by Jon Krakauer
When Kevin Huguet told Allison that Shaun Donovan had argued for a light sentence at their meeting, she was demoralized. Given the ongoing investigation of the Missoula County Attorney’s Office by the DOJ and all the criticism from both local and national news media that Fred Van Valkenburg’s office had allowed numerous rapists to avoid prosecution, she couldn’t understand why Donovan and Van Valkenburg seemed so determined to go easy on Beau Donaldson. Detective Guy Baker had told her that the case he’d assembled against Donaldson was backed up with some of the strongest evidence he’d ever submitted for a rape case. With Hillary McLaughlin’s testimony about Donaldson’s attempt to rape her, the case had grown even stronger. So why was the prosecution so reluctant to seek an appropriately harsh sentence?
Allison was shocked that Donovan seemed to be on the verge of reneging on his pledge to settle for nothing less than significant time in the state penitentiary. “It felt like I’d been lied to,” she told me, “and pushed in the direction they wanted to go. I felt like I continually had to push back to try to get the prosecutor’s office to do the right thing. They made it pretty clear that they didn’t like it when I spoke up or questioned what they were doing, or asked them to do more than they wanted to. It was really hard for me. I see now why most girls who’ve been raped don’t go forward with pressing charges.”
Recent sexual-assault cases in fanatical football towns such as Tallahassee, Florida; South Bend, Indiana; Seattle, Washington; and Columbia, Missouri, give credence to the notion that if the defendants are star players, it can be difficult to hold them accountable. But to the Huguet family, Shaun Donovan’s suggestion that it was unrealistic to expect much, if any, prison time for Beau Donaldson because Missoulians were in thrall to Griz football seemed like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
“Shaun is a likable guy,” Kevin noted. “But he’s part of the local good old boys club, and he has two sons who played football for Carroll College [a private school in Helena, Montana, that won the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics football title in 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2007, and 2010]. I was highly concerned right away that his kids played on teams that won national championships. I wondered where his loyalty was going to lie. How hard is he going to fight for my kid against an accused football player? Shaun seemed way too concerned about the effect of the legal proceedings on Beau and his family. Even in our first meeting he was talking about ‘Beau’s poor family. Remember that they’re victims as well. Beau’s actions have caused them significant financial harm and emotional harm.’ Like, he thinks I care about that? After what Beau did to Allison? He raped my daughter while she was sleeping. I care about only one thing, and that’s justice. I want him to go to prison.”
During their July 20 meeting, deputy prosecutor Shaun Donovan had given Kevin Huguet a four-page document that outlined potential sentences for Beau Donaldson and listed the pros and cons of recommending each sentence. Shortly after the meeting concluded, he e-mailed the same document to Allison, and he also invited her to meet with him to discuss potential sentences. When she read it, her mistrust of Donovan grew.
Allison Huguet arranged to meet Donovan on July 26, and she asked her sister Kathleen and Detective Guy Baker to accompany her. The discussion quickly turned to whether Allison would agree to a five-year sentence at a minimum-security Department of Corrections facility, which Donovan seemed to favor. When Allison told him she would go to trial before she accepted such a lenient punishment for Beau Donaldson, Shaun Donovan countered that getting a conviction for rape was, throughout the country, among the most difficult challenges prosecutors faced.
Donovan also warned Allison that she might believe she was strong, but being on the witness stand and getting ripped to shreds by a veteran defense attorney like Milt Datsopoulos “is a lot harder than you think.”
Prior to this meeting, however, Detective Baker had assured Allison, “You have the fortitude to go to trial. I know you can do this. I will be there in the courtroom when you are testifying, and you can look over at me for support. Standing up to Beau and telling the truth for everyone to hear will give you back control. It will empower you.”
Emboldened by Baker’s confidence in her, Allison demanded to know why Shaun Donovan would even discuss the possibility of a short sentence at the DOC if he was sincerely committed to a longer sentence at the Deer Lodge penitentiary. Growing angry and defensive, Donovan snapped, “I’ve been doing this job for a long time, and you are not going to change how I do my job, Allison.”
Detective Baker broke into the discussion at this point to try to dial down the tension. He politely asked Donovan if he would be willing to explain to Milt Datsopoulos that Allison was unwilling to accept anything less than a sentence in the state penitentiary.
According to Allison, Donovan replied, “I would never do that. I will not recommend a sentence simply because it’s what the victim wants.” This infuriated Allison, but according to the laws of Montana (and almost every other state), although prosecutors are required to consult with victims of rape about plea negotiations, they are completely free to ignore a victim’s entreaties at their discretion. A rape victim has absolutely no right to veto a plea deal if he or she finds it objectionable. It came as a surprise to Allison Huguet, but deputy prosecutor Shaun Donovan was not acting as her attorney in the way that Milt Datsopoulos was acting as Beau Donaldson’s attorney. Donovan’s title was deputy Missoula County attorney, and his legal responsibility was to represent the interests of the state of Montana, not Allison Huguet’s interests. Whenever he believed those interests diverged, Huguet was out of luck.
As this became clear to Huguet, her anger was exacerbated by the fact that earlier, when she’d asked Donovan if it would be a good idea for her to retain a lawyer to represent her personal interests, he’d repeatedly discouraged her from doing so, assuring her that it was unnecessary and might make her case harder to prosecute.
* * *
* pseudonym
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
For the first sixteen months after she was raped, Allison Huguet found it surprisingly easy to keep her emotions under control, at least most of the time, by stuffing the trauma into some deep recess of her subconscious. That changed after Beau Donaldson’s arrest. Suddenly her rape was all over the news, and it stayed in the news for months. Missoula can feel like a very small town in which everyone seems to know everyone else’s business. Although she was never named by the mainstream news media, hundreds of people, perhaps thousands, learned from the gossip mill that Huguet was Donaldson’s accuser, the woman responsible for his arrest. “I was surprised how quickly people found out,” said Huguet’s friend Keely Williams. “Because the day after Beau got arrested, people started texting me things like ‘What the fuck is wrong with you and Allison? Why is she lying about being raped?’ ”
Donaldson told his friends and family that he and Huguet had had sex multiple times before, “so he couldn’t have raped her.” In turn, his friends and family spread the word throughout Missoula, and beyond, that she had falsely accused him. A great many people were led to believe that she was enjoying the attention she was getting for maliciously destroying his life.
The rumors were utterly false. In the summer of 2012, Huguet grew increasingly anxious, even paranoid—an aftereffect of the rape. If she entered a bathroom and the shower curtain wasn’t pulled all the way open, she became fearful that someone was hiding behind it, and she’d panic. Before going to sleep she would check under the bed to make sure nobody was hiding beneath it. And then she would check again, and again. She had great difficulty sleeping. When a doctor recommended that she take medications to reduce her anxiety or help her sleep, she refused. “I didn’t want to take something that made me fall asleep,” Huguet explained, “because I was afraid I would be unable to wake up if something bad happened.”
When she did fall asleep, moreover, she had recurring nightmares. “They started after Beau was arrested,” Huguet told me, “when I
was constantly having to fight the prosecutors about getting him sent to prison. I remember some of the nightmares really clearly.”
In one of them, Huguet dreamed that she, Beau Donaldson, and her friend Keely Williams were standing on the Maclay Bridge—a decrepit one-lane bridge across the Bitterroot River, in the neighborhood where they grew up. During the summer, the bridge is a popular hangout for local teenagers, who jump from it into the chilly river below. In Huguet’s nightmare, she recalled, “It was late fall or maybe winter. Beau and Keely and me were down by the bridge, and I think Beau was trying to tell me he was sorry for raping me. And then he jumped off the bridge to kill himself. I jumped in to save him, even though Keely was yelling, ‘No! No! No! Let him go! Don’t go after him!’
“I swam over to him, and was trying to pull him to shore, when suddenly he woke up with this look on his face,” Huguet said, trying not to sob. “It was that same look he had when I saw him at the Mo Club at Thanksgiving and he was laughing at me. I realized that he wasn’t drowning, and that he hadn’t jumped off the bridge to kill himself. Then Beau grabbed me, held me underwater, and tried to drown me.” At this point Huguet woke up, terrified. “Looking at the nightmare now,” she continued, “I think it says a lot about what I was going through. I think I was struggling with the fact that I still wanted to trust Beau, my childhood friend, but he obviously was not trustworthy.”
She had many such nightmares. “When I’d have a dream like that,” Huguet said, “I’d wake up emotionally drained. The images from the dream would be really vivid, and they would stay in my head throughout the day. I couldn’t get them out of my mind. People don’t understand how exhausting that was—the nightmares, and not sleeping, and constantly worrying about who might be hiding behind the shower curtain. They just don’t get what you go through, day after day, when you’ve been raped.”
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ALLISON HUGUET’S ONGOING stalemate with deputy prosecutor Shaun Donovan and the Missoula County Attorney’s Office (MCAO) exacerbated her post-traumatic stress, but she refused to agree to a plea deal that didn’t require Beau Donaldson to serve time in the state penitentiary. By late August, Donovan felt he’d negotiated a deal with Donaldson’s attorney, Milt Datsopoulos, that the Huguet family would be able to live with. On August 20, Donovan held a meeting with Allison, her parents, Fred Van Valkenburg, and Assistant Deputy Chief County Attorney Suzy Boylan, one of the most skilled prosecutors at the MCAO, to discuss the plea agreement Donovan had drafted, hoping the Huguets would agree to it.
The meeting was quarrelsome. According to the terms of the deal, in return for a guilty plea by Donaldson, “the State agrees to recommend that the Defendant be sentenced to a term of 30 years at the Montana State Prison with 20 years of that sentence suspended.” When the prosecutors asked Allison if she would agree to it, she told them she was “not willing to agree to that, at all.”
Boylan tried to change Allison’s mind by arguing that ten years in the state prison was “quite harsh.” The Huguets responded by pointing out that a ten-year sentence meant Donaldson would in fact be eligible for parole after just two and a half years. Boylan countered that although Allison appeared to be a very strong woman, she had no idea what it was like to get up on the witness stand and be cross-examined by a ruthless defense attorney. Boylan had seen it many times, she said, and it was almost always an unimaginably horrible experience for the victim. She also stated, quite accurately, that if the case went to trial there was a good chance that Beau Donaldson would receive a sentence that included no prison time whatsoever.
After Boylan spoke, Van Valkenburg told the Huguets that this was almost certainly the harshest deal Milt Datsopoulos and Beau Donaldson would accept and, furthermore, that he was going to present the deal to Datsopoulos regardless of whether the Huguets were on board. And if they didn’t agree with the terms of the deal, Van Valkenburg added, he hoped they would at least agree not to let it become “a public spat in the media.” The next day, August 21, Shaun Donovan sent the plea agreement to Donaldson and Datsopoulos to be signed.
On September 11, 2012, they signed it. That afternoon, television reporter Irina Cates posted a story on the KPAX website in which she wrote,
Prosecutors say the victim is not completely satisfied with the plea bargain, but she understands why it had to be done.
“It’s beneficial to the victim and the community in the sense that there’s a guarantee of a conviction. There is always a possibility when a person does not plead guilty that something else could happen, that results in them not being convicted,” says Deputy Missoula County Attorney Shaun Donovan.
“The reason we pled guilty is that it’s a reduced recommendation substantially from the original proposal by the county attorney’s office,” says Donaldson’s defense attorney Milt Datsopoulos….
During the investigation, Missoula Police detectives monitored a phone call between the victim and Donaldson, where Donaldson admitted taking advantage of her. He apologized to the woman and attributed the act to a drinking problem and pain medication.
“He made a mistake, he acknowledged that mistake early on and based on his conduct—based on his former life—we believe strongly this young man shouldn’t have a big chunk of his life taken away from him,” Datsopoulos said….
Datsopoulos is concerned the federal investigations into the Missoula community and the sexual assault allegations involving UM athletes could affect Donaldson’s case.
Four hours later, Gwen Florio announced the plea agreement on the Missoulian website:
“The victim has suffered an injury that no amount of punishing the defendant is going to fix,” said Donovan.
Donaldson’s attorney, Milt Datsopoulos, said he doesn’t believe prison is the place for his client. “Hopefully, the life he’s led will be the most persuasive” argument in favor of a less severe sentence, Datsopoulos said….
“He made a mistake and he acknowledged that mistake early on,” Datsopoulos said. According to charging documents in the case, Donaldson apologized to the woman the next day.
“This took place at a house party and both individuals had been drinking,” Datsopoulos said. Everyone there “was drinking more than they should, but that’s a rite of passage,” he said.
Donovan said he doesn’t know if the victim or her family will testify at the sentencing. But if the victim chooses, she can ask the judge to impose a longer prison sentence. “She’s conflicted,” he said of the plea agreement.
Datsopoulos said a more appropriate sentence would involve his client being placed in a prerelease center run by the Department of Corrections.
And he said he’s concerned that publicity over the issue of sexual assault—especially “the premise that [UM athletes] have been given special consideration”—has “polluted” the environment surrounding sentencing.
“I don’t think that’s completely far-fetched, but we don’t want that to happen,” Donovan said, adding that the County Attorney’s Office seeks “an appropriate” sentence.
The articles upset Allison Huguet. She felt that Milt Datsopoulos had skillfully spun his comments to portray Beau Donaldson in a very sympathetic light, while Shaun Donovan’s statements had failed to present a strong case for a harsh sentence. Even after the media announced that Donaldson had confessed to raping Huguet and had pleaded guilty, many Missoulians continued to believe that she was lying and he was innocent. A close friend of Huguet’s named Valerie* told Huguet that her father had come home from a poker game and started to rant about “how messed up it was that Beau Donaldson was going to have to go to jail.”
“Why?” Valerie asked her father. “Would you think the same thing if it was me who’d been raped by Beau?”
Her dad replied that the friends he was playing cards with—men who knew both Huguet and Donaldson quite well—had assured him that “Allison made up a story about being raped, and it’s all a lie.”
In a September 12 e-mail to prosecutors Shaun Dono
van and Fred Van Valkenburg, Huguet requested a meeting to “discuss a few things.” She explained that she was “a little frustrated with some of the comments” Donovan had made to reporters Irina Cates and Gwen Florio. Although she “appreciated” that he’d mentioned she “didn’t necessarily agree with the plea deal,” Huguet wrote, she was confused by what Donovan meant when he said she was “conflicted”:
I have remained consistent through the entire process that [Donaldson] needs to go to prison for a long amount of time and that I fully intend on testifying/making a verbal statement [to that effect] at the sentencing….
Milt continues to try and play this off as a “mistake” and make Beau look like someone teachers, coaches, and principals will stand up for. [Milt also] tries to pass off some of [Beau’s] responsibility…by saying “This took place at a house party and both individuals had been drinking….Everyone there ‘was drinking more than they should, but that’s a rite of passage.’ ”…
From the beginning I have been trying really hard to have faith and find the positives in each court hearing, but I am struggling to feel like I am being fully supported and defended by your office. I know Milt has the right to say whatever he wants to the media and I am not at all shocked by what he is saying, it would just be nice if your office could be a little more aggressive in responding to some of his claims and make your own statements reminding the public of what Beau is, which is someone who admitted [to] raping someone he describes as “a little sister.” I truly do appreciate your guys time with the case and hope that you can understand my frustrations.