Police: Conservative Princeton student faked attack, e-mail threats

MOUNT LAUREL, N.J. - A Princeton University student who argued that his conservative views were not accepted on the campus confessed to fabricating an assault and sending threatening e-mail messages to himself and some friends who shared his views, authorities said Monday.

Princeton Township police said Francisco Nava was not immediately charged with any crime, but the investigation was continuing.

Nava claimed to have been assaulted Friday by two men off-campus, police said. But he later confessed that scrapes and scratches on his face were self-inflicted, and that the threats were his work, too, said Detective Sgt. Ernie Silagyi.

A spokeswoman for the Ivy League university said that disciplinary action _ which could range from a warning to expulsion _ was pending Monday.

"The university takes all matters related to the safety of its community members very seriously," said spokeswoman Lauren Robinson-Brown. "It's particularly concerning that a student would fabricate such matters."

Nava, a 23-year-old junior politics major from Bedford, Texas, found himself at the center of one campus controversy recently when he wrote a column for the student newspaper, The Princetonian, criticizing the school for giving out free condoms, which he said encouraged a dangerous "hook-up culture." A debate followed on the opinion pages of the paper.

A short time later, Nava made his first report to the university public safety office that he was receiving threatening messages in his campus mailbox. A friend says Nava told him one message read, in capital letters: "ONE MORE ARTICLE AND YOU WON'T LIVE TO SEE THE LIGHT OF DAY."

Other members of the Anscombe Society, a conservative student organization, who have spoken out against premarital sex and gay marriage, said they received similar threats. So did Robert George, a professor in the politics department.

Robinson-Brown would not say exactly how the university responded to the threats. But she said, in general, when students are threatened they are given access to counselors, assured that the campus security force will take their calls right away and can be moved to new dorm rooms.

In The Princetonian on Friday, another student, Brandon McGinley, wrote that the threats Nava received did not get the same forceful response as anti-gay graffiti that appeared this semester on the blackboards outside the dorm rooms of some gay students.

It's an argument that Nava and others have frequently made about the campus, which is considered more politically conservative than some other Ivy League schools but to the left of most of the country.

McGinley called it a double standard, which made it seem OK to "use intimidation tactics to silence the voices of morally conservative students."

But the threats, like the attack, turned out to be a hoax.

"Everyone feels saddened, shocked and surprised to have been dragged along in this," McGinley said. "We're all extremely concerned for (his) mental state."

McGinley said it was a surprise that Nava, who was a resident assistant in a dorm and a member of a campuswide committee on religious life, would be involved in such a hoax.

But he said that after the purported attack, Nava's friends began comparing notes and found some several inconsistencies he told them about threats and the attack. He said they told authorities about them.

Nava did not respond immediately to an e-mail from The Associated Press on Monday. A phone listing for him could not be located.