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Who is Katherine Ellis? Woman reveals sorority culture’s dark side as she was fined $4K for being with cancer-stricken father

The 24-year-old talked about her experience at the Bama Rush and about her disappointment after joining a sorority at the University of Alabama

BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS: A woman recently shared a flashback about her time at a sorority in Alabama. Katherine Ellis joined the University of Alabama in 2017 and during her freshman year, she participated in Bama Rush to join a sorority. It was a time of hope and excitement for Katherine Ellis but her happiness was short-lived when catastrophe struck in her family.

In a video she posted on her TikTok page, which is followed by over 45,000 people, the 24-year-old said, “Imagine joining a sorority at Alabama thinking it's gonna be the best thing ever but then your dad gets cancer, and they try to fine you thousands of dollars because of it," the Daily Mail reported.

Who is Katherine Ellis?

Katherine Ellis is a sports reporter and a podcast host. Ellis, who has 13,000 followers on Instagram, gave details from her flashback, saying, “Freshman year I went to Alabama, and like every single girl there who wants a social life, I rushed. When you want to rush at Alabama, you have to decide you want to rush months before, and then go through this whole registration process. The registration is an application that takes a long time to do. You have to submit photos of yourselves. You have to submit your resume [and] letters of recommendation.”

“I didn’t know I needed f**king letters of recommendation to hang out with a bunch of girls and go to parties. Thousands of girls are going through a rush at the exact same time. So you can't actually pick who you want in your sorority or not based on the first round because the first round is like five minutes,” she noted, before explaining, “So the first round is all GPA drops, and no one told me if I had below a 3.0 GPA, I would be dropped from almost every single house right off the bat.”

“I also have no idea why the sororities even care about grades because I had a 2.9 going into Bama, and I left with a 4.0. If you can spell Bama — not even Alabama — you can get a 4.0 at that school,” Ellis stated.

‘I dropped’

However, after much effort, the woman got into a sorority, which she chose not to name. She revealed that after being selected, she and her sorority sisters had to prepare for the homecoming and do “pomping” for hours. Pomping is an Alabama tradition that involves making portraits out of thousands of two-by-two-inch pieces of tissue paper rolled up into little balls.

Ellis said, “For the two weeks leading up to homecoming, we were required to be at the sorority house for eight hours a day, pomping it up. If you're caught not actively pomping, the hour didn't count, and for every hour you miss, you owe them $100.” However, around the same time, Ellis' father got cancer and she went home to be with him as he went through a “life-threatening surgery”. She mentioned, “I missed a week, and they fined me $4,000. So I dropped.”

The content creator also revealed that after leaving the University of Alabama, she went on to attend Boston University before graduating in 2021. Ellis’ story has received a lot of comments from other social media users who also had bad experiences in their sororities. One said, “I got fined for missing an event bc I was in the ER.” Another one posted, “I got fined for going to my grandpa's funeral.” The third one added, “It’s crazy. My daughter was in the sorority. She missed meetings due to surgery and was fined.”