'Gossip Girl'-Style Facebook Scandal Plays Out at Connecticut Prep School

(Nov. 23) -- America's elite prep schools may be portrayed as envious, insidious bastions of backstabbing politics on television, but in the real world they sometimes turn out to be -- well, pretty much the same.

Connecticut's famous Choate Rosemary Hall, once home to JFK, Ivanka Trump, Edward Albee and others, has become embroiled in a Facebook scandal that seems ripped from an episode of "Gossip Girl," The Daily Beast's Lynnley Browning reports. A group of Choate students are in serious trouble after posting flames to a 200-page private Facebook thread titled "Mwaahhahaha," where they attacked other students and bragged about drinking and taking drugs.

"You know it is possible to say no when someone tries to have sex with you. Just throwing that out there. Like no is still an option, you whore," read one post.

"EWWW, SHE'S SO GROSS AND FAKED AND SPRAY TANNED," wrote another.

The administration responded quickly when Mwaahhahaha went public, deleting the thread, expelling two of the authors and suspending four more. They also blocked Facebook access from the school, though that decision seems fruitless to many students who own smart phones.

"Banning Facebook is like trying to use a fork to plug a hole in a dam," David Gudelunas, an associate professor of communications at Fairfield University in Connecticut, told the Connecticut Post Chronicle. "It seems to me that there should be more interest in teaching young people its proper use, and it should start as early as middle school."

The scandal touches on hot-button issues like free speech, privacy and cyber-bullying, like the sort blamed for the suicides of Rutgers freshman Tyler Clementi, Massachusetts high school student Phoebe Prince and myriad others. Both high school and the Internet can bring out the worst in people, and school administrators and others have been struggling to manage the wave of vitriol that comes at their intersection.

Luckily, the Choate case has not escalated to the tragic consequences of some of the other incidents. And it will probably remain no more than one entry in a long list of prep-school scandals. In fact, it may just be another case of life imitating art.

"One needs only to look around to notice the girls here at Choate who try to dress and act exactly like Blair Waldorf, with over-the-top headbands and unnecessary hostility toward each other," a Choate senior wrote in the school newspaper earlier this year.

Read More at The Daily Beast.

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