Why did famed author Jon Krakauer decide to write about sexual assault?
It was after learning that a family friend had been raped by an acquaintance.
In his research tracking rape cases around the country he came across the sentencing of Beau Donaldson, a University of Montana football player who pled guilty to raping his childhood friend, Allison Huguet.
He’s guilty. But it’s a weird story.
All the rapes covered in the book were wildly different. In each case both the man and woman involved could have made better choices. Alcohol was involved in all.
Krakauer researched College Football players because of their far too elevated social status in the U.S.A.
They feel entitled. Expect that women will want to sleep with them, even when they don’t.
Krakauer studied 230 rapes in town, most of which either weren’t prosecuted or the prosecutions were bungled. Most rapists walked away without punishment.
The stories told in Jon Krakauer’s new book, “Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town,” remind us of what a brave and risky thing it still is for a woman to report a rape.
Krakauer, who has written for this Web site, explores a spate of sexual assaults that occurred on and around the campus of the University of Montana between 2008 and 2012. For several of the women involved, the risk of reporting their rapes felt even more acute because the men they were naming were football players in a town that, like a lot of college towns, is football crazy. The team was the Grizzlies; Missoula is also known as Grizzlyville. …
This guy went to trial. If I were on the jury I would have found star quarterback Jordan Johnson guilty of rape.
Instead the state of Montana paid Johnson $245,000 under a settlement where he agreed to drop claims that the school and its officials mishandled the investigation against him.
Later he had a tryout with a Canadian Pro football team.
As far as I’m concerned, Jordan Johnson is a rapist. Women should be warned about him.
This is Kirsten Pabst. One of Johnson’s lawyers. She comes off very badly in the book. Women do not want to report a rape to her.
A good gift for a student going away to University for the first time would be this book – Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town
Most young people don’t know the law. Are clueless when it comes to date rape. Acquaintance rape.
By the way, Missoula has a lower than average rate of sexual assaults. If you don’t count football players.
And things are getting better.
In the three years Krakauer spent writing Missoula, the University of Montana (UM), the police department, and the prosecutor’s office have all established agreements with the DOJ to reform their handling of sexual assault. (The prosecutor’s office agreed to oversight by Montana’s attorney general only last June, after first filing a lawsuit against the DOJ.)
Rick McCharles 