Missoula

by Jon Krakauer

  Kathleen Huguet told Allison that a mutual acquaintance was informing people that “you and Beau had sex last weekend.” Kathleen didn’t even bother asking Allison if the rumor was true, because she knew it was preposterous: Beau Donaldson was the last person in the world Allison would ever sleep with. In high dudgeon, Kathleen reported that she had sent their acquaintance a nasty Facebook message commanding her to stop spreading ridiculous rumors.

  “I was sitting there in shock when Kathleen told me this,” Allison said. “I couldn’t even process it.” Donaldson and his friend Sam Erschler had assured Allison and her mother that they would say nothing about the rape to anyone. Yet a rumor that she had willingly slept with her rapist was already circulating in Missoula, Montana; Boise, Idaho; and La Grande, Oregon.

  Allison said nothing to Kathleen about the rape. Instead she called Keely Williams for commiseration, telling her, “I can’t believe this.” Then she thumbed a text to Beau Donaldson to let him know what people were saying about them. She warned, “I can promise you that if I hear one more person saying that I slept with you, I am going to the police.”

  Donaldson immediately texted her back, saying that although he had no idea who was responsible for the rumor, he would “shut it down and get it taken care of.”

  The text from Donaldson seemed genuinely contrite. Allison Huguet found it surprisingly reassuring. It gave her a sense of control, or at least an illusion of control, that continued for more than a year. “At the time,” she told me, “I felt I had some real leverage, so I wasn’t so scared of him. And I had confidence he would really seek the help he needed.” Huguet convinced herself that as long as nobody knew she had been raped, she could resume living as if it had never happened, and everything would return to normal. She didn’t see any reason to seek psychotherapy.

  “That next year turned out to be weird for me,” she said. “I can’t remember if I thought much about the rape or didn’t think about it during that period. I can’t remember if I was sleeping okay or having nightmares. That whole period is kind of blank. I’m pretty sure I managed to just keep it out of my mind.” That semester, she recalled, “I was working full-time for my dad at Office Solutions. I studied a lot and did well with my online classes. And on weekends I would go to Pullman sometimes.”

  Two of Huguet’s closest friends from EOU had graduated and moved to Pullman, Washington, a college town. When Huguet visited, she and her friends hit the bars. “I was drinking a lot more than usual that year,” she said. “Drinking and partying. Having a good time. Looking back, I see that I was making some bad decisions. And looking back, now I know why I was making those bad decisions. But at the time, I wasn’t willing to accept the fact that Beau had changed me in that way. I wasn’t willing to give that to him.”

  In January 2011, Huguet moved from Missoula back to La Grande, rented an apartment with a friend of a friend named Natasha, and resumed classes at EOU. “It was good being around her,” Huguet remembered. “We became pretty close, pretty fast. She was a feminist. A very strong, very independent female.” One evening Huguet surprised herself by confiding to Natasha that she had been raped. “Tasha was like, ‘Oh my God, Allison. You went to the police, right?’ ” Sheepishly, Huguet confessed that she hadn’t. “Tasha was appalled,” Huguet said. “She said she understood why I hadn’t wanted to report it but told me, ‘The police need to know about this guy and what he did to you.’ ”

  Soon thereafter, Natasha got a job at a crisis center for victims of domestic violence and sexual assault, a place called Shelter from the Storm. Surprisingly, once she started working with professional counselors and advocates, Natasha’s opinion about the desirability of reporting rapes to the police changed. Her colleagues pointed out that for some victims of sexual assault, engaging with the criminal justice system could traumatize them severely all over again, so the staff at SFTS didn’t necessarily recommend it. Her colleagues definitely urged every victim to get counseling, however. More than half a year had passed since Huguet had been raped, but she still hadn’t sought help from a therapist. She was doing fine, she thought. She had no reason to talk to a shrink.

  Looking back at that period now, Huguet said, “I understand that I just didn’t want to acknowledge what Beau did to me. Because if I did acknowledge it, I would have to deal with it, and it would become real. Your mind is pretty good at blocking out traumatic experiences and preventing you from thinking about them. At least until something comes along to trigger you.”

  —

  IN THE AUTUMN of her final year at EOU, Huguet drove from La Grande to Missoula to spend Thanksgiving with her family. On November 23, 2011, the Wednesday evening before the holiday, she headed downtown with three of her friends to decompress at the Missoula Club, a venerable burger-and-beer joint universally referred to as the Mo Club. The place was packed. Huguet was chatting at the bar with a friend named Carol* when she noticed Beau Donaldson gazing at her from across the room, no more than twenty feet away. “He was standing there laughing,” Huguet recalled, “staring at me.”

  Donaldson had reason to be feeling good. Four days earlier, he and his Griz teammates had played their final regular-season game against their archrivals, the Montana State University Bobcats, an annual contest known as the “Brawl of the Wild.” The Griz had won 36–10, making them co-champions of the Big Sky Conference with a record of nine wins and two losses, sending them to the NCAA Football Champion Series play-offs, which would commence in ten days. And after sitting out the entire 2010 football season with an injured ankle, Donaldson had played well and contributed to the team’s success in 2011.

  Huguet hadn’t seen Donaldson since he’d come over to her mom’s house to apologize, the day after he’d raped her. Fourteen months had passed. The shock of encountering him face-to-face caused Huguet’s chest to constrict. Her friend Carol, who had dated Donaldson for an extended period in high school, was not aware that her ex-boyfriend had raped Huguet. “I don’t know what possessed me,” Huguet said, “but I told Carol what had happened. Right then and there. She looked at me in horror.”

  Carol then turned toward Donaldson, scowled, and said, “You need to leave right now.”

  Donaldson glowered back at her, silently mouthed the words “Fuck you,” and laughed.

  “He was mocking me,” Huguet said. “He had this smug, entitled expression. He was like, ‘This is my territory. These are my people. You don’t deserve to be here.’ ” Extremely unnerved, she and Carol hurried out of the bar. Upon arriving back at her mom’s house, Huguet went downstairs, got on the Internet, opened the web page for the Missoula Police Department, and looked up the e-mail address for Detective Guy Baker.

  Huguet had met Baker during her junior year at Big Sky High School, when he spoke to a criminal justice class she was taking. A year later, because Huguet was interested in police SWAT operations, she decided to conduct research about SWAT training for her senior project, and asked Baker to be her mentor. In addition to writing a ten-page essay examining whether the physical fitness requirements for joining SWAT teams discriminated against women, she took the same grueling physical fitness test administered to all men and women who aspired to join the Missoula Police Department’s SWAT team. Applicants had to complete a three-hundred-meter obstacle course in less than seven and a half minutes while wearing a twenty-five-pound bulletproof vest.

  The most challenging obstacle for Huguet was a smooth, six-foot-high wall that she had to pull herself up and over twice. “It gave her fits,” Detective Baker told me. “She kept trying and trying to get over it, and refused to give up. She ended up completing the course in just over seven minutes and got a qualifying score. Which was interesting, because no other female in our department had ever passed this test at the time.” Baker was impressed. And Huguet came to respect and trust him, as well.

  By the time Huguet found Detective Baker’s e-mail address, it was 2:30 in the morning. She was too angry to sleep. “When I saw Be
au that night,” she recalled, “it was like a dam broke. It triggered this rush of buried feelings I didn’t even know I had. I went from never thinking about the rape and believing I was no longer affected by it to realizing that it had been having a huge effect on me all along. I realized that Beau had all this power over how I felt, and I didn’t want him to have that power anymore. I began to think that maybe it had been a mistake not to go to the police.”

  Nearly four years had passed since Allison Huguet had last spoken to Detective Baker, before she had graduated from high school. Huguet was still deeply ambivalent about reporting Beau Donaldson to the authorities, but she trusted Baker enough to broach the subject in a noncommittal fashion. She sent him an e-mail that read,

  Dear Detective Baker,…This is Allison Huguet. I worked with you on SWAT training my senior year of high school. There is a situation I have been put in, in Missoula, and I would love to talk about it with you. I want to know my options on a legal matter that is very personal. If you could email me back that would be great.

  Baker replied a day later, the Friday after Thanksgiving, suggesting they meet that very afternoon to discuss whatever was on her mind, but by then Huguet was having second thoughts about starting a process she might not be able to control or stop, so she didn’t respond to Baker’s e-mail. Instead, she persuaded her mother to ask a family friend, an attorney who worked as a public defender, whether he thought Huguet should report the rape to the police. “He basically said, ‘You better prepare for the hardest, nastiest fight of your life if you go that route,’ ” Huguet remembered. “He said my life would be torn apart, and every aspect of it would be exposed in public, and these cases are very hard for victims to win.”

  On Tuesday, November 29, four days after he’d proposed that they meet, Detective Baker still hadn’t heard from Huguet. So he sent her another e-mail, inquiring, “Do you still want to talk?”

  Huguet replied:

  I am now back in Oregon. I’m confused on what to do about this situation and I did talk to a lawyer but he was not exactly comforting, basically he told me [to] prepare to have my life completely changed. I just kinda want to know if I meet and discuss the situation with you, do you then have to report it?

  Baker answered right away:

  It depends. If you tell me you committed a violent crime then I might be obligated to investigate it, but if it’s not that, then we should be able to talk about it. We can talk on the phone if you want. Does it involve something you did, or something that was done to you?

  Huguet replied:

  It was something that was done to me. It was a year and a few months ago, but when I talked to the lawyer he said the statute of limitations is not up on it. It’s something I thought I could handle. But every time I come home I realize I’m mad at myself for not reporting the situation. I will be home this Friday, though, so maybe we can meet up after that some time.

  Allison Huguet returned to Missoula for Christmas break on December 9, 2011. One night soon thereafter she went out to a bar called the Bodega with her friend Carol and some other girlfriends, and the conversation quickly turned to the subject of how unsettled Huguet had felt ever since running into Beau Donaldson at the Mo Club. Coincidentally, Donaldson’s close friend Sam Erschler also happened to be at the Bodega that night, and he sat down with Huguet and Carol to have a drink. As the night slid past and Huguet became intoxicated, she grew increasingly agitated over the fact that Donaldson apparently felt no remorse over the violence he had done to her. When she disclosed that she had been having nightmares, Erschler revealed that he, too, had been having nightmares—about Donaldson chasing Huguet down the alley. Erschler told Huguet he would do anything to make her feel better.

  “Well, if you really want to do something for me,” Huguet replied in a moment of drunken pique, “you could hurt Beau.” She offered Erschler a thousand dollars to beat the shit out of Donaldson.

  “Al,” Erschler replied, “you know I can’t do that.”

  Disappointed that Sam Erschler refused to exact revenge on her behalf, later that night when Carol and her boyfriend were driving Huguet home, she begged them to swing by Donaldson’s house and slash the tires on his truck. “I think that’s when I realized that I was acting crazy,” Huguet observed, “that I was starting to totally lose it. I was wanting to do things I would never have even thought of doing in a normal state of mind. Honestly, if I could have found someone who would kill Beau for me, at that time I think I would have paid them to do it. And that started to really scare me—that I was angry enough to think like that.”

  A few days later Carol told Huguet, “Every time you come home now, you’re more and more angry. I can tell that what Beau did to you is really stressing you out. I really think you need to do something about it. I think you need to report Beau to the police.”

  On Friday, December 16, 2011, Huguet heeded Carol’s advice, went to the Missoula police station, and told Detective Baker that Beau Donaldson had raped her. She made it clear, however, that she wasn’t sure she wanted to file a report about the incident.

  * * *

  * pseudonym

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Allison Huguet had the digital recording of Beau Donaldson admitting that he “took advantage” of her, and the nurses at the First Step sexual-assault response center had obtained physical evidence of the rape. But because Donaldson had been unaware that he was being recorded, his confession would not be admissible as evidence. Furthermore, because the assault had happened in September 2010, nearly fifteen months before Huguet shared her secret with Detective Baker, and First Step typically kept rape kits for no more than six months before disposing of them, there was a good chance that her rape kit had been destroyed. Getting a conviction and sending Donaldson to prison was by no means a certain outcome. Although Baker was eager to investigate her case, he suggested that over the weekend Huguet think further about what she wanted to do.

  A day earlier, coincidentally, an article on the front page of the Missoulian had announced that there had been a recent sexual assault on the UM campus “that reportedly involved two female students, multiple male students and the date-rape drug Rohypnol.” A subsequent article on December 16, 2011, disclosed that “at least three” of the accused rapists were Griz football players.

  The two reports were written by a seasoned journalist named Gwen Florio who’d learned her chops reporting for the Philadelphia Inquirer and had gone to Afghanistan in 2001 to cover America’s rapidly expanding war on terrorism for the Denver Post. The articles Florio wrote in December 2011 about the sexual assaults allegedly involving Griz players were the first of what would be more than one hundred stories published in the Missoulian about the “Missoula rape scandal,” as it would soon be christened.

  As Huguet agonized over what to do, the articles Florio published in December 2011 became a factor in her calculus. She was aware that if Beau Donaldson was charged with raping her, she would face scathing criticism from Griz fans. She understood that if the case went to trial, Donaldson’s attorneys would attempt to destroy her reputation. But she also knew that if she didn’t report Donaldson, he might rape other women. Because the latter possibility worried her more than the former, on December 20 Huguet went to the Missoula police station and made a formal statement to Detective Baker, which he recorded on video, setting the clunky machinery of justice in motion.

  Gwen Florio’s reporting, it turned out, also inspired another victim of sexual assault to come forward and tell her story in a public forum. Terry Belnap, the mother of a UM student named Kelsey Belnap, happened to see Florio’s December 16, 2011, article about the gang rape by Griz players and thought it sounded dismayingly like what had happened to Kelsey a year earlier, in December 2010. When Terry brought the article to her daughter’s attention, Kelsey also found Florio’s account of the 2011 incident to be excruciatingly similar to what had happened to her. “Oh my God,” Kelsey thought. “I could have prevented this from happening.�
��

  Terry Belnap sent an e-mail to Florio saying that Kelsey was willing to talk about being raped by four members of the Griz football team, in the hope that doing so might keep others from being subjected to what she had been forced to endure.

  —

  ON DECEMBER 15, 2010, three months after Allison Huguet was raped, Kelsey Belnap took her last exam of the semester and then walked outside into the crisp autumn afternoon. Her best friend, Betsy Fairmont,*1 who had just completed the same exam, invited Belnap to come to her boyfriend’s apartment that evening to celebrate. “Sure,” Belnap replied. “That sounds like a good time.” Fairmont and Belnap, who were both twenty-one years old, first went to Belnap’s apartment and had dinner with Belnap’s boyfriend, whom she lived with. Because Belnap’s boyfriend had to work that night, however, he couldn’t join the women in toasting the end of the semester.

  Fairmont’s boyfriend, whom Belnap had met only once before that evening, was Benjamin Styron,*2 a defensive lineman for the Griz who weighed more than 240 pounds. When Fairmont and Belnap arrived at his apartment, at 5:45 p.m., Styron and his roommate, a Griz player who weighed almost as much as Styron, were smoking weed outside. The four students went indoors, poured themselves shots of 99-proof schnapps, and were soon joined by three other members of the UM football team. Belnap didn’t know any of the men except Styron and his roommate. The five Griz players began competing to drink the most, and they encouraged the two women to join them. “Every couple of minutes we would all take another shot,” Belnap told me. “It was a ‘Let’s see if you can keep up’ kind of thing. I was like, ‘Uh, okay.’ ”