Missoula

by Jon Krakauer

  Belnap didn’t suspect that the football players might be setting her up to be raped. The celebration seemed innocuous. “I was just hanging out with my friend and her friends,” she said. “I have a brother who was on the football team. I used to work in the equipment room for the football team. At that point I didn’t imagine anything bad could happen.”

  One of the football players rolled a blunt and started passing it around. “I have never smoked pot in my life,” Belnap said, “and had no intention of smoking pot, so it made me uncomfortable, and I told Betsy that. But it was their apartment, so I didn’t say, ‘Please don’t do it.’ ”

  Betsy Fairmont inhaled a lungful of smoke and then turned to Belnap and exclaimed, “Oh!” as if she’d suddenly remembered how marijuana affected her. “When I get drunk and high,” Fairmont warned, “I get really messed up.”

  A few minutes later, Belnap looked at the clock and noticed that it was around 6:30 or 6:45. “But the clock had gotten completely blurry,” she said. “So I told myself, ‘I’m done drinking.’ Because at that point I knew I was really, really drunk. And after what Betsy had told me, I was also thinking, ‘Oh crap. I’ve got to get her home, too.’ ”

  By then Kelsey Belnap had consumed between eight and eleven shots in approximately forty-five minutes. She can recall very little about what happened thereafter. When she quit imbibing she was seated on the living room couch, “and the next thing I know,” she said, “I was in a dark bedroom, sitting at the foot of a bed. I remember looking at the door and thinking, ‘What the hell am I doing in a bedroom?’ And then I turn around, because I heard a noise, and Betsy and Benjamin are having sex on the bed behind me.”

  Belnap isn’t amorously adventurous. “I am not into watching other people do that,” she said. “I’ve never even seen a porn film; I certainly didn’t want to watch live sex.” So she tried to get up from the bed and leave the room, she recalled, “but my body was like a limp noodle. I could not move. And then I remember the door opening. At first I thought, ‘Someone is here to help me get out of this room.’ And then all of a sudden this person was standing in front of me with his penis in my face. I said, ‘I don’t want to!’ and I pushed him away.” But her resistance was ignored.

  Even now, Kelsey Belnap doesn’t know the identity of this assailant. He grabbed her jaw, pulled it open, and thrust his erect penis into her mouth. “That’s the last thing I remember until a while later, when someone else came in the room,” she said. Belnap didn’t know who that second person was, either, but said, “I remember my belt buckle being played with, and then somehow I was bent over the bed.” For the next two hours she drifted “in and out of awareness” as different men entered the room, had sex with her, and left. “I was blacked out throughout pretty much the entire thing,” she said, “and only remember bits and pieces of what happened.” Later, according to Belnap, a police officer told her that she had engaged in sex with all four of Benjamin Styron’s teammates.

  After she began to drift back up to the surface of consciousness, Belnap said, the first thing she recalled was being “in the bathroom, throwing up in the bathtub. Betsy was throwing up in the toilet, and all the boys were gone except Benjamin. Betsy was like, ‘Benjamin! Get out of here!’ She was embarrassed for him to see her like that.”

  When Belnap eventually regained control of her faculties, she burst into tears. Betsy Fairmont called a friend, who took Fairmont and Belnap to the Community Medical Center emergency room, where Belnap was admitted at 9:00 p.m. According to the nurses’ notes, she was “obviously intoxicated” and had slurred speech. Two and a half hours after she’d stopped drinking, her blood alcohol concentration was measured to be 0.219 percent, nearly three times the legal limit for driving. When asked if she was experiencing any pain, Belnap replied that her vagina hurt. When asked to elucidate further, she stated that she thought she “may have been raped.” According to a nurse’s somewhat confused notes,

  What she remembers is that possible 2 males performed oral sex on her and possible one male penetrated her vagina with his penis. Patient states that she does remember trying to push the males off, and in no way gave consent to the males for sex. Patient relates that she does not remember the events well but knows that sex did take place that was not consensual. Patient became very emotional and started crying while relating this.

  Although Belnap’s mother was born in Missoula, and both her parents graduated from the University of Montana, she was raised in Idaho Falls, Idaho, where her parents still reside. But her mother’s aunt lived in Missoula, so when Kelsey was admitted to the emergency room, the hospital contacted this grandaunt. She came to the emergency room right away, called Kelsey’s mom, and put Kelsey on the phone. Kelsey blurted in a despairing voice, “Mom, I think I’ve been raped.”

  When the emergency room staff learned that Kelsey Belnap might have been sexually assaulted, they notified the Missoula Police Department. At 11:00 p.m., Officer Mitchell Lang arrived at the hospital to talk to her. According to Belnap, Lang “seemed very shaky. Like, this wasn’t the kind of situation he’d dealt with before.” The initial report filed by Officer Lang says,

  Kelsey still appeared heavily impaired and her story was fragmented. Kelsey stated that she did not remember much of what happened that evening….[S]he stated that she was taken into one of the rooms in the apartment but she did not know which one….

  Kelsey stated that 2–3 additional persons came into the bedroom….[S]he remembered her head being grabbed by one of the males and he was trying to make her perform oral sex on him. Kelsey stated she pushed the male back but when he was forcing her head down again she stopped resisting because she was scared. When asked if the male said anything she stated she thought he said “it is good for her to be this drunk.”…Kelsey stated she then performed oral sex on 1 or 2 additional males and then stated she was “bent” over the bed and penetrated vaginally. Kelsey stated the additional males then took turns….Kelsey stated she was reluctant about pressing charges at this time because she did not want to get anyone in trouble.

  After speaking briefly with Kelsey Belnap, Officer Lang interviewed Betsy Fairmont. She told him she couldn’t remember anything about what happened, but Fairmont said she was sure Belnap had no intention of charging anyone with sexual assault. Nevertheless, Lang recommended to Belnap that she go to the First Step rape clinic for a forensic gynecological examination.

  At 1:00 a.m., Belnap’s boyfriend and her grandaunt took her to First Step, where she was examined by Claire Francoeur, the same nurse who’d examined Allison Huguet. Francoeur found semen in Belnap’s vagina and on her rectum, as well as redness on her cervix and “multiple genital lacerations” indicative of penetrating trauma. “I was still pretty sick and still felt a bit drunk,” Belnap recalled, “so it was hard for me to be there. But Francoeur was very sensitive.”

  The following afternoon, a Missoula police officer named Travis Welsh contacted Kelsey Belnap to confirm whether or not she wanted to pursue a criminal investigation. Belnap told Officer Welsh that, regardless of whatever she and Betsy Fairmont might have told Officer Lang, she definitely wanted to press charges. A day later Belnap went to the police station, where she was interviewed by detectives Guy Baker and Mark Blood. According to the report subsequently filed by Baker, Belnap recalled sitting in the bedroom when one of the football players walked up to her,

  unbuttoned his pants and removed his penis. Kelsey stated he then directed her head towards his erect penis with his hand. Kelsey stated she said something to the effect, “I don’t want to” and pushed him away with her hands….[He] then stepped towards her again and pushed and/or moved her outstretched arms and her hands down to the sides of her torso and then put his penis in her mouth. Kelsey stated she was scared and let him put his penis in her mouth without saying anything else to him….[S]he then performed oral sex…on the male for several minutes….Kelsey stated the male exited the bedroom and she heard him exclaim “Damn!” a
nd then say something else to the other males.

  Kelsey stated another male…then entered the bedroom….[S]he was still sitting at the edge of the bed when he walked up to her….[H]e also removed his penis from his pants. Kelsey stated he did not say anything to her and she did not say anything to him….[H]is penis was not erect and she put it in her mouth before performing oral sex on him for several minutes. Kelsey stated she performed oral sex on him because she was scared….[S]he thought she passed out or blacked out while performing oral sex on the second male because the next memory she has is lying on her back on the bed and somebody tugging on the front of her pants in an attempt to unbutton them….[S]he next recalls standing beside the bed, bent forward from the waist with her arms on the bed while somebody was holding onto her waist while standing behind her. Kelsey stated she remembers a penis penetrating her vagina, but she is unsure which male was having sex with her. Kelsey stated she did not say “no” or “stop” to the male or make any verbalization to the male while he was having sexual intercourse with her.

  Kelsey stated she thought she passed out or blacked out again while the male was having sex with her because the next memory she has is her pants are on again and she is walking out of the bedroom….[T]he next thing she remembers is her and Betsy in the bathroom….

  Kelsey stated she experienced pain in the area of her vagina following the incident and…was still feeling soreness and discomfort in her vaginal area at the time of the interview….[S]he also experienced soreness in her neck and shoulders as a result of the incident. When asked if she thought the males perceived the sexual activity to have been consensual or nonconsensual, Kelsey stated they would have likely believed it was consensual sex. When asked to elaborate, Kelsey stated she was so intoxicated she did not resist them, she never said “no” or “stop” to verbalize to them that she “didn’t want to” have sex with them.

  Reflecting on this interview in 2014, four years after it occurred, Belnap told me that she hadn’t been emotionally prepared to be interrogated in this fashion less than forty-eight hours after being gang-raped. No one had informed her that she could ask for a victim advocate to be present during the interview. “I had just been through this ordeal,” she said, “and they put me in a room with two male authority figures. It was very intimidating. I tried to maintain my game face, and thought I didn’t need anyone to be there with me, but I wish there had been another female present to make me feel a little more comfortable.”

  Belnap’s nervousness, her inability to remember much, and the fact that her best friend had insisted that Belnap had no intention of alleging that she was raped led Detectives Baker and Blood to question the reliability of Belnap’s account. “They seemed skeptical,” she said, “like they thought I was just another drunk girl. I began to feel like I was the perp. They asked me a couple of different times, ‘How did the guy who put his penis in your face grab your jaw? Did he grab it forcibly, or did he just kind of tug at it?’ I showed them exactly how he did it, but they didn’t seem to believe that I really resisted or said no.”

  Detective Baker asked Belnap if she was dating anyone, a question cops often ask women who report they’ve been raped. “When I said, ‘Yes, I am,’ ” Belnap remembered, “the way he reacted made me feel like he assumed I had cheated on my boyfriend and then lied about being raped to cover it up, even though that wasn’t the case at all.”

  Regarding Baker’s question about whether Belnap thought the men who had sex with her perceived it to be consensual or nonconsensual, she said, “Looking back now, that seems like a very inappropriate question for them to ask. How was I supposed to know what those boys were thinking? I was passed out most of the time. I wasn’t even aware what they were doing to me.”

  The day after the incident at Benjamin Styron’s apartment, Betsy Fairmont sent several apologetic text messages to Kelsey Belnap, expressing how sorry she was that Belnap had been raped. “Betsy texted over and over again,” Belnap said. “She said, ‘I am so sorry. I should have taken better care of you.’ ”

  When Belnap told Fairmont that she’d filed a police report accusing Styron’s friends of raping her, however, Fairmont’s sympathy vanished. She tried to downplay what had happened, according to Belnap, and begged Belnap not to pursue the matter with the police. “I don’t want to get anyone in trouble!” Fairmont protested.

  When Betsy Fairmont was interviewed by Detective Baker on January 11, 2011, nearly four weeks after the incident, Fairmont insisted that Belnap had willingly had sex with all four of Benjamin Styron’s teammates. Fairmont “ended up covering for all five football players,” Belnap said bitterly. “They were her boys. When I told her, ‘But this happened, Betsy. I was raped,’ she changed her story and lied through her ass.”

  Styron and the men who allegedly raped Belnap left town for Christmas break immediately after the incident, dispersing to five different cities in California, Arizona, and Washington. Because Betsy Fairmont was adamant that Belnap had consented to having sex with the football players, and it would have been prohibitively expensive for the police department to fly Detective Baker to three distant states to interview them, neither Styron nor any of the suspects were questioned until they came back to Missoula for the start of the spring semester, by which time seven weeks had elapsed. Detectives Baker and Blood didn’t interview Benjamin Styron and his roommate until February 3, 2011, and their three teammates weren’t interviewed until mid-February, by which time all four suspects had had ample opportunity to rehearse their stories with Styron, Fairmont, and one another before giving their statements to the police.

  On February 18, Detective Baker met with deputy Missoula County attorney Jason Marks. “Based on the investigation,” Baker wrote in his inclusive case report, “it was decided there was not probable cause to file criminal charges against anyone involved in the incident.”

  “Baker called me and said, ‘We need to talk,’ ” Kelsey Belnap recalled. When she arrived at the police station, Detective Baker explained that because Betsy Fairmont, Benjamin Styron, and all four of his teammates had stated that the sex was consensual, the Missoula County Attorney’s Office had determined that there was insufficient evidence to move forward. It was Belnap’s word against the word of six eyewitnesses.

  According to Belnap, Baker told her the kicker was this: “ ‘They said you were moaning, so you couldn’t have been passed out. We needed one more person to take your side and back up your story, and there wasn’t one. I’m sorry, but there is nothing we can do.’ ” The case was closed.

  The Missoula police chief at the time was Mark Muir. In an interview with Muir broadcast in 2014 on 60 Minutes Sports, correspondent Armen Keteyian asked why the case was never prosecuted. “A lack of ability to show it was nonconsensual sex,” Chief Muir replied, adding that it was an easy decision to make. He reminded Keteyian that Kelsey Belnap had told Detective Baker that the men with whom she had sex “would likely have believed” it was consensual. “How do you overcome that?” Muir said.

  According to Montana law, Keteyian countered, a person who is physically incapacitated is incapable of providing consent. Given her extremely high blood alcohol level, he wondered, wasn’t Belnap clearly incapacitated?

  “No,” Chief Muir answered. “Physical incapacitation differs from incapacitation of the mind.” The fact that Belnap “had blackouts does not, specifically, indicate that she was physically helpless at the time,” Muir asserted, implying that Belnap’s case would have been prosecutable if she’d been completely unconscious the whole time, but because she was intermittently semiconscious, her claim that she never gave consent wasn’t credible.

  But the relevant law, Montana statute 45-5-501, doesn’t say a victim has to be “physically helpless” to be incapable of giving consent, as Muir incorrectly asserted. The law states that a victim is incapable of consent if he or she is “mentally defective or incapacitated”; “physically helpless”; or “overcome by deception, coercion, o
r surprise.” And with a blood alcohol content of .219 percent more than two hours after the alleged rapes began, it’s hard to imagine that Belnap wasn’t mentally incapacitated to a significant degree.

  During an on-camera interview with Missoula County Attorney Fred Van Valkenburg, Keteyian observed that when Belnap’s first assailant shoved his penis in her face, she told him “no” and tried to push him away. “Isn’t that enough?” Keteyian asked, referring to indication of an absence of consent.

  Because Kelsey Belnap said nothing further to communicate her lack of consent as the sexual activity escalated, Van Valkenburg replied, he didn’t have enough evidence to take the case to trial. “This was not a prosecutable case,” he told Keteyian. “So I don’t have any sort of regret about not filing this. I don’t think we did anything wrong.”

  Van Valkenburg, who was the head Missoula County prosecutor, neglected to mention the incriminating evidence he actually did have, such as the emergency room nurse’s notes and Detective Baker’s statement in his case report that when Kelsey Belnap’s initial assailant stuck his erect penis in her face, “she said something to the effect, ‘I don’t want to’ and pushed him away with her hands.”

  Nor did Van Valkenburg acknowledge the substantial and well-documented injuries to Belnap’s vagina or the text messages to Belnap from Betsy Fairmont saying, “I am so sorry. I should have taken better care of you”—texts that Detective Baker downloaded from Belnap’s phone and submitted as evidence. Furthermore, the recorded statements the perpetrators made to Baker failed to explain how, exactly, Belnap expressed consent while facedown and semi-comatose, bent across a bed. The perpetrators’ statements also failed to address the implausibility of their claims that she eagerly engaged in painful, injurious sex with four men she’d never met before that evening.

  The Missoula County attorney’s decision not to prosecute infuriated Kelsey Belnap and her family. Gang rape is an especially heinous crime. It seemed likely that the men who allegedly assaulted Kelsey might also have assaulted other women, and might rape again if not held accountable. The Belnaps believe a more motivated prosecutor than Van Valkenburg would have ordered a more thorough investigation, charged the perpetrators with rape, and either persuaded them to make a plea deal or taken them to trial—where he or she could have discredited the testimony of Kelsey’s assailants and, possibly, persuaded a jury to convict them.