Missoula by Jon Krakauer Read Free Book Online Page A

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 onehundred 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’sapartment 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