Mitt Romney ... spotted something he thought did not belong at a school where the boys wore ties and carried briefcases. John Lauber, a soft-spoken new student one year behind Romney, was perpetually teased for his nonconformity and presumed homosexuality. Now he was walking around the all-boys school with bleached-blond hair that draped over one eye, and Romney wasn't having it.
"He can't look like that. That's wrong. Just look at him!" an incensed Romney told Matthew Friedemann, his close friend in the Stevens Hall dorm, according to Friedemann's recollection. Mitt, the teenaged son of Michigan Gov. George Romney, kept complaining about Lauber's look, Friedemann recalled.
A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school's collegiate quad to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber's hair. Friedemann followed them to a nearby room where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors.
Well, that's not very nice. Of course it was a long time ago, apparently verified by independently talking to 5 others who were present. However for the moment, Romney has no recollection of the alleged incident, which if true is about as disturbing as the incident itself. The victim however, seemed to recall the incident very clearly.
One of his former bullies, David Seed, ran into Lauber in an airport in the mid-1990s and approached him, apologizing for his role in what happened all those years ago. Lauber told him that the attack was "horrible" and recounted how frightened he felt as it took place, then acknowledged, "It's something I have thought about a lot since then." We'll never know whether those scars ever fully healed for John Lauber; he died in 2004.
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