Hugin actively fought anti-discrimination policies that protect gays, lesbians
New Brunswick, NJ – Greedy drug company CEO Bob Hugin has displayed a troubling pattern of intolerance, particularly against women and the LGBTQ community, that has gone on for years. While president of the all-male, exclusive Tiger Inn eating club at Princeton University, he fought against the inclusion of women, and against campus anti-discrimination policies that included protections for gays and lesbians.
“This is the real Bob Hugin: anti-women, and anti-gay,” said Menendez for Senate Campaign Chairman Michael Soliman. “Bob Hugin was in a position to show real leadership on advancing the causes of women and the LGBTQ community and failed, instead perpetuating a culture of discrimination and hate. Bob Hugin can’t erase his past. He is a disgrace and unfit to represent New Jersey and all its vibrant diversity.”
While an undergrad at Princeton in 1976, Hugin led a campus petition drive aimed at blocking the school from expanding its anti-discrimination policy to include gays and lesbians after gay activists on campus tried to launch the Gay Alliance of Princeton and were victims of harassment and vandalism. When members of the Alliance hung banners in their dorm room windows, they encountered eggs, rocks and stink bombs, and intruders broke into the room of one of the activists and vandalized his property.
According to published reports at the time, Hugin’s petition urged the university to rescind its action and called for a student referendum, saying “students as a whole should have a say on something so controversial as this.” Hugin then said that if a member of the Tiger Inn was found to be gay, “he wouldn’t last long.”
“To call extending basic protections to gay students ‘controversial’ and to say that someone who is gay wouldn’t be welcome in your exclusive club, just goes to show you the kind of small-minded, loathsome man Bob Hugin is. This goes to the heart of his character. What kind of man watches as his fellow classmates are attacked, ridiculed and harassed, and then stands up for the attackers? What kind of man perpetuates stereotypes of hate and intolerance just to protect his good ol’ boys club? Bob Hugin is nothing but a bully and a thug,” said Steven Goldstein, founder of Garden State Equality. “He can try to slither out of it, but there is no justification for his actions. And his continued, unwavering support for Donald Trump and other anti-LGBTQ candidates and causes only prove he’s the same man he was when he first showed his true colors at Princeton.”
Last night, Hugin desperately tried to walk back anti-women statements he made as a married adult in his late 30s, 15 years after graduating Princeton, when he fought, as president of the Tiger Inn, to keep it all-male. Even after the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled in favor of the women who brought suit and ordered the university’s eating clubs to go co-ed, Hugin called it “politically correct fascism,” then unsuccessfully pursued to have the case overturned at the U.S. Supreme Court.
“Absolutely disgraceful. This wasn’t youthful naïveté. Bob Hugin was in his late 30s and married for five years at the time. Nothing about his disdain for women seems to have changed,” Soliman continued. “Since then, Hugin has given hundreds of thousands to candidates who have fought to roll back women’s rights, he supports extreme Supreme Court justices who would reverse Roe v. Wade, and he was a delegate for a presidential candidate who bragged about sexually assaulting women.”
Senator Bob Menendez has been a lifelong champion for women, women’s reproductive rights and equal pay. He is the chief sponsor of the Equal Rights Amendment that would enshrine equality for women in the U.S. Constitution. As the nation’s highest-ranked elected Hispanic, Bob Menendez has fought his entire career to end discrimination and ensure all Americans, regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, or status in life, have an equal opportunity to achieve their full potential.
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