In 2013, Jon Krakauer was at a Missoula, Mont., sentencing hearing for a college football player accused of rape. Transfixed by the victim’s steely testimony, the author of “Into Thin Air” and the classroom staple “Into the Wild” had a eureka moment: This might be a book. During a break, he approached one of the victim’s friends in the crowded courtroom.
“She was very, like, ‘Uh-oh, there’s this creepy old guy,’” said Mr. Krakauer, who just turned 61, in an interview. But she agreed to pass along a note to the victim. After Mr. Krakauer scribbled his name, the woman remembered “Into the Wild,” and blurted out: “They made us read your stupid book in high school!”
Mr. Krakauer’s “Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town,” due Tuesday from Doubleday, tracks a number of sexual-assault cases involving students at the University of Montana. The publisher plans an initial run of 500,000 copies, reflecting the timely matchup of a best-selling writer and a hot-button issue.
“Missoula” lands just weeks after a scathing report from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism on Rolling Stone’s now-discredited article alleging a gang rape in a University of Virginia fraternity.
The book goes beyond the drumbeat of news reports and statistics, examining the subject through the prism of picturesque Missoula, a small city dominated by a university with a popular football team. Mr. Krakauer dissects several sexual-assault cases that happened between 2010 and 2012 and tracks their progress through the University of Montana, the Missoula Police Department and the Missoula County Attorney’s Office. In 2012, the U.S. Department of Justice began investigating how the university and local authorities were handling sexual-assault cases, leading to changes in procedures. In Mr. Krakauer’s book, the outcomes of the cases for the accused rapists ranged from being dropped for lack of evidence to prison.
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While he was a student at Hampshire College during the 1970s, a girlfriend told him she had been raped, Mr. Krakauer said. At the time he grasped neither the breadth of the problem nor its consequences. But in 2012, after learning that a friend had been preyed upon as a teenager and again as a young woman, he began reading up on sexual assault. He hadn’t intended to write about the problem, just to get a sense of its frequency and effect.
“I’m kind of an obsessive type,” Mr. Krakauer said. “Once you just start digging, if you just tell yourself ‘No, just keep digging, another few shovel holes,’ you find that inevitably there’s always stuff there buried deep.”
Relying on police reports, recordings of university disciplinary proceedings, court documents and other material, Mr. Krakauer knits diverse—and often conflicting—memories and motivations into a narrative. He depicts victims and the accused, their families and friends, university officials, law-enforcement authorities, lawyers and health professionals. Through heated exchanges among officials, Mr. Krakauer portrays the pressures on institutions and authorities to respect the rights of both accuser and accused in complex cases with life-destroying consequences.
Mr. Krakauer also talked to psychologists and scholars about the trauma of rape, exploring the corrosive toll of sexual assault on a typical American college town. “Missoula” revisits how the encounters unfolded, the victims’ anguish about coming forward and the alleged rapists’ horror and disbelief at being accused. One victim and the man accused of raping her had been friends since first grade, but never romantically linked.
One takeaway from “Missoula” is that every incident of alleged rape is different, and ambiguities abound. Mr. Krakauer provides no sweeping conclusions. The age-old problem of rape by nonstrangers can only be solved incrementally, he said, and recent improvements in how cases are handled are encouraging.
“I write these books for things that I become obsessed with. I don’t delude myself into thinking I’m going to change the world,” he said.
Campus rape isn’t a recent epidemic, Mr. Krakauer added, but rather “a scourge that’s always been there and it’s just now coming to light because women are being emboldened” to come forward.
“Into the Wild,” Mr. Krakauer’s first best seller, was about a young adventurer who expired in the Alaskan wilderness. Published in 1996, the book is a perennial on high-school and college syllabuses. The author followed with “Into Thin Air,” a first-person account of an Everest expedition in which a number of people died. He then wrote “Under the Banner of Heaven,” about murder among a Mormon splinter group, and “Where Men Win Glory,” on the life and death of football star turned Army Ranger, Pat Tillman. At first, the shift in subject flummoxed his publishers, Mr. Krakauer said. An editor asked: “Jon, where are the mountains?” But readers gobbled these up, too.
Despite his success, Mr. Krakauer doesn’t strive to be a public figure and is seldom recognized. “Missoula” has been kept under wraps, and no book tour is in the works. But he has one appearance on his calendar—in Montana, where some saw their community as unfairly singled out.
“I felt I needed to do something in Missoula to allow my critics to confront me,” he said. Fact & Fiction, a local bookstore, is organizing an event next month, said Eamon Fahey, the store’s chief operating officer. To allow for a big audience, the event will be held not at the store but a nearby hotel.
Asked which schools now deal effectively with sexual-assault complaints, Mr. Krakauer said, “Ironically, I think the University of Montana probably has it somewhat right because the DOJ forced them to get it right.”
According to a statement from the University of Montana, the school is “stronger, safer and better aligned with best practices because of our continuing work on policies, training and programs—both those implemented before the federal government’s investigations and since.”
