Missoula : rape and the justice system in a college town /

THREE YEARS AGO, a young woman befriended by the powerhouse author Jon Krakauer and his wife told them she had been raped when she was a teenager by a boy she knew and, later, for a second time, by a family friend. She was still struggling to recover. "She gobbled Adderall to stay awake and guzzled alcohol to fall asleep," Krakauer writes. "It was an unconscious attempt to annihilate herself." Krakauer set out to educate himself about rape, especially when it is committed by someone the victim knows, looking for survivors who would tell him their stories. He focused on why many don't go to the police as he tried "to comprehend the repercussions of sexual assault from the perspective of those who have been victimized." The result is "Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town," which has more in common with "Under the Banner of Heaven," Krakauer's depiction of the evils of Mormon fundamentalism, than with his morally complex tales of misadventure, "Into the Wild" and "Into Thin Air." In "Missoula," Krakauer looks at the University of Montana, the local police and the prosecutor's office through the eyes of five women who reported rapes or attempted rapes between 2010 and 2012. The Justice Department investigated the handling of 80 sexual assault cases in Missoula during this period, and Krakauer supplies dismaying details that would explain why the department found a pattern of disrespect and indifference toward alleged victims. For example, he tells us, a detective interviewing an accused male student quickly reassured him that she was certain he didn't commit a crime, because "we have a lot of cases where girls come in and report stuff they are not sure about, and then it becomes rape." Similarly, the police chief sent an article to the female student in this case, citing two studies claiming that 45 percent of rape accusations are false. "Scholars have debunked both of these articles," Krakauer writes, correctly pointing out that better research has estimated the rate of false rape reports at 2 percent and 8 percent. Another sore spot is the university's prized football team, which included several players accused of sexual assault. The allegations split Missoula - especially because they involved the quarterback Jordan Johnson. On a Saturday night in February 2012, a woman whom Krakauer calls Cecilia Washburn (her name was not released) said she arranged to watch a movie with Johnson. The night before, she'd hugged him at a dance and, Krakauer reports, drunkenly said, "Jordy, I would do you anytime." But Washburn didn't shower or put on clean clothes or makeup the night he came to her house, and she testified that she didn't plan to have sex with him. Watching the movie on her bed, the two agree, they started kissing and Washburn let Johnson take her shirt off. He said they then had consensual sex. But Washburn said that she protested, "No! Not tonight!" as Johnson pinned her down and pulled off her leggings and underwear. Washburn's male housemate was in the living room just outside her door, playing a video game. She didn't call out to him, but when Johnson went to the bathroom, she grabbed her phone and texted, "Omg, I think I might have just gotten raped, he kept pushing and pushing and I said no but he wouldn't listen." A few minutes later, she drove Johnson home; when she returned, her housemate said, she cried inconsolably. Faced with this case and others, the university president fired the football coach and athletic director The football team responded with an open letter that contained no words of apology and warned the school's authority figures "to carefully consider the impact of their statements and actions on our team and our great tradition." Three months later, following an investigation, the president of the university decided to expel Johnson. This could have been the rare case in which a school throws out a star athlete for sexual assault. But after a secret review, the Montana commissioner of higher education restored the quarterback to campus and to football. The case against Johnson moved to court, where he went on trial. The university had used the standard of "preponderance of the evidence" (or more likely than not) to find Johnson culpable, but the standard for a criminal conviction is higher - beyond a reasonable doubt. After Washburn testified, an expert explained why victims who are raped by a person they trusted sometimes freeze or act on autopilot, as they try to stave off the trauma with denial. But the jury found Johnson not guilty. Krakauer presents this outcome not as a reflection of the differing evidentiary standard, and a jury's best effort to resolve a difficult and confusing set of facts, but as a bitter failure of the adversarial process. "Because the legal system stacks the deck more heavily against sexual-assault victims than victims of other crimes, it's easier to keep the whole truth from coming out," he writes. Yet the jury puzzled over the details of this case, according to a juror Krakauer interviewed, and finally hesitated to convict in part because of a key detail: ambiguity in Washburn's testimony about whether she told Johnson it was O.K. that he didn't have a condom. Krakauer doesn't seem to have spoken to Johnson or Washburn. (In an author's note, he says he tried to interview the victims and accused men whose cases he covered.) And it's not clear that he spoke to any prosecutors or police officers in Missoula, or to university officials. As a result, the book feels one-sided. It also lacks texture. Much of the story is told through transcripts of court proceedings or recordings of police interviews and news coverage. Krakauer doesn't take us inside the student culture at the university or the community of Missoula. He lets his contempt for certain city officials show, but they're neither memorable villains nor three-dimensional characters afforded the opportunity to explain themselves. And strikingly, the women who should be at the book's emotional center don't really come to life either. Krakauer did speak to some female students, like Allison Huguet, whose assailant, another football player, confessed to raping her and was convicted, in one of the book's bright spots. But he tells us little about these women outside of the experience of reporting rape and coping with the aftermath, reducing them, however inadvertently, to victimhood. It's an odd lapse for a past master storyteller. More generally, Krakauer doesn't fully grapple with the complexities of campus sexual assault. He notes the heavy drinking that leads up to some of his book's most wrenching episodes without exploring the role alcohol plays in making perpetrators dangerous or victims vulnerable. He briefly mentions critics who take campus rape seriously as a social problem but worry that "universities have overreacted to it, resulting in the denial of due process to men accused of rape." But Krakauer dismisses this concern as "specious." Instead of delving deeply into questions of fairness as universities try to fulfill a recent government mandate to conduct their own investigations and hearings - apart from the police and the courts - Krakauer settles for bromides. University procedures should "swiftly identify student offenders and prevent them from reoffending, while simultaneously safeguarding the rights of the accused," he writes, asserting that this "will be difficult, but it's not rocket science." Maybe not, but it sure is bedeviling a lot of smart people at the moment. Krakauer's bland assurances don't reflect the emerging consensus that these university procedures aren't easy to get right but are worth struggling over because legitimating the outcome is crucial for both sides. Predatory football players or insensitive authorities can't be blamed for all the current tumult. "Missoula" ends up sounding only one cautionary note in a debate that's becoming ever more layered and cacophonous. 'Omg, I think I might have just gotten raped,' one student texted to her housemate. EMILY BAZELON, a staff writer for The Times Magazine, is the author of "Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy."

*Starred Review* Missoula, Montana, a college town of 70,000 people in western Montana, has made headlines in recent years for rape, both on and off the University of Montana campus, and most notably for the number of cases involving players on the University of Montana Grizzlies football team. The notoriety has spawned everything from a viral blog post (My Weekend in America's So-Called Rape Capital,' Jezebel) to a Department of Justice investigation. Krakauer, who most recently wrote about another scandal with a Montana connection (Three Cups of Deceit, 2011, examines the misdeeds of Three Cups of Tea author Greg Mortenson, whose Central Asia Institute was headquartered in Bozeman), tackles several highly charged cases and reminds us that rape is often not an instance of he said, she said but she said, he denied, and the community refused to listen. Built primarily around the cases of Beau Donaldson, the Montana Grizzlies fullback and linebacker convicted of rape, and Jordan Johnson, the star quarterback ultimately acquitted of the charge, Missoula tells a much larger story, one that comprises multiple cases, scores of people, and a detailed time line. While the book showcases Krakauer's rigorous reporting and disciplined writing style he doesn't waste a word on the scenery the clinical blow-by-blow seems barely to conceal his rage. What he reveals is a clear pattern in which young women who reported being raped were not properly served by the agents of justice in Missoula. Do you have a boyfriend? is a question commonly asked by investigators, with the insinuation that women who regret cheating on their boyfriends regularly recast consensual sex as rape. With a few notable exceptions, the women were disbelieved, condescended to, and then expected to be understanding when prosecutors declined to vigorously pursue their attackers. Using a transcript, Krakauer re-creates one mind-blowing scene in which a detective soothes in motherly fashion the accused rapist she is supposed to be interrogating: Don't beat yourself up more than you already have about this, okay? What are we to make of the fact that some of those who fail the victims are women themselves? Missoula, despite its reputation as a blue oasis in a red state (a popular local saying is that Missoula is only 20 minutes from Montana), is crazy about its football team. The raped women, their friends, family, and defenders, and even a local reporter who covers the stories, face ostracism, threats, and the accusation that they are somehow making things up in order to harm the football program. It seems little wonder when we learn how few rapes actually get reported. Krakauer is clearly angry but channels his anger into an important document that, if there is any justice in the world, will better our society's understanding and treatment of rape. Though this makes for grim reading, and the sheer volume of information can make the story somewhat difficult to follow (particularly the passages involving the defendant Donaldson, a detective named Donovan, and attorney with the last name Datsopolous), readers will be impelled forward by the sheer, heartbreaking injustice of it all. Many Missoulians will feel unfairly maligned by the book's title, which has stirred further controversy in a town that thinks of itself, with some justification, as progressive in many ways. While this book may be unique in its disquieting particulars for instance, the chief deputy county attorney who abruptly resigns, enters private practice, and joins the defense of Johnson the problem is universal. Krakauer points out that Missoula's rape statistics are actually very much like those of other similarly sized college towns throughout the U.S. It is to be hoped that we won't need a book written for each one of them, too, before things get better.--Graff, Keir Copyright 2015 Booklist

Sexual-assault victims are routinely met with indifference and incomprehension, according to this impassioned study of campus rape. Journalist Krakauer (Into Thin Air) follows a rash of rapes at the University of Montana in Missoula from 2010 to 2012, events that sparked a furor and a Justice Department investigation; Krakauer sticks with two cases in particular through agonizing courtroom dramas, spotlighting the two obstacles to justice. The first is haphazard investigation, made worse by the callousness and suspicion about the motives of women making rape allegations on the part of the university administration, the Missoula Police, and the county attorney's office. (The county's chief sexual-assault attorney quit and joined the defense in a high-profile rape case against the University's star quarterback.) The second is the counterintuitive behavior of traumatized victims, which often undermines their claims. (The quarterback's accuser failed to call for help from her nearby roommate, then sent an innocuous text message with a smiley icon and drove her alleged assailant home after the attack.) Krakauer's evocative reporting, honed to a fine edge of anger, vividly conveys the ordeal of victims and their ongoing psychological dislocations. The result is a hard-hitting true-crime exposé that looks underneath the he-said-she-said to get at the sexist assumptions that help cover up and enable these crimes. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.