Missoula (5 page)

Reflecting on this interview in 2014, four years after it occurred, Belnap told me that she hadn’t been emotionally prepared to be interrogated in this fashion less than forty-eight hours after being gang-raped. No one had informed her that she could ask for a victim advocate to be present during the interview. “I had just been through this ordeal,” she said, “and they put me in a room with two male authority figures. It was very intimidating. I tried to maintain my game face, and thought I didn’t need anyone to be there with me, but I wish there had been another female present to make me feel a little more comfortable.”

Belnap’s nervousness, her inability to remember much, and the fact that her best friend had insisted that Belnap had no intention of alleging that she was raped led Detectives Baker and Blood to question the reliability of Belnap’s account. “They seemed skeptical,” she said, “like they thought I was just another drunk girl. I began to feel like
I
was the perp. They asked me a couple of different times, ‘How did the guy who put his penis in your face grab your jaw? Did he grab it forcibly, or did he just kind of tug at it?’ I showed them exactly how he did it, but they didn’t seem to believe that I really resisted or said no.”

Detective Baker asked Belnap if she was dating anyone, a question cops often ask women who report they’ve been raped. “When I said, ‘Yes, I am,’ ” Belnap remembered, “the way he reacted made me feel like he assumed I had cheated on my boyfriend and then lied about being raped to cover it up, even though that wasn’t the case at all.”

Regarding Baker’s question about whether Belnap thought the men who had sex with her perceived it to be consensual or nonconsensual, she said, “Looking back now, that seems like a very inappropriate
question for them to ask. How was I supposed to know what those boys were thinking? I was passed out most of the time. I wasn’t even aware what they were doing to me.”

The day after the incident at Benjamin Styron’s apartment, Betsy Fairmont sent several apologetic text messages to Kelsey Belnap, expressing how sorry she was that Belnap had been raped. “Betsy texted over and over again,” Belnap said. “She said, ‘I am so sorry. I should have taken better care of you.’ ”

When Belnap told Fairmont that she’d filed a police report accusing Styron’s friends of raping her, however, Fairmont’s sympathy vanished. She tried to downplay what had happened, according to Belnap, and begged Belnap not to pursue the matter with the police. “I don’t want to get anyone in trouble!” Fairmont protested.

When Betsy Fairmont was interviewed by Detective Baker on January 11, 2011, nearly four weeks after the incident, Fairmont insisted that Belnap had willingly had sex with all four of Benjamin Styron’s teammates. Fairmont “ended up covering for all five football players,” Belnap said bitterly. “They were her boys. When I told her, ‘But this happened, Betsy. I was raped,’ she changed her story and lied through her ass.”

Styron and the men who allegedly raped Belnap left town for Christmas break immediately after the incident, dispersing to five different cities in California, Arizona, and Washington. Because Betsy Fairmont was adamant that Belnap had consented to having sex with the football players, and it would have been prohibitively expensive for the police department to fly Detective Baker to three distant states to interview them, neither Styron nor any of the suspects were questioned until they came back to Missoula for the start of the spring semester, by which time seven weeks had elapsed. Detectives Baker and Blood didn’t interview Benjamin Styron and his roommate until February 3, 2011, and their three teammates weren’t interviewed until mid-February, by which time all four suspects had had ample opportunity to rehearse their stories with Styron, Fairmont, and one another before giving their statements to the police.

On February 18, Detective Baker met with deputy Missoula County attorney Jason Marks. “Based on the investigation,” Baker wrote in his inclusive case report, “it was decided there was not probable
cause to file criminal charges against anyone involved in the incident.”

“Baker called me and said, ‘We need to talk,’ ” Kelsey Belnap recalled. When she arrived at the police station, Detective Baker explained that because Betsy Fairmont, Benjamin Styron, and all four of his teammates had stated that the sex was consensual, the Missoula County Attorney’s Office had determined that there was insufficient evidence to move forward. It was Belnap’s word against the word of six eyewitnesses.

According to Belnap, Baker told her the kicker was this: “ ‘They said you were moaning, so you couldn’t have been passed out. We needed one more person to take your side and back up your story, and there wasn’t one. I’m sorry, but there is nothing we can do.’ ” The case was closed.

The Missoula police chief at the time was Mark Muir. In an interview with Muir broadcast in 2014 on
60 Minutes Sports
, correspondent Armen Keteyian asked why the case was never prosecuted. “A lack of ability to show it was nonconsensual sex,” Chief Muir replied, adding that it was an easy decision to make. He reminded Keteyian that Kelsey Belnap had told Detective Baker that the men with whom she had sex “would likely have believed” it was consensual. “How do you overcome that?” Muir said.

According to Montana law, Keteyian countered, a person who is physically incapacitated is incapable of providing consent. Given her extremely high blood alcohol level, he wondered, wasn’t Belnap clearly incapacitated?

“No,” Chief Muir answered. “Physical incapacitation differs from incapacitation of the mind.” The fact that Belnap “had blackouts does not, specifically, indicate that she was physically helpless at the time,” Muir asserted, implying that Belnap’s case would have been prosecutable if she’d been completely unconscious the whole time, but because she was intermittently semiconscious, her claim that she never gave consent wasn’t credible.

But the relevant law, Montana statute 45-5-501, doesn’t say a victim has to be “physically helpless” to be incapable of giving consent, as Muir incorrectly asserted. The law states that a victim is incapable of consent if he or she is “mentally defective or incapacitated”; “physically
helpless”; or “overcome by deception, coercion, or surprise.” And with a blood alcohol content of .219 percent more than two hours after the alleged rapes began, it’s hard to imagine that Belnap wasn’t mentally incapacitated to a significant degree.

During an on-camera interview with Missoula County Attorney Fred Van Valkenburg, Keteyian observed that when Belnap’s first assailant shoved his penis in her face, she told him “no” and tried to push him away. “Isn’t that enough?” Keteyian asked, referring to indication of an absence of consent.

Because Kelsey Belnap said nothing further to communicate her lack of consent as the sexual activity escalated, Van Valkenburg replied, he didn’t have enough evidence to take the case to trial. “This was not a prosecutable case,” he told Keteyian. “So I don’t have any sort of regret about not filing this. I don’t think we did anything wrong.”

Van Valkenburg, who was the head Missoula County prosecutor, neglected to mention the incriminating evidence he actually did have, such as the emergency room nurse’s notes and Detective Baker’s statement in his case report that when Kelsey Belnap’s initial assailant stuck his erect penis in her face, “she said something to the effect, ‘I don’t want to’ and pushed him away with her hands.”

Nor did Van Valkenburg acknowledge the substantial and well-documented injuries to Belnap’s vagina or the text messages to Belnap from Betsy Fairmont saying, “I am so sorry. I should have taken better care of you”—texts that Detective Baker downloaded from Belnap’s phone and submitted as evidence. Furthermore, the recorded statements the perpetrators made to Baker failed to explain how, exactly, Belnap expressed consent while facedown and semi-comatose, bent across a bed. The perpetrators’ statements also failed to address the implausibility of their claims that she eagerly engaged in painful, injurious sex with four men she’d never met before that evening.

The Missoula County attorney’s decision not to prosecute infuriated Kelsey Belnap and her family. Gang rape is an especially heinous crime. It seemed likely that the men who allegedly assaulted Kelsey might also have assaulted other women, and might rape again if not held accountable. The Belnaps believe a more motivated prosecutor
than Van Valkenburg would have ordered a more thorough investigation, charged the perpetrators with rape, and either persuaded them to make a plea deal or taken them to trial—where he or she could have discredited the testimony of Kelsey’s assailants and, possibly, persuaded a jury to convict them.

Instead, as Terry Belnap lamented to Gwen Florio, “We were left with no answers and no further investigation….I really felt that we were brushed off.” When Terry Belnap asked her daughter if she wanted the family to hire a lawyer to pressure Van Valkenburg to prosecute, according to Florio’s article in the
Missoulian
, Kelsey Belnap said, “Mom, they’re football players and nobody’s gonna listen to me. They’ll make my life hell.”

GWEN FLORIO’S PIECE
about Kelsey Belnap appeared on the front page of the
Missoulian
on December 21, 2011. When Allison Huguet read that Belnap had shared her story with Florio in the hope that it would prevent other women from being sexually assaulted, it boosted Huguet’s confidence that reporting Beau Donaldson to the police had been the right decision. She was further encouraged when Detective Baker learned from nurse Claire Francoeur that Huguet’s rape kit, along with other evidence pertaining to the assault, had not in fact been destroyed and was being stored at the Montana Department of Justice in Helena, the state capital. On December 22, Baker received this evidence from Francoeur.

A day later, after obtaining a warrant, Baker asked Huguet to come to the police station and call Donaldson from her cell phone while Baker surreptitiously recorded the conversation, hoping to obtain a confession that could be used as evidence.

“When I filed the police report,” Huguet told me, “this call was something Detective Baker warned me I might have to do. But it wasn’t something I thought I’d actually be able to do. It was really difficult.” Baker plugged Huguet’s phone into a recording device, and she dialed Donaldson’s number, but he didn’t answer. Baker had Huguet wait ten minutes and call Donaldson again. When he failed to answer this time, Baker asked her to leave a message on Donaldson’s voice mail asking him to call her back.

After half an hour, Beau Donaldson hadn’t called, so Baker turned the recorder off and told Huguet they’d try again in a few days. As they were walking out of the interview room, however, her phone began ringing. “It was Beau,” she said, “but Detective Baker didn’t want me to answer because the recorder wasn’t hooked up.” She let it ring, then called Donaldson back after the recorder had been reconnected to her phone. “That was probably the most awkward conversation of my life,” Huguet said. “I don’t even remember how I started it. I think I told him that I was becoming upset about what had happened….Then I told him that I had read about the sexual assaults that had been going on at the university and wondered if he was involved. He got very defensive immediately. He was like, ‘I don’t know anything about that! I didn’t have anything to do with that!’ He was freaking out.”

Huguet pointed out that when Donaldson had apologized, the day after raping her, he’d promised that he would seek help for his abuse of drugs and alcohol, but from the way he’d acted when she’d run into him at the Mo Club just before Thanksgiving, it appeared he hadn’t made any progress on that front. According to Huguet, “Beau said, ‘Oh, so you think it’s a problem that I have a few drinks with my friends?’ And I told him, ‘Yeah, I do think it’s a problem, because that’s exactly how you ended up raping me.’ ”

As Allison Huguet spoke on the phone with Beau Donaldson, Detective Baker was coaching her about what to say, hoping to get Donaldson to make a clear, unambiguous confession. Eventually Donaldson admitted, “Yes, I took advantage of you,” adding that he felt “shitty” about it.

A little later, Donaldson told Huguet that he’d sought treatment from two different psychotherapists, prompting her to ask, “And you told them you raped me?”

“Yes,” Donaldson replied.

“At that point I thought the police had enough,” Huguet said. But Detective Baker disagreed. He was a very dedicated cop. His father had been a law enforcement officer for the city of Missoula for thirty-one years. His grandfather had worked for the Montana Highway Patrol for thirty-four years. Baker, who was forty-four years old, had joined the Missoula Police Department when he was twenty-one.
He’d spend thirteen of his twenty-three years on the force as a detective and had been the lead investigator on approximately seven hundred cases, nearly one hundred of which were sexual assaults. He knew all too well how easily even a slam-dunk rape case could be sabotaged by unforeseeable developments. And he understood that there was no better way to ensure a conviction than to get an incontrovertible confession from the accused rapist.

Baker urged Huguet to stay on the phone with Donaldson a little longer and to ask him to explain why he’d raped her. She reluctantly agreed. “But when I kept asking Beau why he did it,” she recalled, “he kept saying, ‘I don’t know! I don’t know!’ Finally, he just got really angry and started yelling at me. So I said, ‘Okay, well, if you can’t give me an explanation of why you did this to me, then I’m going to have to go to the police.’ And he said, ‘Okay. If that’s what you have to do…’ And then I hung up.”

As soon as the call ended, Huguet lost her composure and started sobbing. “That call was extremely emotional,” she said. “Beau was someone I had cared deeply about for most of my life. Even though he raped me, I couldn’t help still caring about him on some level, and I knew I had just sealed his fate—that he was now going to be in a world of trouble because of what I had just gotten him to say on tape. But at the same time, that was exactly what I had wanted to do. When I explained to Detective Baker why I was bawling, he was like, ‘Allison, you need to keep in mind that you are doing the right thing.’ ”