Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town - Softcover

Krakauer, Jon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804170568 ISBN 13: 9780804170567

Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “A devastating exposé of colleges and local law enforcement.... A substantive deep dive into the morass of campus sex crimes, where the victim is too often treated like the accused.” —Entertainment Weekly

Missoula, Montana, is a typical college town, home to a highly regarded state university whose beloved football team inspires a passionately loyal fan base. Between January 2008 and May 2012, hundreds of students reported sexual assaults to the local police. Few of the cases were properly handled by either the university or local authorities. In this, Missoula is also typical.

In these pages, acclaimed journalist Jon Krakauer investigates a spate of campus rapes that occurred in Missoula over a four-year period. Taking the town as a case study for a crime that is sadly prevalent throughout the nation, Krakauer documents the experiences of five victims: their fear and self-doubt in the aftermath; the skepticism directed at them by police, prosecutors, and the public; their bravery in pushing forward and what it cost them. These stories cut through abstract ideological debate about acquaintance rape to demonstrate that it does not happen because women are sending mixed signals or seeking attention. They are victims of a terrible crime, deserving of fairness from our justice system. Rigorously researched, rendered in incisive prose, Missoula stands as an essential call to action.  

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jon Krakauer is the author of eight books and has received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. According to the award citation, "Krakauer combines the tenacity and courage of the finest tradition of investigative journalism with the stylish subtlety and profound insight of the born writer." 

www.jonkrakauer.com

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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,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804170568
• ISBN 13: 9780804170567
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 416
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland