Missoula Rape and the justice system in a college town

THREE YEARS AGO, a young woman befriended by the powerhouse author Jon Krakauer and his wife told them she had been raped when she was a teenager by a boy she knew and, later, for a second time, by a family friend. She was still struggling to recover. "She gobbled Adderall to stay awake and guzzled alcohol to fall asleep," Krakauer writes. "It was an unconscious attempt to annihilate herself." Krakauer set out to educate himself about rape, especially when it is committed by someone the victim knows, looking for survivors who would tell him their stories. He focused on why many don't go to the police as he tried "to comprehend the repercussions of sexual assault from the perspective of those who have been victimized." The result is "Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town," which has more in common with "Under the Banner of Heaven," Krakauer's depiction of the evils of Mormon fundamentalism, than with his morally complex tales of misadventure, "Into the Wild" and "Into Thin Air." In "Missoula," Krakauer looks at the University of Montana, the local police and the prosecutor's office through the eyes of five women who reported rapes or attempted rapes between 2010 and 2012. The Justice Department investigated the handling of 80 sexual assault cases in Missoula during this period, and Krakauer supplies dismaying details that would explain why the department found a pattern of disrespect and indifference toward alleged victims. For example, he tells us, a detective interviewing an accused male student quickly reassured him that she was certain he didn't commit a crime, because "we have a lot of cases where girls come in and report stuff they are not sure about, and then it becomes rape." Similarly, the police chief sent an article to the female student in this case, citing two studies claiming that 45 percent of rape accusations are false. "Scholars have debunked both of these articles," Krakauer writes, correctly pointing out that better research has estimated the rate of false rape reports at 2 percent and 8 percent. Another sore spot is the university's prized football team, which included several players accused of sexual assault. The allegations split Missoula - especially because they involved the quarterback Jordan Johnson. On a Saturday night in February 2012, a woman whom Krakauer calls Cecilia Washburn (her name was not released) said she arranged to watch a movie with Johnson. The night before, she'd hugged him at a dance and, Krakauer reports, drunkenly said, "Jordy, I would do you anytime." But Washburn didn't shower or put on clean clothes or makeup the night he came to her house, and she testified that she didn't plan to have sex with him. Watching the movie on her bed, the two agree, they started kissing and Washburn let Johnson take her shirt off. He said they then had consensual sex. But Washburn said that she protested, "No! Not tonight!" as Johnson pinned her down and pulled off her leggings and underwear. Washburn's male housemate was in the living room just outside her door, playing a video game. She didn't call out to him, but when Johnson went to the bathroom, she grabbed her phone and texted, "Omg, I think I might have just gotten raped, he kept pushing and pushing and I said no but he wouldn't listen." A few minutes later, she drove Johnson home; when she returned, her housemate said, she cried inconsolably. Faced with this case and others, the university president fired the football coach and athletic director The football team responded with an open letter that contained no words of apology and warned the school's authority figures "to carefully consider the impact of their statements and actions on our team and our great tradition." Three months later, following an investigation, the president of the university decided to expel Johnson. This could have been the rare case in which a school throws out a star athlete for sexual assault. But after a secret review, the Montana commissioner of higher education restored the quarterback to campus and to football. The case against Johnson moved to court, where he went on trial. The university had used the standard of "preponderance of the evidence" (or more likely than not) to find Johnson culpable, but the standard for a criminal conviction is higher - beyond a reasonable doubt. After Washburn testified, an expert explained why victims who are raped by a person they trusted sometimes freeze or act on autopilot, as they try to stave off the trauma with denial. But the jury found Johnson not guilty. Krakauer presents this outcome not as a reflection of the differing evidentiary standard, and a jury's best effort to resolve a difficult and confusing set of facts, but as a bitter failure of the adversarial process. "Because the legal system stacks the deck more heavily against sexual-assault victims than victims of other crimes, it's easier to keep the whole truth from coming out," he writes. Yet the jury puzzled over the details of this case, according to a juror Krakauer interviewed, and finally hesitated to convict in part because of a key detail: ambiguity in Washburn's testimony about whether she told Johnson it was O.K. that he didn't have a condom. Krakauer doesn't seem to have spoken to Johnson or Washburn. (In an author's note, he says he tried to interview the victims and accused men whose cases he covered.) And it's not clear that he spoke to any prosecutors or police officers in Missoula, or to university officials. As a result, the book feels one-sided. It also lacks texture. Much of the story is told through transcripts of court proceedings or recordings of police interviews and news coverage. Krakauer doesn't take us inside the student culture at the university or the community of Missoula. He lets his contempt for certain city officials show, but they're neither memorable villains nor three-dimensional characters afforded the opportunity to explain themselves. And strikingly, the women who should be at the book's emotional center don't really come to life either. Krakauer did speak to some female students, like Allison Huguet, whose assailant, another football player, confessed to raping her and was convicted, in one of the book's bright spots. But he tells us little about these women outside of the experience of reporting rape and coping with the aftermath, reducing them, however inadvertently, to victimhood. It's an odd lapse for a past master storyteller. More generally, Krakauer doesn't fully grapple with the complexities of campus sexual assault. He notes the heavy drinking that leads up to some of his book's most wrenching episodes without exploring the role alcohol plays in making perpetrators dangerous or victims vulnerable. He briefly mentions critics who take campus rape seriously as a social problem but worry that "universities have overreacted to it, resulting in the denial of due process to men accused of rape." But Krakauer dismisses this concern as "specious." Instead of delving deeply into questions of fairness as universities try to fulfill a recent government mandate to conduct their own investigations and hearings - apart from the police and the courts - Krakauer settles for bromides. University procedures should "swiftly identify student offenders and prevent them from reoffending, while simultaneously safeguarding the rights of the accused," he writes, asserting that this "will be difficult, but it's not rocket science." Maybe not, but it sure is bedeviling a lot of smart people at the moment. Krakauer's bland assurances don't reflect the emerging consensus that these university procedures aren't easy to get right but are worth struggling over because legitimating the outcome is crucial for both sides. Predatory football players or insensitive authorities can't be blamed for all the current tumult. "Missoula" ends up sounding only one cautionary note in a debate that's becoming ever more layered and cacophonous. 'Omg, I think I might have just gotten raped,' one student texted to her housemate. EMILY BAZELON, a staff writer for The Times Magazine, is the author of "Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy."

*Starred Review* Missoula, Montana, a college town of 70,000 people in western Montana, has made headlines in recent years for rape, both on and off the University of Montana campus, and most notably for the number of cases involving players on the University of Montana Grizzlies football team. The notoriety has spawned everything from a viral blog post (My Weekend in America's So-Called Rape Capital,' Jezebel) to a Department of Justice investigation. Krakauer, who most recently wrote about another scandal with a Montana connection (Three Cups of Deceit, 2011, examines the misdeeds of Three Cups of Tea author Greg Mortenson, whose Central Asia Institute was headquartered in Bozeman), tackles several highly charged cases and reminds us that rape is often not an instance of he said, she said but she said, he denied, and the community refused to listen. Built primarily around the cases of Beau Donaldson, the Montana Grizzlies fullback and linebacker convicted of rape, and Jordan Johnson, the star quarterback ultimately acquitted of the charge, Missoula tells a much larger story, one that comprises multiple cases, scores of people, and a detailed time line. While the book showcases Krakauer's rigorous reporting and disciplined writing style he doesn't waste a word on the scenery the clinical blow-by-blow seems barely to conceal his rage. What he reveals is a clear pattern in which young women who reported being raped were not properly served by the agents of justice in Missoula. Do you have a boyfriend? is a question commonly asked by investigators, with the insinuation that women who regret cheating on their boyfriends regularly recast consensual sex as rape. With a few notable exceptions, the women were disbelieved, condescended to, and then expected to be understanding when prosecutors declined to vigorously pursue their attackers. Using a transcript, Krakauer re-creates one mind-blowing scene in which a detective soothes in motherly fashion the accused rapist she is supposed to be interrogating: Don't beat yourself up more than you already have about this, okay? What are we to make of the fact that some of those who fail the victims are women themselves? Missoula, despite its reputation as a blue oasis in a red state (a popular local saying is that Missoula is only 20 minutes from Montana), is crazy about its football team. The raped women, their friends, family, and defenders, and even a local reporter who covers the stories, face ostracism, threats, and the accusation that they are somehow making things up in order to harm the football program. It seems little wonder when we learn how few rapes actually get reported. Krakauer is clearly angry but channels his anger into an important document that, if there is any justice in the world, will better our society's understanding and treatment of rape. Though this makes for grim reading, and the sheer volume of information can make the story somewhat difficult to follow (particularly the passages involving the defendant Donaldson, a detective named Donovan, and attorney with the last name Datsopolous), readers will be impelled forward by the sheer, heartbreaking injustice of it all. Many Missoulians will feel unfairly maligned by the book's title, which has stirred further controversy in a town that thinks of itself, with some justification, as progressive in many ways. While this book may be unique in its disquieting particulars for instance, the chief deputy county attorney who abruptly resigns, enters private practice, and joins the defense of Johnson the problem is universal. Krakauer points out that Missoula's rape statistics are actually very much like those of other similarly sized college towns throughout the U.S. It is to be hoped that we won't need a book written for each one of them, too, before things get better.--Graff, Keir Copyright 2015 Booklist

Sexual-assault victims are routinely met with indifference and incomprehension, according to this impassioned study of campus rape. Journalist Krakauer (Into Thin Air) follows a rash of rapes at the University of Montana in Missoula from 2010 to 2012, events that sparked a furor and a Justice Department investigation; Krakauer sticks with two cases in particular through agonizing courtroom dramas, spotlighting the two obstacles to justice. The first is haphazard investigation, made worse by the callousness and suspicion about the motives of women making rape allegations on the part of the university administration, the Missoula Police, and the county attorney's office. (The county's chief sexual-assault attorney quit and joined the defense in a high-profile rape case against the University's star quarterback.) The second is the counterintuitive behavior of traumatized victims, which often undermines their claims. (The quarterback's accuser failed to call for help from her nearby roommate, then sent an innocuous text message with a smiley icon and drove her alleged assailant home after the attack.) Krakauer's evocative reporting, honed to a fine edge of anger, vividly conveys the ordeal of victims and their ongoing psychological dislocations. The result is a hard-hitting true-crime exposé that looks underneath the he-said-she-said to get at the sexist assumptions that help cover up and enable these crimes. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Chapter One Office Solutions & Services, a Missoula office-products company, didn't have its 2011 Christmas party until January 6, 2012. As a counterpoint to the chilly Montana evening, the staff decorated the place in a Hawaiian motif. Around 9:00 p.m., thirty or forty people--employees and their families, mostly--were chatting, playing party games, and sipping beverages from red plastic cups in a room overlooking the parking lot when a shiny Chrysler 300 sedan pulled up and rolled to a stop in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows, attracting the attention of the revelers. Two well-dressed men with dour expressions got out of the vehicle and stood beside it. "It was a really nice black car," recalls Kevin Huguet, the owner of Office Solutions. As he was admiring the Chrysler, one of Huguet's salesmen asked, "Who are those guys?" Huguet had no idea. So he walked outside and asked, "Can I help you?" "We're Missoula police detectives," the man who had been driving the car replied. "I just need to talk to Allison." "Allison is my daughter," Huguet said, his hackles rising. "You're going to have to tell me a little more than that." "Dad, it's okay," twenty-two-year-old Allison Huguet interjected, having walked out to the parking lot shortly after her father. Detective Guy Baker, who is six foot five and weighs 250 pounds, peered down at Allison, a slender woman with bright eyes and a ponytail. "I need to talk to you," he said. "We don't have to do this in front of your dad. How do you want us to handle this?" He and Allison walked away from the car to speak privately, while Detective Mark Blood remained behind with Kevin Huguet. "Hey," Baker said to Allison in a warmer voice when they'd moved a short distance away. They'd become acquainted four years earlier, during her final year of high school, when she asked him to serve as her mentor for a school project. It had been a positive experience for both of them. Explaining why he'd shown up during the company Christmas party, he said, "I thought it was important to tell you in person as soon as possible: About an hour ago I arrested Beau Donaldson. I got a full confession from him, and he is in jail." Allison's eyes brimmed with tears of relief. Over by the Chrysler, Kevin Huguet grew impatient as he watched Allison and Baker conferring. "You know what?" he told Detective Blood after a few minutes. "I want to know what's going on here. This is my daughter, and I want to know what's going on." Kevin abruptly strode away and confronted Baker. "She didn't do anything bad," Baker said. "It's not like that." Then Baker turned to Allison and said, "I think you really need to talk to your dad and tell him." Allison faced her father and, in a shaky voice, declared, "Beau raped me." Kevin stood on the cold pavement, gobsmacked. Struggling to make sense of the words his daughter had just spoken, he wrapped his arms around her. As he hugged Allison and began to process what Beau Donaldson had done to her, Kevin's shock and confusion turned into blinding rage. "I thought he was going to find Beau and kill him or something," Allison told me, recalling the events of that night. Beau Donaldson, a junior at the University of Montana at the time of the assault, was on the school's football team. Allison Huguet was attending Eastern Oregon University on a track scholarship. They had grown up together in Missoula and had been inseparable friends since the first grade, but the relationship had never been romantic. Donaldson often referred to Huguet as his "little sister," and the sentiment was reciprocated. Throughout her childhood and adolescence, Huguet regarded Donaldson as the brother she never had. For the previous sixteen years, Huguet's parents had welcomed Donaldson into their home as if he were a member of their family. "You spend your whole life, when you have kids, protecting them," Kevin Huguet told me. "But who thinks their daughter's trusted friend is actually a monster who is going to hurt them in the night?" Allison was as angry as her father, but a confounding mix of other emotions had supplanted her rage. Donaldson raped her on September 25, 2010. She had waited fifteen months, suffering in silence, before going to the police. During that period she told nobody beyond her mother and three or four close friends that she had been raped--not even her father or sisters knew about it. Such reticence, it turns out, is common among victims of sexual assault. No more than 20 percent of rapes are reported to the police, a statistic that defies comprehension until one looks closely at how sexual-assault cases are adjudicated in the United States. Montana is a huge place with relatively few people. Although Missoula is the state's second largest city, it only has seventy thousand residents. Congenial and picturesque, it's the kind of community that charms first-time visitors into putting money down on real estate within hours of arriving. Some 42 percent of the population has a bachelor's degree or higher, compared to 28 percent of the rest of the nation. Good restaurants and lively bars abound. A legendary trout stream, the Clark Fork, runs fast and clear through the heart of downtown, paralleled by an abandoned railroad right-of-way that's been transformed into a bucolic thoroughfare for cyclists, joggers, and strollers. South of the river, the city's unpresuming neighborhoods stretch across a broad valley, above which five mountain ranges converge. From Missoula's origins in the mid-nineteenth century until the late decades of the twentieth, the local economy depended heavily on timber cut from the surrounding high country. About thirty-five years ago, however, the forest-products industry began to fall on hard times. Most of the sawmills closed, and loggers in calk boots and tin pants became an endangered species. A behemoth pulp mill pumped $45 million annually into the local economy (and at times created a noxious smog that settled so densely over the city that drivers had to turn on their headlights in the middle of the day) until 2009, when it was shuttered and sold for scrap. Presently the largest employer in the Missoula Valley is the University of Montana, by a large margin. With its 15,000 students and more than 800 faculty members, UM, as it is known, has left a deep imprint on the city. Missoula has a much higher proportion of Democrats, for instance, than the state as a whole. As locals like to joke, one of the things that's so great about living in Missoula is that it's only twenty minutes from Montana. Despite its liberal bent, in many ways Missoula resembles other cities of similar size in the Rocky Mountain region. Its population is 92 percent white, 2 percent Native American, 2 percent Hispanic, and less than 1 percent African American. The median family income is $42,000. Twenty percent of the population lives below the poverty line. Among Missoulians there is strong support for the right to keep and bear arms, and for limiting the role of the federal government in their affairs. Missoula has a culture uniquely its own, however, thanks to the fusion of its gritty frontier heritage with the university's myriad impacts. UM has nationally distinguished programs in biology and ecology and is perhaps even more renowned for its literary bona fides. The faculty of the university's Creative Writing Program, founded in 1920, has included such influential authors as Richard Hugo, James Crumley, and William Kittredge. Reminiscing in one of his incomparable essays about what drew him to Missoula for the first time, Kittredge wrote, I was looking for what I took to be a genuine world to inhabit. I wanted to be someone that I could understand and stand--a romantic idea that seems commonplace in the West these days. . . . The northern Rockies seemed like an undiscovered land, thick with secrets no one could bother to keep. During a drunken visit to Missoula to go fishing with Kittredge in 1972, Raymond Carver, the godfather of minimalist fiction, fell head-over-heels in love with both the town and Diane Cecily, the university's director of publications. Richard Ford, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, resided in Missoula for three or four very productive years in the 1980s and is recalled with pride by its citizenry. The literary figure most closely identified with the town, however, is Norman Maclean, the author of A River Runs Through It, the semiautobiographical work of fiction set in Missoula and on the nearby Big Blackfoot River, from which the Academy Award-winning film starring Brad Pitt was adapted. But never mind Kittredge or Ford or the Big Blackfoot. Missoulians' greatest source of civic pride, hands down, is the University of Montana football team, the beloved Grizzlies of the Big Sky Conference, who won the Football Championship Subdivision national title in 1995 and 2001. Their record of twelve straight conference titles prior to 2010 was the second-longest streak in NCAA Division I history. In 1985, a billionaire Missoula construction magnate named Dennis Washington donated $1 million to build Washington-Grizzly Stadium, a beautiful facility that seats 25,200 and is filled to capacity for almost every home game. The Grizzlies' overall record from the opening of the stadium through 2011 was a remarkable 174 wins and 24 losses. The Griz don't play at the same elite level as college-football colossi like Florida State, Ohio State, and Alabama. It's fair to say that the team's win-loss record would be much less impressive if they played under the bright lights of the Big Ten or the Southeastern Conference, instead of in a backwater like the Big Sky. Be that as it may, the Grizzlies inspire the same kind of fanaticism in Missoula as the Seminoles do in Tallahassee and the Crimson Tide does in Tuscaloosa. UM fans call themselves "Griz Nation." Missoula is "Grizzlyville." It would be hard to overstate the degree to which Griz football is exalted by the residents of western Montana. Recent events, however, have forced at least some Missoulians to reconsider their veneration of all things Griz. In December 2010, four of Beau Donaldson's teammates on the UM football team allegedly gang-raped a female student when she was too drunk to resist, and because the football players claimed the sex was consensual, they were not charged with a crime. A year later, in December 2011, three Griz football players sexually assaulted two female students after allegedly drugging them. None of these assailants was prosecuted, either. When the latter incident was brought to light by the local newspaper, UM president Royce Engstrom appointed the Honorable Diane Barz, who in 1989 became the first woman to serve on the Montana Supreme Court, to launch an investigation. In a preliminary report, released to the public on December 31, 2011, Barz wrote, This investigation has revealed . . . evidence of non-consensual sex that is not being reported in the University system. . . . The University is required to take immediate and appropriate action. In Barz's final report, completed on January 31, 2012, she identified nine sexual assaults by UM students (not all of whom were football players) from September 2010 through December 2011. At the top of the list was the rape of Allison Huguet by Beau Donaldson. Barz warned, The reports of sexual assaults on the UM campus now require immediate action and swift compliance with Title IX mandates. . . . A rape-tolerant campus with ineffective programming, inadequate support service for victim survivors, and inequitable grievance procedures threatens every student. . . . Acts of sexual violence are vastly under-reported on college campuses and a victim of sexual assault is likely to suffer from depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, substance abuse, and academic problems. Diane Barz's report rattled Missoula. Then, just three months later, the U.S. Department of Justice revealed that it, too, was investigating the apparent epidemic of sexual assaults in western Montana. The feds announced that at least eighty alleged rapes had been reported in Missoula over the preceding three years and that the DOJ would be scrutinizing "assaults against all women in Missoula, not just university students." United States attorney general Eric Holder noted, "The allegations that the University of Montana, the local police department and the County Attorney's Office failed to adequately address sexual assault are very disturbing." The spate of rapes in Grizzlyville led to disquieting articles from such national publications as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. But it was a 3,800-word dispatch posted on the website Jezebel nine days after the DOJ announcement that perhaps did the most damage to Missoula's good name. Written by Katie J. M. Baker, it was titled "My Weekend in America's So-Called 'Rape Capital,' " and the derogatory moniker went viral, prompting an outcry from Missoulians who believed it was unfair. Baker's tart, insightful piece indicated that she wasn't sure the description was deserved, however. Her headline was drawn from the article's second paragraph, in which she quoted a twenty-year-old Missoula drug dealer who lamented, "People think we're the 'rape capital' of America now," before immediately noting, "but we're not. Missoula is just like any other college town." In fact, 80 rapes over the course of three years appears to be "on par with national averages for college towns of Missoula's size," as Baker mentioned in her piece. According to the FBI's latest statistics, there were an average of 26.8 "forcible rapes" reported in American cities the size of Missoula in 2012--which works out to be 80.4 rapes over three years. In other words, the number of sexual assaults in Missoula might sound alarming, but if the FBI figures are accurate, it's actually commonplace. Rape, it turns out, occurs with appalling frequency throughout the United States. Chapter Two When Allison Huguet was five years old, her family moved from Kalispell, up near Glacier National Park, to Missoula, where they bought a home in a quiet neighborhood called Target Range, at the western edge of the city, near the confluence of the Bitterroot River and the Clark Fork. Huguet enrolled in the first grade at Target Range School and soon befriended Beau Donaldson. They remained close buddies for the next twelve years. Huguet and Donaldson graduated together in June 2008 from Big Sky High School, where both of them were good students and outstanding athletes. Huguet, who competed on the track team, was the Montana pole-vault champion their senior year. Donaldson set ten school records on the football field and was honored as the team's most valuable player. When Donaldson accepted a scholarship to play football at UM, it was deemed sufficiently important to merit an article in the Missoulian, the local newspaper. "I've always wanted to play for the Griz," Donaldson told the paper. He had been recruited by a number of other schools, including Montana State University, in Bozeman, the archrival of the University of Montana. It was a big deal in Missoula when he decided to attend UM. Excerpted from Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town by Jon Krakauer All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.