Remembering fight clubs
It's a time the Leavitt family wishes to forget, but apparently the fight club from five years ago is still permanently attached to its legacy.
USA Today has a feature this morning on teen fight clubs, which apparently, even seven years after the Brad Pitt movie, are making resurgence.
Six paragraphs into the story, Chase Leavitt, son of Health and Human Services secretary and former Utah governor Mike Leavitt, is noted for being part of a fight club at an LDS ward chapel in December 2001. Apparently, to make a point about a resurgence, you must dredge up old news.
From the story
"Many fight-club brawlers are suburban high school kids, not gang members or juvenile criminals. Chase Leavitt, son of U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt, was arrested for participating in a fight club at a Mormon church gym in Salt Lake City in December 2001, when his father was Utah's governor.
"The younger Leavitt, then 18, pleaded guilty to disturbing the peace and trespassing in September 2002 and was sentenced to 40 hours of community service, says Sim Gill, the chief prosecutor of Salt Lake City who handled the case.
"According to Gill, Chase Leavitt laced up boxing gloves and punched it out with a 17-year-old opponent at the church, which is in an affluent neighborhood. Organizers handed out fliers advertising the fight. About 100 students from Leavitt's East High School paid admission before cops raided the premises. As the teens fled, they dropped a video camera with footage of several bouts that night.
"This is not something that just happens in poor neighborhoods," Gill says. "This crosses all socioeconomic bounds. It's happening in middle-class and upper-middle-class environments."
Secretary Leavitt and Chase Leavitt declined to comment, referring calls to attorney Loren Weiss. He says Chase Leavitt was "prosecuted for who he was, not what he did."
-- Thomas Burr
USA Today has a feature this morning on teen fight clubs, which apparently, even seven years after the Brad Pitt movie, are making resurgence.
Six paragraphs into the story, Chase Leavitt, son of Health and Human Services secretary and former Utah governor Mike Leavitt, is noted for being part of a fight club at an LDS ward chapel in December 2001. Apparently, to make a point about a resurgence, you must dredge up old news.
From the story
"Many fight-club brawlers are suburban high school kids, not gang members or juvenile criminals. Chase Leavitt, son of U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt, was arrested for participating in a fight club at a Mormon church gym in Salt Lake City in December 2001, when his father was Utah's governor.
"The younger Leavitt, then 18, pleaded guilty to disturbing the peace and trespassing in September 2002 and was sentenced to 40 hours of community service, says Sim Gill, the chief prosecutor of Salt Lake City who handled the case.
"According to Gill, Chase Leavitt laced up boxing gloves and punched it out with a 17-year-old opponent at the church, which is in an affluent neighborhood. Organizers handed out fliers advertising the fight. About 100 students from Leavitt's East High School paid admission before cops raided the premises. As the teens fled, they dropped a video camera with footage of several bouts that night.
"This is not something that just happens in poor neighborhoods," Gill says. "This crosses all socioeconomic bounds. It's happening in middle-class and upper-middle-class environments."
Secretary Leavitt and Chase Leavitt declined to comment, referring calls to attorney Loren Weiss. He says Chase Leavitt was "prosecuted for who he was, not what he did."
-- Thomas Burr
3:50 PM
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