PHILADELPHIA A former student who blew the whistle on a Penn State fraternity’s secret Facebook page featuring photos of naked women said the university ignored his complaints about sexual assault, hazing and drug use.

James Vivenzio of Great Falls, Virginia, said in a lawsuit filed Monday that he waited eight months for Penn State to take action before going to police in January.

As a freshman pledge, he said, he was burned with cigarettes, force-fed buckets of liquor mixed with urine, vomit and hot sauce and made to guzzle alcohol as part of fraternity hazing rituals. He said he feared someone would end up dead.

“I never intended to become a whistle-blower,” Vivenzio, now 21, said at a news conference in Philadelphia Monday. “I was afraid somebody could die unless the abuse, the Facebook 2.0 site, and all that was going on, were shut down.”

Penn State quickly denied the claims filed in the lawsuit, which named the school, the fraternity and others as defendants.

Penn State recently suspended Kappa Delta Rho for three years. The fraternity’s national office on Monday expelled 38 fraternity members, saying they violated the fraternity’s values.

Kappa Delta Rho executive director Joseph Rosenberg, however, said fraternity members who assumed responsibility for their actions would not be expelled.

The fraternity expulsions have no effect on the students’ status at the university.