Missoula

by Jon Krakauer

  Jordan Johnson’s alleged rape of Cecilia Washburn on February 4, 2012, in addition to the other sexual assaults by Griz football players that occurred on Coach Pflugrad’s watch, apparently compelled President Engstrom to take decisive action.

  Missoulians were already disturbed by the escalating rape scandal, and the firing of Robin Pflugrad and Jim O’Day left the town reeling. On March 30, the football team posted a letter on GoGriz.com (no connection to eGriz.com), the official website of the UM athletic department:

  Dear Parents, Griz Nation, The University of Montana, the citizens of Missoula;

  We write this letter as the players of the 2012 University of Montana Football team. We also write this letter as students of a University we love, members of a community we cherish and as stewards of one of the most respected and honored football traditions of excellence in the nation.

  The events over the past months regarding allegations and actions of players and most recently the firing of our head coach and the athletic director have all had a deep and profound impact on us. We understand and accept the fact that a few of our teammates’ actions, whether intended and deserved or not, have contributed to this unfortunate situation. Whether or not true, regardless of obvious motivations and despite the facts, or lack of them, we have learned that the rules in today’s public arena are about perception and expediency. As student athletes of this university we are left without an answer as to why our two leaders, Coach Pflugrad and Jim O’Day, are gone. These events have left us disappointed, saddened, and stunned, but they have also provided us something else.

  We have been reminded of the commitment we made years ago, and supported by our families, to pursue excellence in the sport we love that led us from across the country and Montana to come here. Our responsibility to honor those who support us, our duty to respect the players and coaches who built the proud Griz tradition, and our unwavering appreciation of Griz Nation is now stronger and more deeply felt. Most importantly, our commitment to each other is stronger than ever.

  Speaking with one voice, we ask for your strength, support and solidarity. We hope this series of personal and collective tragedies will give way to strengthening and rebuilding. We also ask those who have been entrusted with authority and power to carefully consider the impact of their statements and actions on our team and our great tradition.

  Our team stands together, closer and stronger than ever before. Just as we will hold ourselves to a higher standard, we will also hold others. We understand that honor, truth and hard work win in the end. We are Montana.

  The letter showed a belated understanding by the Griz players that Missoula’s sexual-assault problem was having a deleterious impact on the football program and their individual careers. Conspicuously absent, however, was any expression of concern for the women who had been raped by their teammates. One is left with the sense that the football players saw themselves as the primary victims of the rape scandal.

  Many Missoulians shared the players’ perspective. There is a feeling in Missoula that the Grizzlies football team represents the entire town, not just the University of Montana. Even Missoulians who despise the university for what they perceive to be its liberal bias and academic insularity tend to love the Griz. At the time, a large segment of the population seemed to feel that the whole city had been unfairly besmirched by the scandal. Expressions of support for the beleaguered team appeared all over Missoula in the form of flags, banners, T-shirts, and signs proclaiming, “WE ARE GRIZ NATION.” Florio was called a bitch and a cunt by anonymous posters to Internet forums, and she was threatened with violent assault.

  But the support for the football players wasn’t universal. Stenciled graffiti declaring “WE ARE GRIZ RAPE NATION” appeared as well, on a few Missoula walls and railway underpasses. And the bad news about Missoula’s rape problem, as it turned out, was far from over.

  On May 1, 2012, the assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, Thomas Perez, arrived in Missoula and held a press conference to announce that the DOJ had launched a major investigation into the handling of eighty Missoula sexual-assault cases over the previous three years. Perez said the DOJ would be investigating the Missoula County Attorney’s Office, the Missoula Police Department, and the University of Montana. Letters sent to county attorney Fred Van Valkenburg and police chief Mark Muir alleged that their agencies’ “failure to investigate reports of sexual assaults against women” amounted to gender discrimination.

  Van Valkenburg and Muir appeared beside Perez at the press conference, along with Missoula mayor John Engen and UM president Royce Engstrom. Although Muir, Engen, and Engstrom promised to support the investigation, Van Valkenburg took the microphone after Perez made his comments and slammed the DOJ. He railed against “the heavy hand of the federal government,” adamantly denied that his office had done anything wrong, and refused to cooperate with the feds, claiming that the DOJ was overreaching its jurisdiction.

  Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez wasn’t swayed by Fred Van Valkenburg’s outburst. “I don’t think protecting women from rape or sexual harassment,” he said, “is an overreach of federal government.”

  As the scandal had intensified during the first six months of 2012, the Missoula Police Department, the Missoula County Attorney’s Office, and the University of Montana had scrambled to address the torrent of negative press, with mixed results. On multiple occasions, public officials became so rattled by media reports about the scandal that they actually tried to blame Gwen Florio and/or rape victims for their predicament.

  Media inquiries about the university’s response to the sexual assaults were handled by UM Vice President of External Relations Jim Foley. He had a close relationship with the athletic department, and he accompanied the football team to all of its out-of-town games. In March 2012, Foley sent an e-mail to Dean Charles Couture suggesting that the university take disciplinary action against Kelsey Belnap for speaking to Florio about the school’s mishandling of her case. “Is it not a violation of the student code of conduct for the woman to be publicly talking about the process and providing details about the conclusion?” Foley inquired.

  Foley also took umbrage at Florio’s use of the terms “gang rape” and “football players” to describe the assault of Belnap in 2010 by four members of the Griz football team, instead of calling it a “date rape” by multiple “students,” as it was characterized in official university statements. “Can anybody tell me where UM has used the terms gang rape and football players in any public document that the Missoulian would be referencing?” he wrote in an e-mail to Dean Couture, UM counsel David Aronofsky, and Lucy France, the UM director of equal opportunity and affirmative action.

  Couture explained to Foley that he had used the term “gang rape” when referring to the assault of Kelsey Belnap “because that is what it was.” To Couture’s credit, in December 2011, a year after the alleged assault occurred, when he learned that Belnap had purportedly been raped by reading about it in the Missoulian, he launched an investigation of Benjamin Styron and the four football players accused of raping her.

  The University Court determined that Styron was not guilty of violating the university’s Student Conduct Code. Thanks to Couture’s efforts, however, one of Belnap’s assailants was expelled. Another agreed to withdraw from the university at the end of the 2012 spring semester, was banned from any future access to the UM campus, and was prohibited from reenrolling in any Montana University System campus in the future. The other two perpetrators, who dropped out of school after Gwen Florio’s article about Kelsey Belnap was published, were notified that they would face disciplinary action if they ever attempted to reenroll.

  * * *

  * Four months earlier, Van de Wetering had represented Calvin Smith when Smith was found guilty of raping Kaitlynn Kelly by the University of Montana.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Following the arrest of Beau Donaldson on January 6,
2012, for raping Allison Huguet, he remained in jail until January 13, when he was released on bail, which had been reduced from $100,000 to $50,000. That same day, Huguet got an alarming phone call from a close friend who had attended high school with her and Donaldson. This friend told Huguet that an admirer of Donaldson’s named Sharon Mortimer*1 had been telling people that Huguet was lying when she accused Donaldson of raping her and that Donaldson had also been falsely accused of raping another woman in 2008.

  The rumor made Huguet wonder. Sharon Mortimer was obviously wrong about Beau Donaldson being innocent of raping her. Maybe Mortimer was also wrong about Donaldson being innocent of raping this other woman, whoever she was. So Huguet phoned Detective Guy Baker, the officer who’d arrested Donaldson, to let him know about the rumor.

  Detective Baker tracked down Sharon Mortimer and asked her to come to the Missoula Police Department to be interviewed. If Beau Donaldson had indeed raped another woman two years before raping Allison Huguet, and the victim could be persuaded to testify against Donaldson, it could help convict him for raping Huguet, even if this other victim hadn’t reported the assault to the police. As David Lisak has noted, persuading a jury to convict a serial rapist is a lot easier than convicting someone who’s under suspicion for committing only a single rape.

  During her interview with Detective Baker, Sharon Mortimer explained that she had a second cousin named Hillary McLaughlin who lived in Great Falls. In the autumn of 2008, McLaughlin came to Missoula on a Friday night to visit her best friend, Joanna Sutherlin,*2 who had gotten McLaughlin a ticket to a Griz football game on Saturday. The night before the game, Sutherlin held a party at her house, and McLaughlin invited Mortimer to come over and join the fun. Mortimer showed up with her boyfriend and Beau Donaldson, who was a freshman at UM that fall. Sharon Mortimer told Detective Baker that Hillary McLaughlin was attracted to Donaldson, wanted to hook up with him, and led him upstairs “to show him something” in Joanna Sutherlin’s bedroom.

  The following evening, Sharon Mortimer told Detective Baker, she got a phone call from one of Hillary McLaughlin’s friends who was upset about what “Beau had done to Hillary.” In a subsequent conversation with McLaughlin, according to Mortimer, McLaughlin told her that while McLaughlin and Donaldson were upstairs, he had tried to rape her, but Mortimer didn’t believe it. She reported to Detective Baker that when she, her boyfriend, and Donaldson had left the party, McLaughlin had hugged her, said good-bye to Donaldson, and given no indication that anything was wrong. Hillary McLaughlin had invented the story about the attempted rape because she had consensual sex with Beau Donaldson and then regretted it, Mortimer insisted.

  A week after interviewing Sharon Mortimer, Detective Baker interviewed Hillary McLaughlin, and McLaughlin’s account of what happened at Sutherlin’s party was rather different from Mortimer’s. As McLaughlin told Detective Baker, and later told me, Beau Donaldson began hitting on McLaughlin as soon as he arrived at the party. “Beau was very, very clingy,” McLaughlin recalled, “and kind of hung all over me for the entire night. I had never met him before, so it was kind of weird.” It was also strange that Donaldson, as a member of the Griz football team, was drinking heavily the night before a game.

  Hillary McLaughlin had arrived in Missoula that evening after working all day and then driving three hours from Great Falls. After spending a couple of hours with Beau Donaldson she felt worn out, so she left the party and went upstairs alone to get ready for bed. When she arrived in Joanna Sutherlin’s room, McLaughlin took off her makeup, changed into a T-shirt and sweatpants, and climbed into bed. “I was playing on my phone and laying in bed,” McLaughlin said, “and for some reason I still had the light on. All of a sudden the door opened and it was Beau. And he walks in and doesn’t say anything, then he shuts the door and locks it.”

  Donaldson didn’t turn off the light, and McLaughlin vividly remembers what happened next: “He had khaki shorts on, and he pulls them down and he gets on top of me.” Donaldson was drunk, she told me, “But I don’t think he was to the point where he couldn’t control himself.” As Beau Donaldson sprawled over her, essentially naked from the waist down, McLaughlin wrapped the sheets around herself as tightly as possible. He pushed her phone onto the floor and began humping his penis against her, pinning her body to the mattress. “I started screaming,” McLaughlin said, “because he was just kind of grinding on top of me, and trying to make out with me. I was moving my head to keep him from kissing me, and screaming.”

  Around midnight, Joanna Sutherlin was sitting on the staircase with two friends—a man named Cody*3 and a woman named Grace*4—and heard the screaming. They rushed up to Sutherlin’s bedroom but discovered that the door was locked. For several minutes, the three of them tried to open the door, without success, and as they struggled with the lock, the crying and screaming from inside the room continued. When McLaughlin heard her friends trying to force their way into the bedroom, she yelled, “Joanna! Help me!”

  They yelled back, “We’re trying to get the door open!” All the while, Beau Donaldson kept humping McLaughlin, despite her cries for help and the yelling from just beyond the door.

  “After maybe five to eight minutes,” Hillary McLaughlin recalled, “I think Cody finally broke the hinge off the door and got it open. I was still screaming and Beau was still grinding on me and wouldn’t stop, and wouldn’t get off of me. I was like, ‘What are you doing! Leave me alone!’ Finally, I believe either Cody or Grace just ripped him right off of me. He still had his shorts down, and they pushed him out of the room.”

  When he interviewed Grace about the incident, Detective Baker wrote in his case report, Grace said Donaldson “acted as if he was irritated that they had interrupted what he was doing with Hillary.”

  According to the case report, Joanna Sutherlin told Detective Baker that “based on what she observed when she opened the locked door, she felt ‘if nobody stopped him…he would have raped [Hillary McLaughlin].’ ” Baker wrote that “Joanna stated it was ‘obvious’…[Hillary] did not want to be with him, but Beau did not stop despite Hillary’s continued screams, and [Joanna] and Grace’s attempts to get the door unlocked.”

  After Joanna, Grace, and Cody got Donaldson out of the bedroom, McLaughlin told me, “I remember I just sat there and cried. I didn’t know what to think. I had never been in a situation like that before.” Sutherlin and Grace tried to console McLaughlin, who was extremely shaken, and then went downstairs and demanded that Beau Donaldson, Sharon Mortimer, and their friends get out of Sutherlin’s house immediately. Grace told Detective Baker that Donaldson and his entourage “were mad about being asked to leave.”

  The day after the party, Sharon Mortimer returned to Joanna Sutherlin’s home, apparently unaware that Beau Donaldson had attempted to rape Hillary McLaughlin in Sutherlin’s bedroom. So McLaughlin took her cousin into a closet so they could talk privately and told her straight up: “Beau tried to rape me last night.”

  According to McLaughlin, Mortimer replied, “No, he didn’t.”

  McLaughlin said, “Yes, he did.”

  At which point, Hillary McLaughlin told me, Mortimer again declared, “No, he didn’t!” and became angry. “That’s bullshit!” Mortimer claimed. “Beau would never do that! He’s not that type of person.”

  To convince her cousin that Beau Donaldson really did try to rape her, McLaughlin gave her a blow-by-blow account of what had gone down in the bedroom. Mortimer refused to believe it, telling McLaughlin, “That’s not true! That’s not what happened!” before leaving Sutherlin’s house in a huff.

  When Hillary McLaughlin returned home to Great Falls, she didn’t tell anybody except one friend about Beau Donaldson’s attempt to rape her, and she decided not to report the assault to the police.

  This assault happened in 2008. McLaughlin was nineteen years old. She’d recently enlisted in the Air National Guard and was about to begin basic training. Although she was traumatized by Donaldson’s violent act, she
wondered—like so many other victims of sexual assault—whether she was somehow responsible. “I was feeling all these different emotions,” McLaughlin remembered. “I couldn’t help wondering, like, did I do something to make him think that’s what I wanted? Did I drink too much? I hadn’t really done either of those things, but that stuff goes through your mind anyway. When I thought about it, I knew what happened wasn’t my fault. But I didn’t want to report it. I was like, ‘I can probably just move past this and forget about it.’ ” So that’s what she decided to do. And as time went on, it seemed like she had succeeded in putting the assault behind her.

  In January 2012, Hillary McLaughlin realized that she was mistaken. More than three years had passed since Beau Donaldson had attacked her. In the interim, she’d met a man in the Air National Guard and had gotten married. She was eight months pregnant with their first child. One evening, McLaughlin told me, “My husband, Robert,*5 and I were sitting on the couch when all of a sudden Beau Donaldson’s name and picture appeared on the TV screen. I took a deep breath and was like, ‘Oh my gosh!’ Robert asked, ‘What’s wrong?’ I said, ‘I have to tell you something.’ ”

  Until that moment, Hillary McLaughlin hadn’t said a word about the assault to anyone in her family, and she continued to say nothing about it to any of her relatives beyond her husband. After Beau Donaldson’s arrest was in the news, she and Joanna Sutherlin talked about it over the phone, Hillary says, but “then we kind of went on with our lives and I didn’t think much about it for a little while.” Three weeks after Donaldson’s arrest, however, her husband’s phone rang, and an unfamiliar voice on the other end said, “Hi, this is Detective Guy Baker, from the Missoula Police Department, and I’m looking for Hillary McLaughlin.”