Missoula (4 page)

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llison Huguet had the digital recording of Beau Donaldson admitting that he “took advantage” of her, and the nurses at the First Step sexual-assault response center had obtained physical evidence of the rape. But because Donaldson had been unaware that he was being recorded, his confession would not be admissible as evidence. Furthermore, because the assault had happened in September 2010, nearly fifteen months before Huguet shared her secret with Detective Baker, and First Step typically kept rape kits for no more than six months before disposing of them, there was a good chance that her rape kit had been destroyed. Getting a conviction and sending Donaldson to prison was by no means a certain outcome. Although Baker was eager to investigate her case, he suggested that over the weekend Huguet think further about what she wanted to do.

A day earlier, coincidentally, an article on the front page of the
Missoulian
had announced that there had been a recent sexual assault on the UM campus “that reportedly involved two female students, multiple male students and the date-rape drug Rohypnol.” A subsequent article on December 16, 2011, disclosed that “at least three” of the accused rapists were Griz football players.

The two reports were written by a seasoned journalist named Gwen Florio who’d learned her chops reporting for the
Philadelphia Inquirer
and had gone to Afghanistan in 2001 to cover America’s rapidly expanding war on terrorism for the
Denver Post
. The articles Florio wrote in December 2011 about the sexual assaults allegedly involving Griz players were the first of what would be more than one
hundred stories published in the
Missoulian
about the “Missoula rape scandal,” as it would soon be christened.

As Huguet agonized over what to do, the articles Florio published in December 2011 became a factor in her calculus. She was aware that if Beau Donaldson was charged with raping her, she would face scathing criticism from Griz fans. She understood that if the case went to trial, Donaldson’s attorneys would attempt to destroy her reputation. But she also knew that if she didn’t report Donaldson, he might rape other women. Because the latter possibility worried her more than the former, on December 20 Huguet went to the Missoula police station and made a formal statement to Detective Baker, which he recorded on video, setting the clunky machinery of justice in motion.

Gwen Florio’s reporting, it turned out, also inspired another victim of sexual assault to come forward and tell her story in a public forum. Terry Belnap, the mother of a UM student named Kelsey Belnap, happened to see Florio’s December 16, 2011, article about the gang rape by Griz players and thought it sounded dismayingly like what had happened to Kelsey a year earlier, in December 2010. When Terry brought the article to her daughter’s attention, Kelsey also found Florio’s account of the 2011 incident to be excruciatingly similar to what had happened to her. “Oh my God,” Kelsey thought. “I could have prevented this from happening.”

Terry Belnap sent an e-mail to Florio saying that Kelsey was willing to talk about being raped by four members of the Griz football team, in the hope that doing so might keep others from being subjected to what she had been forced to endure.

ON DECEMBER 15, 2010
, three months after Allison Huguet was raped, Kelsey Belnap took her last exam of the semester and then walked outside into the crisp autumn afternoon. Her best friend, Betsy Fairmont,
*
¹
who had just completed the same exam, invited Belnap to come to her boyfriend’s apartment that evening to celebrate. “Sure,” Belnap replied. “That sounds like a good time.” Fairmont and Belnap, who were both twenty-one years old, first went to Belnap’s
apartment and had dinner with Belnap’s boyfriend, whom she lived with. Because Belnap’s boyfriend had to work that night, however, he couldn’t join the women in toasting the end of the semester.

Fairmont’s boyfriend, whom Belnap had met only once before that evening, was Benjamin Styron,
*
²
a defensive lineman for the Griz who weighed more than 240 pounds. When Fairmont and Belnap arrived at his apartment, at 5:45 p.m., Styron and his roommate, a Griz player who weighed almost as much as Styron, were smoking weed outside. The four students went indoors, poured themselves shots of 99-proof schnapps, and were soon joined by three other members of the UM football team. Belnap didn’t know any of the men except Styron and his roommate. The five Griz players began competing to drink the most, and they encouraged the two women to join them. “Every couple of minutes we would all take another shot,” Belnap told me. “It was a ‘Let’s see if you can keep up’ kind of thing. I was like, ‘Uh, okay.’ ”

Belnap didn’t suspect that the football players might be setting her up to be raped. The celebration seemed innocuous. “I was just hanging out with my friend and her friends,” she said. “I have a brother who was on the football team. I used to work in the equipment room for the football team. At that point I didn’t imagine anything bad could happen.”

One of the football players rolled a blunt and started passing it around. “I have never smoked pot in my life,” Belnap said, “and had no intention of smoking pot, so it made me uncomfortable, and I told Betsy that. But it was their apartment, so I didn’t say, ‘Please don’t do it.’ ”

Betsy Fairmont inhaled a lungful of smoke and then turned to Belnap and exclaimed, “Oh!” as if she’d suddenly remembered how marijuana affected her. “When I get drunk and high,” Fairmont warned, “I get really messed up.”

A few minutes later, Belnap looked at the clock and noticed that it was around 6:30 or 6:45. “But the clock had gotten completely blurry,” she said. “So I told myself, ‘I’m done drinking.’ Because at that point I knew I was really, really drunk. And after what Betsy had told me, I was also thinking, ‘Oh crap. I’ve got to get her home, too.’ ”

By then Kelsey Belnap had consumed between eight and eleven shots in approximately forty-five minutes. She can recall very little about what happened thereafter. When she quit imbibing she was seated on the living room couch, “and the next thing I know,” she said, “I was in a dark bedroom, sitting at the foot of a bed. I remember looking at the door and thinking, ‘What the hell am I doing in a bedroom?’ And then I turn around, because I heard a noise, and Betsy and Benjamin are having sex on the bed behind me.”

Belnap isn’t amorously adventurous. “I am not into watching other people do that,” she said. “I’ve never even seen a porn film; I certainly didn’t want to watch live sex.” So she tried to get up from the bed and leave the room, she recalled, “but my body was like a limp noodle. I could not move. And then I remember the door opening. At first I thought, ‘Someone is here to help me get out of this room.’ And then all of a sudden this person was standing in front of me with his penis in my face. I said, ‘I don’t want to!’ and I pushed him away.” But her resistance was ignored.

Even now, Kelsey Belnap doesn’t know the identity of this assailant. He grabbed her jaw, pulled it open, and thrust his erect penis into her mouth. “That’s the last thing I remember until a while later, when someone else came in the room,” she said. Belnap didn’t know who that second person was, either, but said, “I remember my belt buckle being played with, and then somehow I was bent over the bed.” For the next two hours she drifted “in and out of awareness” as different men entered the room, had sex with her, and left. “I was blacked out throughout pretty much the entire thing,” she said, “and only remember bits and pieces of what happened.” Later, according to Belnap, a police officer told her that she had engaged in sex with all four of Benjamin Styron’s teammates.

After she began to drift back up to the surface of consciousness, Belnap said, the first thing she recalled was being “in the bathroom, throwing up in the bathtub. Betsy was throwing up in the toilet, and all the boys were gone except Benjamin. Betsy was like, ‘Benjamin! Get out of here!’ She was embarrassed for him to see her like that.”

When Belnap eventually regained control of her faculties, she burst into tears. Betsy Fairmont called a friend, who took Fairmont and Belnap to the Community Medical Center emergency room,
where Belnap was admitted at 9:00 p.m. According to the nurses’ notes, she was “obviously intoxicated” and had slurred speech. Two and a half hours after she’d stopped drinking, her blood alcohol concentration was measured to be 0.219 percent, nearly three times the legal limit for driving. When asked if she was experiencing any pain, Belnap replied that her vagina hurt. When asked to elucidate further, she stated that she thought she “may have been raped.” According to a nurse’s somewhat confused notes,

What she remembers is that possible 2 males performed oral sex on her and possible one male penetrated her vagina with his penis. Patient states that she does remember trying to push the males off, and in no way gave consent to the males for sex. Patient relates that she does not remember the events well but knows that sex did take place that was not consensual. Patient became very emotional and started crying while relating this.

Although Belnap’s mother was born in Missoula, and both her parents graduated from the University of Montana, she was raised in Idaho Falls, Idaho, where her parents still reside. But her mother’s aunt lived in Missoula, so when Kelsey was admitted to the emergency room, the hospital contacted this grandaunt. She came to the emergency room right away, called Kelsey’s mom, and put Kelsey on the phone. Kelsey blurted in a despairing voice, “Mom, I think I’ve been raped.”

When the emergency room staff learned that Kelsey Belnap might have been sexually assaulted, they notified the Missoula Police Department. At 11:00 p.m., Officer Mitchell Lang arrived at the hospital to talk to her. According to Belnap, Lang “seemed very shaky. Like, this wasn’t the kind of situation he’d dealt with before.” The initial report filed by Officer Lang says,

Kelsey still appeared heavily impaired and her story was fragmented. Kelsey stated that she did not remember much of what happened that evening….[S]he stated that she was taken into one of the rooms in the apartment but she did not know which one….

Kelsey stated that 2–3 additional persons came into the
bedroom….[S]he remembered her head being grabbed by one of the males and he was trying to make her perform oral sex on him. Kelsey stated she pushed the male back but when he was forcing her head down again she stopped resisting because she was scared. When asked if the male said anything she stated she thought he said “it is good for her to be this drunk.”…Kelsey stated she then performed oral sex on 1 or 2 additional males and then stated she was “bent” over the bed and penetrated vaginally. Kelsey stated the additional males then took turns….Kelsey stated she was reluctant about pressing charges at this time because she did not want to get anyone in trouble.

After speaking briefly with Kelsey Belnap, Officer Lang interviewed Betsy Fairmont. She told him she couldn’t remember anything about what happened, but Fairmont said she was sure Belnap had no intention of charging anyone with sexual assault. Nevertheless, Lang recommended to Belnap that she go to the First Step rape clinic for a forensic gynecological examination.

At 1:00 a.m., Belnap’s boyfriend and her grandaunt took her to First Step, where she was examined by Claire Francoeur, the same nurse who’d examined Allison Huguet. Francoeur found semen in Belnap’s vagina and on her rectum, as well as redness on her cervix and “multiple genital lacerations” indicative of penetrating trauma. “I was still pretty sick and still felt a bit drunk,” Belnap recalled, “so it was hard for me to be there. But Francoeur was very sensitive.”

The following afternoon, a Missoula police officer named Travis Welsh contacted Kelsey Belnap to confirm whether or not she wanted to pursue a criminal investigation. Belnap told Officer Welsh that, regardless of whatever she and Betsy Fairmont might have told Officer Lang, she definitely wanted to press charges. A day later Belnap went to the police station, where she was interviewed by detectives Guy Baker and Mark Blood. According to the report subsequently filed by Baker, Belnap recalled sitting in the bedroom when one of the football players walked up to her,

unbuttoned his pants and removed his penis. Kelsey stated he then directed her head towards his erect penis with his hand.
Kelsey stated she said something to the effect, “I don’t want to” and pushed him away with her hands….[He] then stepped towards her again and pushed and/or moved her outstretched arms and her hands down to the sides of her torso and then put his penis in her mouth. Kelsey stated she was scared and let him put his penis in her mouth without saying anything else to him….[S]he then performed oral sex…on the male for several minutes….Kelsey stated the male exited the bedroom and she heard him exclaim “Damn!” and then say something else to the other males.

Kelsey stated another male…then entered the bedroom….[S]he was still sitting at the edge of the bed when he walked up to her….[H]e also removed his penis from his pants. Kelsey stated he did not say anything to her and she did not say anything to him….[H]is penis was not erect and she put it in her mouth before performing oral sex on him for several minutes. Kelsey stated she performed oral sex on him because she was scared….[S]he thought she passed out or blacked out while performing oral sex on the second male because the next memory she has is lying on her back on the bed and somebody tugging on the front of her pants in an attempt to unbutton them….[S]he next recalls standing beside the bed, bent forward from the waist with her arms on the bed while somebody was holding onto her waist while standing behind her. Kelsey stated she remembers a penis penetrating her vagina, but she is unsure which male was having sex with her. Kelsey stated she did not say “no” or “stop” to the male or make any verbalization to the male while he was having sexual intercourse with her.

Kelsey stated she thought she passed out or blacked out again while the male was having sex with her because the next memory she has is her pants are on again and she is walking out of the bedroom….[T]he next thing she remembers is her and Betsy in the bathroom….

Kelsey stated she experienced pain in the area of her vagina following the incident and…was still feeling soreness and discomfort in her vaginal area at the time of the interview….
[S]he also experienced soreness in her neck and shoulders as a result of the incident. When asked if she thought the males perceived the sexual activity to have been consensual or nonconsensual, Kelsey stated they would have likely believed it was consensual sex. When asked to elaborate, Kelsey stated she was so intoxicated she did not resist them, she never said “no” or “stop” to verbalize to them that she “didn’t want to” have sex with them.