Missoula by Jon Krakauer Read Free Book Online Page B

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,