Missoula (6 page)

Eleven days later, Baker believed he had gathered enough evidence to put together a bombproof case against Donaldson. In addition to recording the phone conversation and obtaining Huguet’s rape kit, he had conducted extensive interviews with Huguet’s mother, Sam Erschler, Keely Williams, and Claire Francoeur, the nurse at First Step who had examined Allison. Baker applied for a warrant to arrest Donaldson, and received it at 2:30 p.m. on January 6, 2012.

Two hours later, Baker, Detective Mark Blood, and three uniformed Missoula police officers drove to Donaldson’s house, asked if he would agree to be interviewed, and then transported him to the police station. When they got there, Baker confiscated Donaldson’s cell phone and advised him of his Miranda rights. Donaldson said
he understood his rights and consented to talk to Baker and Blood without an attorney present.

During the videotaped interview that ensued, Donaldson initially claimed that he and Huguet had fallen asleep together on the couch in his living room and that Huguet had willingly been making out with him, leading him to believe that the intercourse they had was consensual. After Baker pointed out to Donaldson that Keely Williams had clearly stated that she saw Huguet sleeping alone on the couch, however, Donaldson eventually confessed that he had “pulled Allison’s pants down and engaged in sexual intercourse with her while she was sleeping.” According to the case report submitted by Baker, “Beau admitted that due to the fact Allison was asleep, he knew it was nonconsensual sex and he…had ‘raped’ her.”

After interviewing Beau Donaldson for just under an hour, Detective Baker returned Donaldson’s cell phone and allowed him to call his father. Then Baker placed Donaldson under arrest and drove him to the Missoula County jail, where he was booked on a felony charge of sexual intercourse without consent—the legal term for rape in Montana. Bond was initially set at $100,000. By this time, Donaldson’s father had arranged for a prominent Missoula attorney, Milt Datsopoulos, to represent Beau. Datsopoulos had assisted many University of Montana athletes with their legal problems over the years—so many, in fact, that Griz fans often joked, “If you’re guilty, call Uncle Milty!” Extremely unhappy that Donaldson had talked to Detective Baker without an attorney, Datsopoulos phoned Baker while Donaldson was being booked and told him that under no circumstances could he speak further with Donaldson.

Detective Baker is a large man with a comportment that can be intimidating, but he is uncommonly empathic. He appreciates how difficult it can be for a rape victim to go to the police. He knows that the criminal justice system frequently compounds the trauma of being raped and, way too often, fails to hold rapists accountable. So instead of phoning Allison Huguet to tell her that Beau Donaldson had been arrested, Baker and Detective Blood drove across town to Office Solutions & Services to notify Huguet in person that Donaldson was in jail and had given them a full confession.

At 8:11 that evening, an hour before Baker had even broken the
news to Huguet, a disappointed Grizzly supporter using the screen name “grizfan1984” announced on a popular Internet forum,
eGriz.com
,

Just read the jail roster and Beau Donaldson has been arrested again this time for sexual intercourse without consent aka rape, $100,000 bail looks like he won’t be playing for the griz anymore.

At 9:31, someone with the screen name “grizindabox” posted,

It cannot be true, he is from Montana!

At 10:43, “PlayerRep” posted,

I know nothing about the facts, but I know Donaldson and I have doubts that rape occurred or that this will stick. I think Donaldson is a good kid. I know good kids can be caught up with date rape-type things too, but my instincts tell me that he didn’t rape anyone.

In the middle of the night, an article by Gwen Florio about Donaldson’s arrest went up on the
Missoulian
website, impelling an angry Griz supporter calling himself “Sportin’ Life” to post the following about Donaldson’s arrest on eGriz at 5:08 a.m.:

This has got to be Gwen Florio’s fault entirely. This is really a new low for her, stooping to this just to push her anti-football agenda.

At 9:08 a.m., “jcu27” posted,

First off, chicks exaggerate on rape. Second off, she could sucked his dick and still got rape just because she said she didn’t want it later on. Third off, no justice system actually works. Only the people involved actually know what happened. And a lot of people lie.

PART TWO

Before the Law Sits a Gatekeeper

We can finally all agree that women want to have sex. Variously portrayed in the past as tamers of men and tenders of children, we’re now deemed well endowed with horniness. But does that mean we experience desire in the same way that men do? My lust tells me we don’t. Mine, I confess, isn’t blind or monumental or animal. It comes with an endless internal monologue—or maybe dialogue, or maybe babel. My desire is always guessing, often second-guessing. Female lust is a powerful force, but it surges in the form of an interrogation, rather than a statement. Not
I want this
but
Do I want this? What exactly do I want? How about now? And now?

C
LAIRE
D
EDERER
“Why Is It So Hard for Women to Write About Sex?”
The Atlantic
, March 2014

      T
he thumping heart of downtown Missoula is a compact grid of shops, offices, government agencies, restaurants, and bars jammed between the Northern Pacific Railroad tracks and the Clark Fork River. Just to the southeast, on the other side of the river, is the University of Montana campus, accessible via a pair of four-lane bridges for vehicle traffic, and two much smaller bridges for pedestrians and cyclists. Within the eight-by-four-block downtown core are a dozen pubs and bars that fill with UM students every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday evening when school is in session.

On September 22, 2011, Kerry Barrett, a UM senior from New Jersey, went to a pub called Sean Kelly’s with four friends. It was a Thursday night, and the weekly bacchanal known as “Thirsty Thursday” was in full swing—a tradition that has become so prevalent on campuses nationwide that a great many students now avoid enrolling in classes that meet on Friday mornings. Missoula was rocking.

At Sean Kelly’s, Barrett made the acquaintance of a tall, athletic student named Zeke Adams,
*
who socialized with Barrett and her friends for much of the evening. Barrett says she and Adams were attracted to each other, and when he started kissing her she reciprocated. Around 1:30 Friday morning, by which time Barrett and Adams were both intoxicated, they headed to another bar, the Badlander, with one of Barrett’s girlfriends, who departed for home a little later. “Zeke seemed trustworthy,” Barrett told me, “so I felt okay with
my friends leaving us.” Both Barrett and Adams lived near Higgins Avenue, a major north-south arterial that bisects the downtown grid, and after last call at the Badlander, at 2:00 a.m., they started walking together down Higgins toward their respective apartments.

Zeke Adams lived just across the bridge that spanned the Clark Fork; Kerry Barrett lived a mile farther south. “When we got to Zeke’s place,” she remembered, “he was like, ‘Why don’t you come inside?’ So I said okay. But before I even went in the door, I told him, ‘I’m not sleeping with you. If that’s what you’re expecting, I’m just going to go home.’ He said, ‘No, no. I don’t expect that at all. Just come in. We can hang out.’ So we went inside.” Instead of sitting in the living room of the small apartment, however, Adams suggested that they go to his bedroom to avoid waking his roommate.

Barrett followed Adams into his bedroom, where they talked about an abstract painting a friend had painted for him. Then Adams turned down the lights, they reclined on the bed, and started making out. “This was consensual,” Barrett explained. “I really did like him, what I’d known of him at that point.” Eventually, Adams pulled her pants and underwear down to the middle of her thighs and inserted his fingers into her vagina. This, too, was consensual, Barrett made clear, “but then he started getting a little aggressive, which made me feel uncomfortable.” So she told him to stop, put all of her clothing back on, reiterated that she didn’t want to have sex with him, and said she was leaving.

Adams urged her not to go, because it was 3:00 in the morning. As Barrett remembered it, he said, “You’re wasted. Stay over and I’ll drive you home in the morning. You know I’m a nice guy and nothing is going to happen.”

“I actually wasn’t that drunk—not nearly as wasted as he was,” Barrett said, “but before you learn the realities of sexual assault, you’re taught that it’s dangerous to walk alone at night, because strangers are out to get you. The safer option seemed to be to stay at his place. So that’s what I did.”

In a recorded statement Adams later gave to the police, he confirmed Barrett’s account: “I said, ‘Well, you don’t have to go.’…She laid back down in my bed. She told me she didn’t want to have sex with me—and that was fine with me, and I said okay.”

Fully clothed, with her skinny jeans now securely zipped up and buttoned, she fell asleep in his bed. Approximately thirty minutes later, she said, “I woke up to him completely naked, and my pants—which are very tight and not easy to pull off—were down by my ankles.” Adams was spooning her from behind, rubbing his penis against her back, and then he tried to insert it into her vagina. Adams was six feet, three inches tall and weighed 170 pounds; Barrett stood five feet, seven inches and weighed 135 pounds. “Waking up to a big guy like that trying to rape me,” she said, “was terrifying.” Barrett frantically pushed him away and tugged her pants up, but Adams yanked them back down and attempted to penetrate her vagina a second time.

“I pushed him off again,” Barrett said, “and at that point I got up, turned the light on, and got my stuff. He was just sitting there, staring at me. He didn’t say anything. I’ll never forget that stare.” Barrett fled Adams’s apartment in shock, crying, and walked the two blocks to Higgins Avenue, where she called one of the girlfriends who’d been at Sean Kelly’s earlier in the evening. When the friend arrived and found Barrett sobbing inconsolably, she asked what had happened. “I choked out, ‘He tried to rape me!’ ” Barrett remembered. “And then we just sat there and cried hysterically together. Neither of us knew what to do.”

They picked up another friend, who lived in a dorm on the UM campus, and the three women discussed whether to report the assault to the police. Around 4:00 a.m., Barrett called her parents in New Jersey, and her father—a retired police lieutenant—convinced her to go to the Missoula police station, where she was interviewed by an officer named Brian Vreeland on a bench in the entrance to the police department. According to Barrett, Vreeland asked her, “What do you want to come of this?”

Taken aback by the question, Barrett replied that she didn’t know. “I’m not a lawyer or anything,” Vreeland said, “but since no one saw you, and you were fooling around before it happened, it’s hard to really prove anything.”

Officer Vreeland finished taking her statement, then asked Barrett to get in his patrol car and guide him and another officer, Kurt Trowbridge, to Adams’s apartment. “I didn’t know the exact address,” Barrett said, “but I knew I could identify it. By then it was probably
close to five in the morning. It was still dark. Before we got into his car, Vreeland said to me, ‘Oh, and one more thing: Do you have a boyfriend?’ I said, ‘No, I don’t. Why?’ And he said something to the effect of ‘Well, sometimes girls cheat on their boyfriends, and regret it, and then claim they were raped.’ ” Although this struck Barrett as a strange and inappropriate thing for a police officer to tell a woman who had just been sexually assaulted, she wasn’t thinking clearly, because she was still in shock. “So I just said, ‘Oh, okay,’ ” she explained, “and let it go.”

Kerry Barrett directed Officers Vreeland and Trowbridge to Zeke Adams’s apartment, then waited in the back of the police car. While Vreeland and a third officer, Michael Kamerer, tried to make contact with Adams, Barrett recalled, “Officer Trowbridge gave me a little Post-it sticky note with my report number, said I could pick up the report in a couple of days, and sent me on my way.”

After Barrett departed, Officer Vreeland rang Adams’s doorbell and banged on the door, but failed to rouse anyone inside. So he walked around to the side of the apartment, noticed an open window, peered inside, and saw Adams asleep in his bed. When Vreeland shined his flashlight in Adams’s eyes, he woke up and came to the front door. According to the police report filed by Vreeland,

After identifying myself and Officer Kamerer, I asked Zeke if I could speak with him. He was still very intoxicated and seemed to have difficulty making a decision or even a coherent and understandable sentence. He finally admitted he was Zeke Adams and he invited us in to talk to him….After he was dressed, I told him I needed to ask him a few questions about an alleged incident but that I needed to read him his Miranda Warning. He, for the most part, was uncooperative but that may have been due to his intoxication level. He kept attempting to speak as if [he] was a lawyer using legal terms that made no sense in the way he was using them….He had difficulty giving me a “yes” or a “no” when I asked him if he understood his legal rights, stating I was trying to “co-horse [i.e. coerce] him.”

He finally said he would speak with me. I asked him if he had been at Sean O’Kelly’s [sic] this evening and if he had met a girl
named Kerry. He said he thought I was trying to get him to say something without his legal counsel. When I reminded him that he had agreed to speak with me, he told me I was trying to get him to admit he had met “people” [at Sean Kelly’s]….

Zeke then went into a long incoherent speech on the “exact definition of meeting people.” [When] I attempted to explain to him I was just asking him if he met Kerry tonight he replied [with] words to the effect that I was attempting to “co-horse him once again and he thought he needed legal representation.”

I told him I was done interviewing him and that someone would be in touch with him later concerning his side of events.

ON MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 2011
, a female detective named Jamie Merifield called Kerry Barrett to say she had been assigned to Barrett’s case. According to a transcript of the phone conversation, Detective Merifield warned her that it was a “tough case,” because she and Zeke Adams were the only witnesses. Based on Adams’s level of intoxication, Merifield said, and what Barrett had told the officers, “It seems very, very clear” that Barrett’s account was “a very believable story,” and that the events she described actually happened. Merifield cautioned, however, that the case was going to be “very, very difficult” to prosecute. “Shy of him confessing,” she said, “we have nothing to go on.”

Nevertheless, Detective Merifield told Barrett that if she wanted to go forward with the case, Merifield would ask Adams to come to the police station to give a statement. “At the very least,” Merifield explained, she might be able to “scare the shit out of him,” and thereby prevent him from sexually assaulting someone else.

“This was very discouraging to hear,” Barrett said. “I felt like I was getting the brush-off, like they weren’t serious about pursuing it. I told the detective I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, and she said, ‘Well, think about it for a few days and let me know.’ ”

Initially, Barrett wasn’t sure if she wanted Zeke Adams to be charged with a crime. She said, “I remember thinking, ‘Yes, what he did was wrong. But he seemed like a nice guy. Maybe it was just a misunderstanding.’ ” As Barrett replayed that night in her mind,
however, she recalled that before she’d fallen asleep in Adams’s bed, he had assured her that he was trustworthy and “nothing would happen.” And then, some thirty minutes later, she woke up to him sexually assaulting her. No, she told herself, it definitely wasn’t a misunderstanding. Adams had intentionally deceived her.

“The only reason Zeke didn’t rape me is because I woke up,” Barrett said. For all she knew, Zeke Adams was a serial predator who made a habit of luring women into his bed in this fashion. She decided that he should be held accountable for his actions, and she notified Detective Merifield that she wanted to pursue charges against him.

Detective Merifield didn’t find time to interview Kerry Barrett until October 13, 2011, twenty days after Barrett reported the attempted rape. After taking Barrett’s statement, Merifield phoned Zeke Adams to get his side of the story, but couldn’t reach him. So on October 26 she went to Adams’s apartment and left a note asking him to call her.

Adams phoned Merifield the next day. When Officer Vreeland had tried to talk to Adams on September 23, two hours after the alleged assault, Adams was belligerent and uncooperative. According to the report Detective Merifield filed, however, his manner was quite different five weeks later, when she talked to him on the phone:

Zeke became very emotional….He seemed genuinely shocked that he was being accused of assaulting Kerry Barrett. During the course of our phone call it sounded as though he was crying several different times….He said that he felt bad if she felt uncomfortable but maintained that he never assaulted her. Zeke said he would come in as soon as possible to give a statement because he wanted this cleared up….Due to Zeke’s emotional state and apparent inability to process what was happening, I asked him if he was going to be okay over the weekend. I also asked Zeke if he was suicidal. He assured me he was not suicidal.

Zeke Adams came to the police station and gave a recorded statement to Detective Merifield on October 31. She began by assuring him, “I think this is just a big misunderstanding….If there were
charges, I would only recommend misdemeanor charges.” Merifield inquired, “Have you ever been arrested before?”

Adams replied, “I have not.” This was not true. He had been arrested in December 2008 for petty theft. Merifield didn’t check his criminal history, however, and accepted his statement at face value.

Merifield asked how many drinks Adams had consumed before he met Barrett at Sean Kelly’s, but Adams declined to answer. “I feel like these questions are just going to get me in trouble,” he explained.

“When the officers came and talked to you that night you seemed pretty intoxicated,” she reminded him. “What I need to know is if you had a lot to drink and your memory is affected. Do you think you had a good memory of everything that happened?”

“Yes,” Adams asserted. “I could, for example, tell you specific things about what happened. Like I remember she was from New Jersey….I believe she was, like, a biology major.” (Barrett’s major was psychology.) “My memory is pretty clear.”

Clear or not, Adams’s recollections of the evening closely matched Barrett’s account up to the point where she became uncomfortable with the escalating sexual activity, announced she was leaving, and then changed her mind after Adams promised “nothing would happen” and urged her to spend the night. But Adams steadfastly denied Barrett’s claim that he subsequently attempted to have intercourse with her while she was asleep.

“I did not try to have sex with her,” he told Detective Merifield. “When she laid back down on my bed, I kissed her some more, and then she said, ‘No I have to go.’…She grabbed the remainder of her things and left my house….I can say with one hundred percent confidence that I did not intend to hurt her, harm her, do anything to her that she did not want to be done to her.” At this point, Adams broke down and started to cry. “She didn’t express to me in any way that I had done any of those things,” he insisted through his tears. “When she left my house, if anything, I thought, you know, it just appeared to me like she felt like, uh— She didn’t, you know, she was in a situation, she was like, ‘OK, this might not morally be the right thing to do.’ ”