Missoula

by Jon Krakauer

  When Kevin was a boy, his father would lead him and his five brothers a couple of hundred feet up the steep incline of Mount Sentinel to watch Grizzly football games. “We were a large family and didn’t have any money,” Kevin said, “but we could sit on the hill and watch for free.” Ever since becoming the owner of a thriving local business, Kevin has been a corporate sponsor of Grizzly athletics and a season ticket holder. “Football games are an all-day Missoula event,” he said. “Twenty thousand–some people you know show up in the morning for tailgating.”

  Allison and her father usually had breakfast at his house before heading to the game. But the morning after Beau Donaldson raped her, Allison wasn’t ready to face her father over bacon and eggs, so she texted him to say she was going to skip breakfast and would simply meet him at the stadium shortly before the opening kickoff. He texted her back urging her not to be late.

  Allison was in a bind. “My dad was the last person I wanted to know that I had been raped,” she explained. “I was in a state of shock. I wasn’t able to think or make decisions. I was just going through the motions. Mostly, at that point, I was trying to figure out how to make my eyes not look like I had been bawling for the past five hours.” She put on sunglasses to hide her bloodshot eyes and went to Grizzly Stadium.

  Allison’s extended family had tickets together on the thirty-yard line for every game, less than a dozen rows up from the field. When she arrived, her grandfather was there, a couple of uncles, some cousins, and her father. The first thing Kevin said to her was “Do you see Beau down there? Is he playing today? How’s he doing?”

  “I don’t know,” Allison snapped. “Beau is trailer trash.” Kevin, who had never heard her speak ill of Donaldson before, was taken aback, but he let the comment pass. On the far side of the field, Allison could see Donaldson standing on the sideline with his teammates, wearing a maroon game jersey with his number, 45, emblazoned across his chest in silver.

  Before halftime, Allison took leave of her dad to avoid having to look at the man who’d just raped her, and tried to find Keely Williams, who’d said she would be at the game. Allison thought talking to Williams might make her feel a little better. As she was looking for Williams, Allison ran into Sam Erschler, the friend who had persuaded Williams and Huguet to spend the night at Donaldson’s house instead of driving home. Erschler—one of Donaldson’s oldest friends—had no idea that anything was wrong. “I don’t know why, or how it came out,” Allison recalled, “but I told him Beau raped me.”

  “I’m sorry, Al,” Erschler offered, giving her a hug. He told Huguet that Donaldson had been acting strange when they woke up that morning. Then, looking bewildered, Erschler said, “I don’t know what’s going on with Beau these days.”

  Huguet walked off, located Williams, and the two women went to an out-of-the-way corner of the stadium to talk; there, they were soon approached by two young UM students hoping to get friendly. “These two boys were hitting on us,” Huguet told me. “They thought they were being funny and would not go away. Keely finally had to yell at them, ‘You need to leave us alone! Right now! I’m serious!’ ”

  After their would-be suitors departed, Huguet and Williams spent the rest of the football game talking about what had happened at Donaldson’s house. While trying to explain why she felt so guilty about allowing Huguet to sleep alone on the couch, Williams told Huguet a secret she had shared with only a few other people: Two years earlier, when she had left Montana to attend Portland State University, she, too, had been raped by an acquaintance.

  —

  IT HAPPENED DURING Keely Williams’s first week in Oregon, before classes had even started. “It was orientation week,” she remembered. “I hated it. I didn’t do anything. I didn’t make any friends. I didn’t want to be there. I just wanted to sit in my room. I wished I’d never left Missoula.” Then Lewis Ronan,* a boy she’d known slightly in high school who was also a student at Portland State, called and invited her to a party at his apartment. “Sweet!” Williams thought. “Someone I know!”

  It was a small gathering. When Williams arrived, Ronan’s friends were smoking marijuana with a hookah. Williams began gulping down drinks. “I got really drunk,” she said, “and started throwing up—a lot, from drinking too fast. A girl I didn’t know was hanging out in the bathroom with me, helping take care of me and being nice.” The girl offered to drive Williams back to her dormitory, but she was puking too much to travel anywhere. So Williams remained in Ronan’s bathroom with the girl, resting her chest against the rim of the toilet bowl between paroxysms of vomiting.

  As Williams’s retching subsided, the girl repeatedly offered to drive Williams home, but Lewis Ronan intervened each time, insisting, “No, she will just stay here tonight.”

  Eventually, Williams agreed to spend the night at Ronan’s, she remembered, “but I was really drunk, so I didn’t really have a choice. And then I passed out. I don’t even remember going to Lewis’s room. But at some point later in the night I woke up in his bed and…” Williams stopped speaking for a moment as she began to cry. “And he was above me, and he was having sex with me,” she continued between sobs. “And then I passed out again. When I woke up the next day I had no idea where I was, or how to get back to the university campus. I told Lewis I needed to get home, because my mom was coming to visit me.”

  Ronan didn’t acknowledge that he had done anything wrong; he acted like everything was fine as he drove Williams back to her dorm. “I didn’t really put it together that I had been raped, not at first,” she said. When Williams’s mother arrived, Keely said nothing about what had happened. “I just kept begging her to take me home to Missoula,” she explained through her tears. “I told her, ‘I want to go home. I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to go to college. I don’t want to be in Portland.’ ” Her mother had no idea why Keely was so miserable. “She was like, ‘No. You have to stay. You haven’t even been here a week.’ ”

  Later that day, Keely Williams was made painfully aware that her urinary tract had become inflamed during the forced intercourse that had taken place while she was passed out. Not wanting to tell her mother, she went to a local Safeway and bought cranberry juice and Pyridium to treat the inflammation. “It turned my pee bright orange,” she recalled, “but it numbed my bladder, which helped.” Williams spent most of the next couple of days drinking cranberry juice in bed. Purple bruises spread across her chest where she had pressed against the toilet while throwing up.

  Meanwhile, Lewis Ronan began sending text messages to Williams’s phone, indicating that he very much wanted to see her again, apparently unaware that she hadn’t found it pleasurable to be raped while unconscious. “Every time he texted me, I just felt nauseous,” Williams told me. “It made me want to vomit. I did not want him to tell me he wanted to hang out with me or ask me why I didn’t want to talk to him. I wasn’t consciously thinking, ‘This guy raped me,’ because at the time, I didn’t understand that if you don’t actively consent to have sex, it’s rape. I just knew something wasn’t right.”

  Eventually it occurred to Williams that maybe Ronan had indeed raped her. “So I looked some things up,” she said, “and realized that’s what had happened. But I still didn’t understand why somebody I knew would do that. Like, maybe I had said something? Or maybe I did something?” Not unlike many other rape victims, Williams initially reacted by wondering if she was somehow to blame.

  “By now a little bit of time had passed,” Williams said. “I just wanted it to go away. I didn’t know what I should do, or who I should tell….I didn’t want anyone to ask me questions about it. I didn’t want to talk about it. I knew that if I told someone who was really close to me, that they would worry, and ask me questions, and would want me to do something about it, and I didn’t want to deal with any of that. So I told this ex-boyfriend that I thought I had been raped.”

  The ex-boyfriend didn’t believe Keely and became angry. He told her, “You’re just being a s
lut. You’re fucking other guys, and you’re trying to cover that up by saying you were raped.”

  —

  TWO YEARS AFTER Lewis Ronan raped Keely Williams, when Beau Donaldson raped Allison Huguet in September 2010, the trauma Williams had experienced came rushing back to the surface. As she and Huguet talked in a high corner of Grizzly Stadium the morning after Huguet was violated, Williams explained to her friend that part of the reason she felt so guilty about leaving Huguet alone on the couch at Donaldson’s house was that it was all too easy for her to imagine what Huguet was going through, especially when she’d been curled into a ball, sobbing uncontrollably, in the front seat of her mother’s van. “I wanted to absorb all of your pain,” Williams told Huguet. “I wanted to hurt for you so you wouldn’t have to deal with what I went through.”

  The fact that Williams empathized intensely with Huguet could not, and did not, mitigate Huguet’s pain, however. Huguet had been raped, and sooner or later she was going to have to come to grips with it. So she and Williams discussed how she might begin to do that.

  “I didn’t feel like I was strong enough to go to the police,” Huguet said, “or even tell my dad about it.” She really wanted Donaldson to acknowledge what he had done to her, though. She and Williams decided that Huguet would ask Donaldson’s friend Sam Erschler to tell Donaldson that he needed to come to Huguet’s house and apologize, and that if he refused, she was going to report him to the police.

  Williams convinced Huguet that if Donaldson agreed to meet with her, she should surreptitiously make an audio recording of his apology. Williams was majoring in criminal justice at Portland State University, and she knew that according to Montana’s stringent privacy laws, it is illegal to record a conversation unless all parties have been informed that they are being recorded. But even though it would be inadmissible in court, Williams argued to Huguet, “You have to make a recording. Because you don’t know if he will ever admit to this again.”

  Huguet agreed. “I had no desire to talk to Beau,” she said. “And at that point I had no intention of reporting him to the police. But Beau didn’t know that. Threatening to go to the police was the only way I thought I had any power to make him acknowledge what he did. And if I ever did decide to go to the police, or tell anyone else about what happened, I did not want to have to fight about whether Beau really raped me or not. I wanted to be able to prove it.” So Saturday afternoon, following the Griz game, Huguet went to RadioShack with her mother and bought a digital recorder for forty-five dollars.

  —

  BEAU DONALDSON AND Sam Erschler came to Beth Huguet’s home Sunday afternoon. Both Allison and her mother were still extremely upset. Before Donaldson and Erschler arrived, Allison Huguet had turned on the recorder and jammed it between the cushions of her mother’s sectional sofa. Donaldson happened to sit right next to it. As soon as Donaldson sat down, Allison asked him, “Do you want to apologize to me, Beau, or…?”

  Donaldson answered, “I am just so sorry.” Speaking in nervous bursts, he said, “We were, like, on the couch. I was, obviously, completely fucked up. We were both drunk. I mean, we were laying there. I remember we were making out on the couch. We were laying on the couch together. Started doing stuff. And then it was just—I don’t even really remember anything after, like…I remember we were making out.”

  Furious that Donaldson would lie to her face and think he could get away with it, Allison demanded, “Beau, how come I remember falling asleep on the couch, and then I remember waking up, halfway through, realizing you’re on top and having sex with me….Beau! I was asleep!”

  “We were making out on the couch!” Donaldson insisted.

  “No, we weren’t!” Allison replied, just as vehemently.

  “The issue,” said Beth Huguet, “is that it was sex without consent….”

  “The issue, Beau,” Allison angrily interjected, “is that you took complete advantage of me.”

  “I did,” Donaldson confessed. Suddenly he seemed to understand that lying wasn’t going to work. “I admit it. I did. I’m sorry.” Less than two minutes after Donaldson arrived, Allison had the confession she’d sought. But the conversation was far from over.

  “The only reason I even felt comfortable sleeping there is because I’ve known you since the first grade,” said Allison.

  “I know!” said Beau. “And…I can’t blame it on alcohol, because that’s not right. It’s something that I did, and I fucked up.”

  Allison asked him, “Has this happened before?…”

  “No! Never!” Donaldson sobbed. “This is the first time anything has ever happened to me like this. Ever!…I am so sorry.”

  Beth reminded Donaldson that he had betrayed the trust of someone who considered him to be her big brother.

  Through his tears, Donaldson agreed: “She’s my little sister!”

  “If she ever had an issue, she’d come to you guys,” Beth continued, referring to Donaldson and Sam Erschler. “If she ever felt like a guy was treating her wrong, you guys are the people she would turn to….”

  Allison reminded Donaldson that she had always supported him and spoken highly of him to others, at which point Donaldson broke down and began to cry uncontrollably.

  “Do you know that you tore her up inside?” Beth Huguet asked. “You cut her inside, in her vagina….Do you know how devastating that is? As a mother, that kills me….To think that she was physically violated that way….That’s so low!”

  “Beau,” Allison said, “I just wish you knew what it was like to be a girl, and to wake up and have this two-hundred-thirty-pound person on your back, taking advantage of you when you’re not even awake. And then I just had to lay there until you were done.”

  Allison told Donaldson, “I would probably kill myself if this ever happened to another girl and I didn’t say something to the police.”

  Donaldson said he understood. “I just about killed myself that night,” he claimed. After he quit chasing Allison down the alley, he said, “I curled up in my truck in the carport with my fucking handgun in my hand.”

  Allison and her mother were dubious about the sincerity of his remorse. “I don’t know if you guys know about this,” Beth Huguet said, “but Allison had a cyst rupture when she was ten years old, she was in and out of doctors….And because of that…she takes her intimacy very seriously….She is not somebody that sleeps around. She is not promiscuous. Not that that would give you the right to rape her. That’s not the point. It’s just that…we were at the hospital for hours. The fact that you cut her up inside and everything?”

  “Allison, I’m so fucking sorry!” Donaldson wailed.

  “If I hadn’t grown up with you,” Allison said, “if I wasn’t one of your friends— If you had done this to some random girl, and she walks down to the police station and tells them, your whole life is ruined, Beau….Can’t you just see the [front page of the] Missoulian?—‘Another Grizzly football player in trouble. Rapes girl.’…Do you need help? Do you need alcohol help? Do you need help with drugs? Because obviously this is a problem….Do you like your girlfriend?”

  “I love her more than anything,” Donaldson answered. “I want to be married to this girl….”

  “I don’t understand,” said Allison. “If you love her, why are you cheating on her?…Because I’m aware it’s not just me.” Among their circle of friends, Donaldson’s infidelities were common knowledge.

  “You really need to look hard into your life,” Beth scolded, “and take stock, and think of how you need to improve on it. I guess our concern is—and tell me if I’m wrong here, Allison—one of the things that makes her want to go to the police on this, Beau, is the fact that she doesn’t want this to ever happen to another girl. She doesn’t want to know a month or two from now that you violated some other girl. And that by her speaking out she could have stopped it….”

  “Allison,” Donaldson sobbed. “I’m so sorry….”

  “The thing is,” Allison explained, “
I have a boyfriend who I have a lot of feelings for, as well. This is something I can’t even talk to him about. I can’t bring this up to him. He would literally come back here and probably kill you….Honestly, if I hear of one incident, Beau—if I hear about any female ever saying that you touched them, I will go right to the police….”

  Beth Huguet urged Donaldson to get therapy: “You need to really talk to somebody and say, ‘This is what I did. How do I change myself?’ And make sure this never happens to another person.”

  “I obviously fucking need some help,” Donaldson agreed, no longer crying. “I’m so sorry.”

  Allison reminded Donaldson, “If I walked down to the police station right now, it would ruin your life. And that’s why I’m not going to do it….I don’t want to have to live with that. But I’m not okay with what happened….I’m not telling you that by not going out and filing charges that it was okay, because it wasn’t….It needs to never happen again….Get help, Beau.”

  Donaldson assured her that he would. “He promised me that he would get treatment for his drug, alcohol, and sexual issues,” Allison recalled. “And I made it clear that this promise was the only reason I wasn’t going to the police.”

  * * *

  * pseudonym

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “A few days after it happened,” Beth Huguet told me, “I remember Allison sitting on the couch down in the basement of my house, wrapped in blankets. She wasn’t saying anything, but you could see it looping in her mind. You could see it in her face.”

  “I was overwhelmed,” Allison remembered. Classes for her junior year at Eastern Oregon University were due to start in a few days, she said, “But I wasn’t ready to leave the security of my home. I wanted to be near my family and feel protected by them.” She decided to remain in Missoula for the semester and take all her classes online. Then, a week after being raped, she got a phone call from her younger sister, Kathleen, who was attending college in Boise, Idaho.