(Newser)
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Mitt Romney led the charge in a bullying incident while he was a senior at a prestigious Michigan boarding school, five independent witnesses tell the Washington Post. The target was one John Lauber, a soft-spoken new kid at the school who was often teased for his presumed homosexuality. What set Romney off was Lauber's hairstyle—he'd bleached it and draped it over one eye. "He can't look like that," one friend recalls Romney saying. "That's wrong. Just look at him!"
A few days later, Romney led a group of students, shouting that they planned to cut Lauber's hair, who cornered and tackled him. The Post notes that, as "Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help," Romney himself pulled out a pair of scissors and sliced off the offending locks. No one was ever disciplined, but, "To this day it troubles me," says one student who participated. "What a senseless, stupid, idiotic thing to do." Lauber died in 2004, but one former student says he ran into him in the '90s, and apologized. "It was horrible," Lauber replied. "It's something I have thought about a lot since then." A Romney spokesman says the candidate doesn't remember the incident.
