Authors: Jon Krakauer
Allison Huguet said, “As we grow up, we are taught to stay away from strangers and creepy people in the alleyways,…and not to go anywhere without someone you trust. [But] what happens when it’s the person you trust who rapes you?…I’m tired of living in this hell.”
Her family had been forced to suffer the hell of the rape’s aftermath, too, she explained: “My mother, specifically, is not here today because she, emotionally, can’t handle any more of it. She can’t even look at me without having flashbacks of picking me up in the middle of the road that night. Or hear my voice without being reminded of my screams for help, or telling her that Beau had just raped me and was chasing me down an alleyway.”
If Beau Donaldson “was truly remorseful, and understood the pain and damage he has caused,” Allison Huguet said, “he would know he deserves the sentence he has been given, and then some. He would take responsibility for his actions all of the time” and not just while trying to get his sentence reduced. “He would not allow his friends and family to blame me or slander my character for what he has done,” she continued. “I’m deeply frustrated by the fact that he thinks he deserves this [sentence] review….I don’t get to go to a review board and ask them to reduce the pain I feel daily; or take away the flashbacks, nightmares, or anxiety; or restore my sense of safety and security, or my trust in people. I don’t get to ask them to give me back my innocence or joy, or the life that he has sucked right
out of me. And, somehow, he thinks he’s the one that’s been punished too harshly?”
Weeping, Huguet told the judges, “The night that Beau chose to wait until I was alone, asleep and defenseless, walk over to me, pull down my pants, pull down my underwear, pull down his pants, pull out his dick, and shove it into me, he gave me a life sentence—a life in which I have to work every day to get through the pain. Some days I have to convince myself it is even worth it. I don’t get to go to a review board and ask them to reduce the life sentence he has forced on me. There is a reason why people say that rape is the worst crime a person can survive.”
Allison Huguet said she wanted Beau Donaldson “to get help and treatment. But at the end of the day, he has to be punished. And the only thing that is excessive in this case is the amount of suffering that Beau has caused.”
When Huguet finished, Hillary McLaughlin addressed the Sentence Review Division via a video feed from Great Falls. “To hear that Beau Donaldson wants a lighter sentence for sexually assaulting a stranger and raping a lifelong friend is extremely hard for me to understand,” she told the judges, and then she described Donaldson’s attempt to rape her in 2008. Afterward, McLaughlin explained, instead of reporting it to the police, she tried to put the incident “in the back of my mind and just forget about it,” without success.
“Due to Beau Donaldson,” she said, “I have lost my sense of comfort with nearly every person I meet. I have lost who I was before I met him. I live in constant fear of being attacked at any moment….I am constantly looking over my shoulder. I had never experienced anxiety, but now I am treated daily for it. I get nervous, anxious, and scared at any given moment….I struggle with being alone in my own home. And as a twenty-three-year-old woman, I am afraid of the dark. I wake up with nightmares of being attacked, and I’m up for hours on end because I can’t get these visions out of my head. Even while I was screaming and telling him to get off me, he continued to try and sexually assault me….I am stuck living and remembering this feeling for the rest of my life. I am stuck with fear, anger, hurt, nervousness, and anxiety.”
Like Allison Huguet, Hillary McLaughlin was appalled that
Donaldson was claiming that his sentence was unfairly harsh. “I think he got off easy,” McLaughlin declared to the court, “and I hope by telling my story, you realize that his maximum sentence of ten years is temporary, but mine is forever.”
MISSOULA COUNTY ATTORNEY
Fred Van Valkenburg had accompanied Huguet to Deer Lodge, and after McLaughlin completed her testimony, he addressed the panel of judges. “I’d like to begin,” he said, “by telling you a couple of things about the two witnesses you’ve just heard from.” When Missoula police and prosecutors first learned that Donaldson had assaulted Hillary McLaughlin, Van Valkenburg explained, she was “initially very reluctant to get involved in the prosecution.” But she came to understand “that silence was essentially acting as approval for Beau Donaldson’s actions,” and although it was difficult and unpleasant to testify at his sentencing hearing, she felt it was “a duty on her part to try and protect future victims.”
As for Allison Huguet, Van Valkenburg said, the morning after Donaldson raped Huguet, she told him she would not report him to the police if he would seek counseling, treatment for his drug and alcohol abuse, and sex-offender treatment. During the fourteen months following the rape, however, “it became increasingly clear to Allison that Beau had no real intention of keeping those promises to her.” Instead, Donaldson continued “to drink, to take drugs, to party, to laugh in her face when he saw her.”
Around this same time, Van Valkenburg told the court, the
Missoulian
published several articles quoting anonymous women who said they had been raped by football players from the University of Montana. “Allison began to think, ‘My God, Beau Donaldson is out there raping other women because I failed to report the case involving him,’ ” Van Valkenburg explained. So she went to the police and reported that he’d raped her, resulting in his arrest. Subsequently, Donaldson entered into a formal plea agreement with the state, and the agreement had a provision that said, “The Defendant expressly waives any right to appeal” or ask to have his sentence reviewed. “Yet,” Van Valkenburg lamented, “here he is at sentence review….The court should take that into consideration.” The sentence Donaldson
received is “reasonable under the circumstances,” Van Valkenburg observed, and “Judge Townsend thought long and hard” before imposing it.
The state, Van Valkenburg pointed out, “had a strong case against Beau Donaldson because of his tape-recorded confession. There wasn’t really much reason for us to negotiate with the defense, at all. But we did, because, to some degree,…any time you go to a jury trial, it’s a roll of the dice.” It took a long time for Van Valkenburg’s office to convince Allison Huguet to support the plea deal proposed by the state, because she thought thirty years in prison with twenty suspended was too light a sentence, he said. “But one of the things we told her was” that if this sentence is imposed, “it won’t get set aside later on, on an appeal or by a sentence review panel.”
Beau Donaldson “has, essentially, put himself in the situation that he’s in right now,” Fred Van Valkenburg said. “But he’s done more than that. He’s given a horrible black eye to something that is a source of tremendous pride to the people of Montana: the University of Montana football program…and the University of Montana, in general….Enrollment is way down. The university has a budget shortfall of $16 million this year. That’s going to affect every student at the University of Montana.” And Donaldson, he asserted, “is one of the people principally responsible for that.
“Judge Townsend is a thoughtful, reasoned jurist,” Van Valkenburg continued. “She imposed a reasonable sentence on this defendant. And I would respectfully ask you to uphold this sentence.” Van Valkenburg paused for a moment, then added, “And I will tell you, it’s a little tempting to ask for a [slightly stiffer sentence], but I won’t. I will just ask that you uphold the sentence that Judge Townsend imposed. Thank you.”
At this point, one of the three judges scolded Milt Datsopoulos for promising that if the sentence imposed by Judge Townsend fell within the parameters of the plea agreement—as it in fact did—he would “not put the victim through any further proceedings, appeals, sentence review, or otherwise.” So, this judge demanded, how did Datsopoulos explain his request for a sentence review?
Datsopoulos answered that he felt Beau Donaldson deserved a new sentence because the plea agreement was “coercive.”
This was a preposterous assertion. Nobody had forced Beau Donaldson to take a plea deal. Nothing had prevented him from going to trial and having his future decided by a jury of his peers.
In Missoula, Grizzly football exists in a realm apart, where there is a pervasive sense of entitlement. University of Montana fans, coaches, players, and their lawyers expect, and often receive, special dispensation. Datsopoulos had built a thriving law practice in this environment, and he appeared to believe that his client’s pledge not to appeal his sentence wasn’t meant to be taken seriously. Because Beau Donaldson was on the football team, the promise shouldn’t apply.
None of the three judges appointed to the Sentence Review Division by the Montana Supreme Court was from Missoula, however. When it became clear to Datsopoulos that they weren’t impressed by his claim that Donaldson had been coerced into making a plea deal, he tried a final, desperate maneuver. He attempted to convince the judges that Donaldson deserved a lighter sentence because when he’d confessed to raping Huguet at the time of his arrest, he’d knowingly done so without a lawyer present, thereby “eliminating the potential” for Datsopoulos to mount an effective defense. This voluntary confession, Datsopoulos argued, proved that Beau Donaldson accepted responsibility for his crime and wanted to make things right.
Maybe. But on the day Donaldson was arrested, when he went to the police station and gave his statement to Detective Guy Baker, Baker had just informed Donaldson that he’d secretly recorded Donaldson’s phone confession to Huguet, so Donaldson was already aware that the police knew the truth.
The judges weren’t swayed by any of Datsopoulos’s arguments, and they upheld the sentence imposed by Judge Townsend: thirty years in the Montana State Prison, with twenty years suspended. Donaldson would be eligible for parole in July 2015.
It’s both instructive and disturbing to think about how Huguet’s case might have turned out differently if Detective Guy Baker hadn’t obtained a confession from Donaldson. Without a recorded admission of guilt, Chief Deputy Missoula County Attorney Kirsten Pabst might have determined that there was insufficient probable cause to charge Donaldson with rape and declined to prosecute him—just as she declined to prosecute Calvin Smith for raping Kaitlynn Kelly,
and as Fred Van Valkenburg himself had declined to prosecute the football players accused of raping Kelsey Belnap.
And even if Beau Donaldson had been charged, it would have been a much more challenging case to prosecute without a confession. Milt Datsopoulos might have refused to accept a plea deal, sending the case to trial. Whereupon Donaldson would have testified that the sex was consensual, and Datsopoulos would have elicited testimony from Donaldson’s friends corroborating this claim. At which point Datsopoulos would have launched a ferocious attack on Huguet’s character. It’s not hard to imagine a jury being persuaded that there was reasonable doubt about whether Huguet had consented to have sex that night. In that eventuality, Donaldson would have been found not guilty, just as Jordan Johnson was found not guilty; and Donaldson would now be a free man, unrehabilitated and unregistered as a sex offender, able to rape again.
Huguet received plenty of reminders that many people continued to believe that she’d falsely accused Donaldson of rape and that he was innocent—even people she had thought were her friends. Two days after Donaldson’s sentence review hearing, one such person, a young woman who had grown up with Donaldson and Huguet in Missoula’s Target Range neighborhood, posted a hateful message to Huguet on Facebook:
Do you not understand you are messing with someone else’s life, not just for a short moment, but for the rest of their lives….Suck it up and own up to your own damn mistakes, act your age! We are not in middle school any more where things are brushed off, this is real life. Karma is a nasty bitch and I cannot wait until she comes back to bite you in the ass.
B
ack in May 2012, when the U.S. Department of Justice had announced that it was investigating the Missoula County Attorney’s Office, the Missoula Police Department, and the University of Montana for their unsatisfactory response to sexual-assault complaints over the previous three years, the police and the university agreed to cooperate fully with the investigations. Missoula County Attorney Fred Van Valkenburg, however, declared that the MCAO would not cooperate with the DOJ, and he defiantly refused to give federal investigators access to prosecutors in his office or their case files.
A year later, shortly after the Jordan Johnson trial, the DOJ completed its investigations of the Missoula police and the University of Montana and announced that it had reached formal agreements with both institutions to overhaul the way they handled sexual-assault cases. The DOJ reported that its agreement with UM was “a blueprint that can serve as a model for campuses across the nation,” and some months thereafter, an independent auditor reported that the Missoula Police Department was making “steady progress” in complying with the changes decreed by the DOJ, as well.
Fred Van Valkenburg, meanwhile, remained adamant in his refusal to work in concert with the DOJ, claiming it had no legal authority to investigate the MCAO. Permitting the feds to interview Missoula prosecutors and examine their case files would set a dangerous precedent, he claimed, which would allow “the heavy hand of government” to meddle in the affairs of thousands of district attorneys nationwide.
In an attempt to persuade Van Valkenburg to abandon his obstinacy and start cooperating with the Justice Department, in December 2013, Michael Cotter, U.S. attorney for the District of Montana, sent Van Valkenburg a proposed agreement between the DOJ and the MCAO that would improve “the safety and security” of sexual-assault victims in Missoula. It would compel the MCAO to hire in-house investigators (instead of relying solely on the police department to investigate sexual-assault cases); hire in-house victim advocates; and establish a designated sexual-assault unit. It would also oblige MCAO prosecutors to meet face-to-face with every victim who reported a sexual assault, and it would require supervisors to review every case declined for prosecution to ensure that the decision hadn’t been “inappropriately influenced” by a failure to understand “the dynamics of non-stranger sexual assault.”
Michael Cotter’s effort to end the DOJ’s twenty-month standoff with the MCAO had the opposite of its intended effect, however. Van Valkenburg interpreted Cotter’s proposal as a thinly veiled threat to sue the MCAO if Van Valkenburg didn’t agree to the DOJ’s demands, and Van Valkenburg took umbrage. He responded by essentially telling the DOJ to kiss his ass.
Fred Van Valkenburg asked the Missoula Board of County Commissioners for $50,000 to fund a lawsuit challenging the DOJ’s right to tell his office what to do. In making his pitch to the commissioners, Van Valkenburg argued that by suing the DOJ, he could make an important statement about barring the federal government from intruding into local legal matters, while simultaneously saving Missoula taxpayers as much as $400,000 over two years—his estimate of how much it would cost the county to pay the salaries of the new personnel the MCAO would be forced to hire if it acquiesced to the DOJ’s demands.
On January 9, 2014, after the commissioners pledged to fund a lawsuit, Van Valkenburg sent U.S. Attorney Michael Cotter a six-page letter reiterating his refusal to comply with the dictates of the Department of Justice—which, he said, would force the Missoula County Attorney’s Office to “unnecessarily spend hundreds of thousands of tax payer dollars to do what it already does.” Instead, Van Valkenburg offered an alternative proposal: If the DOJ would get off his back, the
MCAO would make a commitment “to assist” the Missoula Police Department and the University of Montana Office of Public Safety as they fulfilled their respective agreements with the DOJ.
Fred Van Valkenburg was happy to help city and university cops submit to the lash of the DOJ, in other words, but it would be a cold day in hell before the Missoula County Attorney’s Office would let itself be tyrannized by the federal government. Furthermore, Van Valkenburg threatened, if the DOJ failed to “affirmatively indicate in the next two weeks” that it was willing to accept his alternative proposal, he was “prepared to take any action necessary” to prevent the DOJ from imposing its will on his office.
Given Van Valkenburg’s famously stubborn disposition, few Missoulians were surprised by his desire to kick sand in the face of the DOJ, but some prominent citizens thought suing the federal government was a horrible idea. On January 15, 2014, the
Missoulian
published an open letter to the county commissioners from a respected clinical psychologist, Frances Marks Buck, who’d provided therapy to numerous local crime victims. Under the headline “Van Valkenburg’s Ego-Based Fight Affects Community’s Well-Being,” Buck wrote,
In Montana, unlike some states, the state attorney general has no jurisdiction or oversight of county district attorneys. The only “oversight” is the electorate….
There are clear problems in the functioning of the Missoula District Attorney office, both with the district attorney himself and a number of assistant district attorneys.
In my opinion, Fred Van Valkenburg’s stance of noncooperation with the DOJ is ego-based, not principle-based….He has focused on the “right” of the DOJ to investigate, not how he, his assistant district attorneys, and the community could benefit from the recommended changes.
Van Valkenburg was unmoved by Buck’s letter. On February 11, when the feds hadn’t budged from their position, Van Valkenburg filed a lawsuit against the Department of Justice, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, and U.S. Attorney Michael Cotter, seeking “a judgment declaring that the defendants do not have the authority to
investigate or sue the Missoula County Attorney or his office.” Van Valkenburg based his legal claim on the federal common-law doctrine of “absolute prosecutorial immunity,” which serves “the same purpose that underlies the immunity of judges and grand jurors,” namely, “to protect the judicial process.”
The DOJ responded to the lawsuit seventy-two hours later, on Valentine’s Day, by releasing a twenty-page report, personally addressed to Fred Van Valkenburg, that documented the failings of the Missoula County Attorney’s Office in blistering detail, based on a far-reaching investigation that included interviews with former MCAO prosecutor Kirsten Pabst, former Missoula police chief Mark Muir, nine Missoula detectives and police officers, and more than thirty female victims of sexual assault. When the DOJ had announced its investigation in May 2012, it had noted that at least eighty alleged rapes had been reported in Missoula over the preceding three years. But the findings sent to Van Valkenburg in February 2014 revealed that there were actually 350 sexual assaults reported to the Missoula police between January 2008 and May 2012, a span of fifty-two months. As part of its investigation, the DOJ asked an eminent supervisor of a police sexual-assault unit and an eminent sex-crimes prosecutor to review these cases.
According to the DOJ Valentine’s Day report,
Women consistently told us that Deputy County Attorneys treated them with indifference or disrespect, and frequently made statements to women victims, advocates, and the public diminishing the seriousness of sexual violence and minimizing the culpability of those who commit it. We learned that prosecutors did not communicate with female victims about their cases, did not inform them of the charges to be filed and did not seek their input about the type of relief to seek against the accused if convicted. In many cases, prosecutors failed even to return victims’ phone calls.
Even though Montana law requires prosecutors to consult with victims of all felony and misdemeanor crimes, the DOJ investigation revealed that “the County Attorney’s Office often neglects to
hold these consultations with sexual assault victims” and that “the interactions that the County Attorney’s Office
does
have with victims of sexual assault often leave them feeling offended, disregarded, and disbelieved by prosecutors.” In one instance cited in the report,
a Deputy County Attorney quoted religious passages to a woman who had reported a sexual assault, in a way that the victim interpreted to mean that the Deputy County Attorney was judging her negatively for having made the report. Advocates told us that Deputy County Attorneys “said terrible things to victims,” including saying to one woman, “All you want is revenge.”
One woman described her interaction with a Deputy County Attorney as “traumatic.” Another woman stated that, by the time the prosecution was over, she was so frustrated by the Deputy County Attorney’s treatment and the MCAO’s failure to keep her informed about key developments in the case that she “would never suggest” that another woman pursue a sexual assault prosecution in Missoula. She said further that it “broke her heart” that other women had to go through a similar process to have their cases prosecuted….
[A] young woman who had suffered a gang rape as a student at the University of Montana…described feeling re-traumatized by the experience of seeking to have the assault prosecuted by the County Attorney’s Office. As a result of hearing about that experience, a friend of the woman declined to report her own rape to either the police or prosecutors. In another example, a clinical psychologist told us that she had counseled numerous sexual assault survivors in Missoula who had pursued criminal charges against their assailants and described their experiences with the County Attorney’s Office as being so horrendous that, when the psychologist herself was sexually assaulted, she was reluctant to have her case prosecuted.
The report warned, “Since the majority of sexual assaults are committed by repeat offenders,” the effect of the MCAO’s failure to file charges was compromising “the safety of women in the Missoula
community as a whole,” because “perpetrators who escape prosecution remain in the community to reoffend.” In an observation directed specifically at Fred Van Valkenburg, the DOJ report noted,
Public comments you have made further suggest that, at the very least, sexual assault is not a high priority for MCAO….For example, in responding to questions about delays in charging decisions, you reportedly said that your attorneys review charging decisions in sexual assault cases “when they have spare time.” While you subsequently attempted to explain that by “spare time” you were referring to the “additional time” after other courtroom and litigation functions have been completed, the statement seems inconsistent with the diligent investigation and prosecution of sexual abuse….
Of equal concern, we found that the County Attorney’s Office declined to prosecute nearly every case of non-stranger assault involving an adult woman victim who was, at the time of the assault, subject to some type of heightened vulnerability—for example, in cases where the assault was facilitated by drugs or alcohol,…even when the assailant had confessed or made incriminating statements….
For instance, a woman reported that she had been drugged and raped by an acquaintance the previous day. Missoula Police officers developed evidence that included video footage of the alleged assailant slipping something into the woman’s drink. The Missoula Police also obtained admissions by the assailant that although he did not remember putting something in the woman’s drink, it was possible he had and, as he stated, “If I were trying to make her relax it would be Xanax.” When confronted with the video footage, the assailant also stated, “My memory tells me no, but I can’t argue with surveillance.” The Missoula Police obtained a search warrant for the suspect’s home and learned that the suspect had recently refilled prescriptions for two drugs common in drug-facilitated sexual assaults, including Xanax. Nonetheless, MCAO declined to charge the case, citing insufficient evidence, but with no documented further explanation. Moreover we found no indication that the
County Attorney’s Office had given any guidance to Missoula Police detectives about how to develop evidence that it believed
would
be sufficient to support bringing charges in this case.
ON FEBRUARY 21, 2014
, one week after the DOJ’s damning report was released, Van Valkenburg responded with a five-page broadside that vehemently denied the DOJ’s allegations. His reaction to the report was “frustration, disbelief and outrage,” he wrote:
It is no coincidence that the DOJ released this letter to the press only after I filed a federal court action seeking clarification of the DOJ’s authority. The letter provided to the press is clearly retaliatory. The DOJ is trying to use the media to improperly influence public opinion about the issue of sexual assault cases.
This is a politically-calculated and irresponsible move on their part….
There are 11 attorneys within the criminal division of the County Attorney’s Office, 7 of whom are women. Each attorney is personally responsible for upwards of 125 criminal cases at any given time. It is safe to say the workload for our attorneys is high, especially in light of limited time and resources. Despite these obstacles, all criminal victims are given priority whether women, children or men. It is a flat out lie for the DOJ to claim sexual assault cases are given the lowest priority.
Plenty of Missoulians applauded their embattled county attorney for standing up to the DOJ. One of these admirers was former Missoula police chief Mark Muir, who’d retired two months earlier. In a guest column published in the
Missoulian
, Muir referred to the DOJ as “Attorney General Eric Holder’s team of ultra-liberal, Washington, D.C., legal staff” and contended that Fred Van Valkenburg had “courageously chosen a bold and wise strategy in suing the United States Department of Justice for its abuse of power.”
Support for Van Valkenburg’s lawsuit was far from universal, however. On the same day that Van Valkenburg released his angry response to the DOJ report, the
Missoulian
published an article written
by Mike Brady, the city’s new police chief, and John Engen, who’d been mayor since 2005; they made a convincing argument that the DOJ’s investigation of the Missoula Police Department, and the resulting agreement between the city and the DOJ to change the way rape investigations were handled, had made Missoula a safer place for women. “It’s close to a year since the city of Missoula entered into an agreement with the United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division,” Brady and Engen wrote, “and we’re the better for it.” They pointed out that police officers were now better trained to handle the unique challenges of acquaintance rape, making them more sensitive to the needs of rape victims, and that the department had adopted better policies and procedures that vastly improved police cooperation with the county attorney’s office and victim advocates. The police department had also commissioned an external review of its performance “to ensure that we’re always improving and that we’re accountable to the citizens we serve.”