Jon Hamm: Mad Men actor charged for violent fraternity hazing

In the television drama Mad Men, he plays a charming, charismatic ad creative with a dark, secret past. Now it has emerged that the actor Jon Hamm may have a slightly murky history of his own.

In November 1990, Hamm, then 19, allegedly took part in the brutal “hazing” of a fellow student at the University of Texas, during a fraternity initiation that led to a lawsuit, criminal charges and the disbandment of the Sigma Nu fraternity.

According to court and school records unearthed this week by Star magazine, the incident took place while Hamm was a second-year student in Austin, Texas. The alleged victim was Mark Sanders, a Sigma Nu “pledge”, as students joining a fraternity are known. Mr Sanders, who was 20 at the time, claimed he was subjected to a lengthy, violent ritual that included being dragged through the frat-house with a hammer, and having his trousers set alight.

A 1991 lawsuit claimed that Hamm had become “mad, I mean really mad” when Mr Sanders had been unable to recite a list of details he was supposed to have memorised about members of the fraternity. “He rears back and hits me left-handed, and he hit me right over my right kidney, I mean square over it,” Mr Sanders alleged. “Good solid hit and that, that stood me right up.”

Hamm and fellow fraternity members then allegedly lifted Mr Sanders into the air by his underwear and “pulled it back and forth in a sawing motion”, before Hamm set the pledge’s jeans alight, telling him he could not extinguish the fire with his hand, but must instead “blow it out”. In its 1991 report on the incident a Texas newspaper, The San Antonio Light, said Mr Sanders was beaten with a paddle and led “around the fraternity house with the claw of a hammer beneath his genitals”.

The student claimed he sought medical treatment and left the university. An arrest warrant for Hamm was issued in 1993 and the future Don Draper was charged with hazing, though he reached a deal that allowed him to complete probation without being convicted. A separate assault charge was dismissed.

Four other fraternity members were also charged with hazing and the university’s Sigma Nu chapter was closed. Representatives for Hamm, an unknown at the time, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In a 2008 interview with W magazine, the actor said he had left the University of Texas in his second year and returned to his family home in Missouri after his father died. Although he had ambitions to be an actor, at the time he was preoccupied, he said, with “getting laid and getting hammered”. Last month, Hamm’s publicist announced he had completed a 30-day stint in rehab for alcohol addiction.

The case has come to light again as Mad Men broadcasts its final episodes on Sky Atlantic. College fraternities have again been in the news and one, at the University of Oklahoma, was recently banned after a video surfaced of members singing a racist ditty.