Missoula (2 page)

      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 he decided to attend UM.

Huguet was proud of Donaldson. “I always thought he was intelligent,” she told me. “I was very happy for him when he got a scholarship. He came from a family where none of them had gone to college; most didn’t even graduate high school.” For her part, Huguet left Montana after high school to attend Eastern Oregon University,
where she was offered an athletic scholarship. She saw Donaldson only once or twice after she departed for college.

On September 24, 2010, Huguet was living in Missoula at her mother’s house and was getting ready to return to La Grande, Oregon, to begin her junior year at EOU. That evening, she received a call from her friend Keely Williams, who suggested they go to a party at a house Beau Donaldson was renting in Missoula’s university district. Williams had also grown up in the Target Range neighborhood and had known Huguet since Allison arrived in Missoula. After graduating from Big Sky High School in the same class as Huguet and Donaldson, Williams had left town to attend Portland State University and happened to be back for a week to visit her parents. When Williams told Huguet that most of the posse they’d hung out with since they were six years old would be at Donaldson’s party, Huguet enthusiastically agreed that they should attend.

Williams drove. Upon arriving at Donaldson’s house, at around 10:00 in the evening, they were happy to see many of their childhood soul mates. “When we walked downstairs I immediately ran into Beau and hugged him,” Huguet remembered. “It was a nice evening. Everyone was relaxed and having a good time.” People played beer pong in the basement and held “tea races” to determine who could chug bottles of Twisted Tea (a brand of syrupy malt liquor favored by UM students) the fastest.

It was a Friday night, and the Griz football team would be playing Sacramento State University on Saturday afternoon, but Donaldson had suffered a serious ankle injury the previous summer and wouldn’t be suiting up for the game. He was pounding down alcoholic beverages with gusto. Enjoying the company of seldom-seen friends, Huguet and Williams found themselves drinking more than they customarily did, too.

By 1:30 in the morning, the party was running out of steam, and the handful of people still there moved upstairs to the living room. Donaldson and Huguet sat down together on a couch. Huguet, growing sleepy, lay across the couch, put a pillow on Donaldson’s thigh, and placed her head on the pillow. But there was nothing remotely sexual about it, said Huguet and Williams. “Allison never had any
interest in that type of relationship with Beau,” Williams insisted. “Absolutely none.”

Another classmate from their Target Range days, Sam Erschler,
*
who lived in the house with Beau Donaldson, urged Keely Williams and Allison Huguet not to drive home, because they’d been drinking. “Which was nice of him,” Huguet acknowledged. “That’s how Sam is. Kind of caring like that. He said, ‘Why don’t you guys just stay here and sleep on the couch.’ So we all agreed we would.”

Not long thereafter, Donaldson got up from the couch he was sharing with Huguet, went downstairs, and Huguet fell asleep on the couch alone, fully dressed. Huguet enjoyed sleeping on couches; even when she was home, she often preferred to sleep on the couch instead of in her own bed. Williams, meanwhile, went in search of an empty bed and soon found one. “It was even made!” she said. “I thought, ‘If we have to stay here, this is where I am going to sleep.’ ”

After discovering the vacant bedroom, Williams went back to the living room to invite Huguet to join her. She shook Huguet awake and said, “Ali, do you want to come to bed? I’m sleeping in this room, and there is a bed.”

“No, I’m fine,” Huguet groggily replied. “I’ll just stay here.” Williams got a blanket and placed it over her friend, then returned to the bedroom. When she left, Huguet was the only person remaining in the living room. Everyone else in the house seemed to be asleep.

HUGUET WAS AWAKENED
about two hours later. It was still dark. She was lying facedown on the couch, and her jeans and underwear had been pulled down. “I remember waking up to Beau moaning, and a lot of pressure and pain,” she later testified. Donaldson was on top of her, penetrating her vagina from behind with his penis. “I opened my eyes, just partly,” she remembered. “Just from his moaning, I could tell it was him.”

Although she was terrified, she forced herself to keep her eyes shut and wait for him to finish. Huguet is an elite athlete, and she’d taken self-defense classes. She was just five feet, five inches tall, however,
and weighed 130 pounds. Donaldson weighed 230 pounds and played both fullback and linebacker for an NCAA Division I football team. She assumed that if he was willing to rape her while she was sleeping, he wouldn’t hesitate to harm her severely in order to keep her from resisting or calling for help. “He could have snapped my neck like a twig,” Huguet told me, “so I just lay there and pretended to be asleep.” Donaldson continued to rape Huguet for another five minutes before ejaculating inside her. He was not wearing a condom.

When he’d finished, he tugged her jeans partly up, threw the blanket over her, and walked away without saying a word. Stunned, Huguet remained motionless until she was sure he was out of the room. Then, quietly, she gathered her shoes and her phone, tiptoed barefoot through the kitchen, exited the house via the back door, and started sprinting down a gravel alley to find help. When Donaldson had yanked Huguet’s pants to her knees, he had torn off the button and mangled the zipper, so with one hand she simultaneously cradled her shoes and tried to hold her jeans up, while with her other she speed-dialed her boyfriend, running as fast as she could at the same time.

“I don’t know why I was calling him,” Allison said. “He had moved to Colorado. It’s not like he was going to be able to help. I guess I wasn’t thinking too clearly. I called him twice, but he never answered.”

Still running, Allison dialed her mother next. “When the phone rang,” Beth Huguet told me, “I looked at my clock, and it was four-eleven in the morning. There was this throaty sound on the other end of the line. Panicked sounds, with nothing coming out. I knew it was Allison, even without any words. I’ll never forget it. I’ll have that with me the rest of my life.”

“Mom!” Allison eventually managed to blurt as she ran. “He’s chasing me! Help me! Save me! Mom!” Donaldson had somehow seen or heard Allison fleeing from the house and was pursuing her.

“I’d only been on the phone with my mom for a few seconds when all of a sudden I heard someone behind me, and I realized Beau was chasing me,” Allison said. A few seconds later his hand brushed her back as he grasped at her from behind. “I was literally screaming into the phone, ‘He raped me!’ right when I felt him grabbing at me.
My mom was telling me, ‘Run! Keep running!’ ” Allison knew that Donaldson owned several guns. As she tried to accelerate away from him, she said, “I thought he was going to kill me. I thought for sure I was dead.”

Running even harder down the alley, and frantically pushing Donaldson’s hands away as he pulled at her, Allison ignored the pain as the gravel cut her bare feet. “I was hitting him as I ran,” she said. “I don’t know if I was actually speaking to him. I was just talking to my mom. And I was worried because the battery in my phone was low and I knew it was about to die.”

Through her own phone, over the sound of Allison sobbing and gasping to catch her breath, Beth could hear Donaldson say, “No, Allison! Stop! Come back! I’m sorry. Don’t say anything. I’ll make it all right. Come back to the house with me!”

“His voice was so calm,” said Beth, a high school teacher. “That’s the most chilling part of the whole thing: how calm he was. How hysterical she was, and how calm he was. It made my skin crawl.” As she spoke with Allison, Beth Huguet threw on some clothes, got in her van, and started down South Avenue toward the university district at sixty miles an hour, all the while imploring, “Run, Allison! Run!”

And then Beth heard Allison say, “He’s not behind me anymore! Oh my God, he’s not behind me!” For some reason, Donaldson had stopped chasing her and turned around. “I was shocked that Beau actually let me go,” Allison remembered. “I honestly assumed he had a gun and I was going to be shot.” Even though he was no longer trying to catch her, Allison didn’t stop running.

Beth recalled that Donaldson lived somewhere near the university, but the university district is huge, and Allison didn’t know the address of the house, or even what street it was on. Eventually, however, Allison was able to communicate that she was near the soccer fields, which are located on South Avenue at Higgins, so Beth kept driving in that direction as fast as she dared.

“I was running barefoot, still trying to hold my pants up,” said Allison, “when I turned out of the alley and got onto South Avenue. And there was my mom.” By this point Allison’s phone battery was dead, so she ran into the middle of the road and flagged Beth down.

“As soon as I saw her, I knew something bad had happened,” Beth
said. “As she came toward me she was hobbling and kind of falling. When she got in the van she started rocking back and forth, crying hysterically. I flipped a U-turn and headed straight to Community Hospital. I knew she had been assaulted, I just didn’t know to what extent.”

A couple of minutes after they’d turned around and were driving toward the hospital, Allison realized that Keely Williams was still back inside Donaldson’s house, sleeping, unaware of the danger she was in. “Keely!” Allison screamed at her mother. “We need to go back and get Keely!” As Beth reversed course and steered the van toward the house, Allison dialed Williams’s number. “Beau just raped me!” she shouted into the phone when Williams answered. “You have to get out! You have to get out right now! My mom and I are outside waiting for you.”

Williams grabbed her purse, put on her shoes, and fled. She was in such a hurry that she slammed her head into the edge of the back door in the dark, giving herself a black eye. “I ran out of the garage and there they were,” she told me. “I jumped in the back of the van. Allison was sitting in the front, hunched over, crying. She wouldn’t turn around. Seeing her like that, I started crying, too, and saying how sorry I was.”

As Williams recounted these events more than two years after the fact, she began to sob. “I felt guilty because I was the one who wanted to go to the party and see our friends,” she continued, tears streaming down her cheeks. “I chose to drive, and then I drank too much to drive us home. And I left her on the couch alone, because I wanted to sleep in a bed. If we had just left, or I had made her sleep with me, or I had slept with her on the couch, then it wouldn’t have happened. I know I shouldn’t feel guilty, but I do. How could I have left her out there?”

“You left me out there,” Allison answered, “because neither of us had any reason to think we would be in danger in that house, with those friends. We trusted them completely.”

      A
fter Beth Huguet picked up Allison and Keely Williams, she drove Allison to Missoula’s Community Medical Center emergency room to receive treatment for her injuries. Because this hospital doesn’t perform forensic examinations of rape victims, however, the staff at Community Medical sent Allison across town to the First Step Resource Center, the sexual-assault response unit at St. Patrick Hospital, to have a rape kit collected.

The United States Violence Against Women Act of 2005 requires that all victims of sexual assault be given free access to an evidence collection kit, better known as a rape kit. It consists of sterile swabs, small containers, plastic bags, microscope slides, and other implements for collecting and storing semen, blood, saliva, hairs, and clothing fibers that might be used as evidence in a criminal trial. For most victims, submitting to the procedures that allow such evidence to be gathered is an exceedingly humiliating experience.

This was certainly true in Allison’s case. After arriving at First Step, she says, “for the next four hours I was essentially raped all over again. I had to stand completely naked on a white sheet and let a nurse brush my entire body to collect evidence that might contain Beau’s DNA.” Allison’s most private recesses were probed, combed, swabbed, photographed, and intensely scrutinized by strangers. A nurse made a video of the inside of her vagina, documenting the flesh that had been torn when Donaldson violated her. “The whole process—while absolutely necessary—was incredibly traumatic,” Allison says, “even though the nurse and counselor tried to be comforting.”

It wasn’t until 10:00 Saturday morning that Allison and Beth
Huguet returned to Beth’s home in Target Range. It had been a long night, but Allison didn’t have the luxury of crawling into bed to sleep. Instead, she took a hot shower, dressed, and tried to pull herself together enough to meet her father, who was expecting her to attend the Griz football game with him that afternoon.

AT THE EASTERN
edge of Missoula, Mount Sentinel towers two thousand feet above the University of Montana campus. A third of a way up the mountainside, a white concrete
M
adorns the slope. Ten stories high, it’s the city’s most famous landmark. Directly below the
M
is Washington-Grizzly Stadium.

Allison’s parents separated when she was fifteen and eventually divorced. Although she had been living at her mother’s house that summer, she remained close to her father, Kevin. He was a huge Griz fan, and whenever Allison was in town on game day, they went to the stadium together to watch the team play. “I was born and raised in Missoula,” Kevin Huguet told me. “Griz football is a big deal here.”

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 slut. 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.”