months, the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy and the Dwight Hall Socially Responsible Investment Fund were bereft of his moral leadership. SPLASH participants were tragically prevented from taking his course on “A Survey of the Work, Life and Teachings of William F. Buckley Jr.” And students mourned the end of Daniel Tenreiro-Braschi’s News columns in which he calls out grave injustices, like how sometimes the dining halls run out of forks.
In his columns, Daniel Tenreiro-Braschi denounced “disillusioned modern nihilism, hedonistic worlds of drug-fueled benders, violence and casual sex.” He dared us to dream of a Yale “free from societal mores [and] distinctly suited to radical self-expression,” such as, I imagine, allegedly touching other people without their consent. And to his detractors, he said, “Perhaps those clamoring for reform would benefit from reading Plato.” Ah yes, I loved the tits and ass portion of “The Republic.”
The tyrannical PC dictatorship may have silenced our glorious hero for a year, causing him to stop writing his columns and delete his Facebook. Even the Twitter handle @TenreiroDaniel, which is attributed to Daniel Tenreiro-Braschi but could theoretically belong to anyone, has no picture of Daniel Tenreiro-Braschi himself, and instead features a photo of Ezra Pound, the brilliant American poet who composed such vivid aphorisms as, “You let in the Jew and the Jew rotted your empire, and you yourself outjewed the Jew,” and “driving any new idea into the great passive vulva of London.”
Now that his suspension is over, will Daniel Tenreiro-Braschi continue to drive his ideas into the great passive vulva of Yale? It remains to be seen whether the cowardly Yale Daily News will be willing to invite him back as a columnist. But to those patriots who will miss Daniel’s shining emissions, one needs only turn to the News archives, and Tenreiro-Braschi’s siren call for justice will ring out once more:
“I am not saying,” he writes, “[that] you should be an asshole all the time.”
Anna Blech is a senior in Hopper College. Contact her at anna.blech@yale.edu.