Missoula Read Free

top of the list was the rape of Allison Huguet by Beau Donaldson. Barz warned,
The reports of sexual assaults on the UM campus now require immediate action and swift compliance with Title IX mandates….A rape-tolerant campus with ineffective programming, inadequate support service for victim survivors, and inequitable grievance procedures threatens every student….Acts of sexual violence are vastly under-reported on college campuses and a victim of sexual assault is likely to suffer from depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, substance abuse, and academic problems.
    Diane Barz’s report rattled Missoula. Then, just three months later, the U.S. Department of Justice revealed that it, too, was investigating the apparent epidemic of sexual assaults in western Montana. The feds announced that at least eighty alleged rapes had been reported in Missoula over the preceding three years and that the DOJ would be scrutinizing “assaults against all women in Missoula, not just university students.”
    United States attorney general Eric Holder noted, “The allegations that the University of Montana, the local police department and the County Attorney’s Office failed to adequately address sexual assault are very disturbing.”
    The spate of rapes in Grizzlyville led to disquieting articles from such national publications as the
New York Times
and the
Wall Street Journal
. But it was a 3,800-word dispatch posted on the website
Jezebel
nine days after the DOJ announcement that perhaps did the most damage to Missoula’s good name. Written by Katie J. M. Baker, it was titled “My Weekend in America’s So-Called ‘Rape Capital,’ ” and the derogatory moniker went viral, prompting an outcry from Missoulians who believed it was unfair.
    Baker’s tart, insightful piece indicated that she wasn’t sure the description was deserved, however. Her headline was drawn from the article’s second paragraph, in which she quoted a twenty-year-old Missoula drug dealer who lamented, “People think we’re the ‘rape capital’ of America now,” before immediately noting, “but we’re not. Missoula is just like any other college town.”
    In fact, 80 rapes over the course of three years appears to be “on par with national averages for college towns of Missoula’s size,” as Baker mentioned in her piece. According to the FBI’s latest statistics, there were an average of 26.8 “forcible rapes” reported in American cities the size of Missoula in 2012—which works out to be 80.4 rapes over three years. In other words, the number of sexual assaults in Missoula might sound alarming, but if the FBI figures are accurate, it’s actually commonplace. Rape, it turns out, occurs with appalling frequency throughout the United States.

CHAPTER TWO
          W hen Allison Huguet was five years old, her family moved from Kalispell, up near Glacier National Park, to Missoula, where they bought a home in a quiet neighborhood called Target Range, at the western edge of the city, near the confluence of the Bitterroot River and the Clark Fork. Huguet enrolled in the first grade at Target Range School and soon befriended Beau Donaldson. They remained close buddies for the next twelve years.
    Huguet and Donaldson graduated together in June 2008 from Big Sky High School, where both of them were good students and outstanding athletes. Huguet, who competed on the track team, was the Montana pole-vault champion their senior year. Donaldson set ten school records on the football field and was honored as the team’s most valuable player. When Donaldson accepted a scholarship to play football at UM, it was deemed sufficiently important to merit an article in the
Missoulian
, the local newspaper. “I’ve always wanted to play for the Griz,” Donaldson told the paper. He had been recruited by a number of other schools, including Montana State University, in Bozeman, the archrival of the University of Montana. It was a big deal in Missoula when