Latest review (I believe) New York Times. I'll be glad to delete if this has already been posted here.
by EMILY BAZELON APRIL 28, 2015
"An odd lapse for a past master story teller"
Three years ago, a young woman befriended by the powerhouse author Jon Krakauer and his wife told them she had been raped when she was a teenager by a boy she knew and, later, for a second time, by a family friend. She was still struggling to recover. “She gobbled Adderall to stay awake and guzzled alcohol to fall asleep,” Krakauer writes. “It was an unconscious attempt to annihilate herself.”
Krakauer set out to educate himself about rape, especially when it is committed by someone the victim knows, looking for survivors who would tell him their stories. He focused on why many don’t go to the police as he tried “to comprehend the repercussions of sexual assault from the perspective of those who have been victimized.” The result is “Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town,” which has more in common with “Under the Banner of Heaven,” Krakauer’s depiction of the evils of Mormon fundamentalism, than with his morally complex tales of misadventure, “Into the Wild” and “Into Thin Air.”
In “Missoula,” Krakauer looks at the University of Montana, the local police and the prosecutor’s office through the eyes of five women who reported rapes or attempted rapes between 2010 and 2012. The Justice Department investigated the handling of 80 sexual assault cases in Missoula during this period, and Krakauer supplies dismaying details that would explain why the department found a pattern of disrespect and indifference toward alleged victims. For example, he tells us, a detective interviewing an accused male student quickly reassured him that she was certain he didn’t commit a crime, because “we have a lot of cases where girls come in and report stuff they are not sure about, and then it becomes rape.” Similarly, the police chief sent an article to the female student in this case, citing two studies claiming that 45 percent of rape accusations are false. “Scholars have debunked both of these articles,” Krakauer writes, correctly pointing out that better research has estimated the rate of false rape reports at 2 percent and 8 percent.
Another sore spot is the university’s prized football team, which included several players accused of sexual assault. The allegations split Missoula — especially because they involved the quarterback Jordan Johnson. On a Saturday night in February 2012, a woman whom Krakauer calls Cecilia Washburn (her name was not released) said she arranged to watch a movie with Johnson. The night before, she’d hugged him at a dance and, Krakauer reports, drunkenly said, “Jordy, I would do you anytime.” But Washburn didn’t shower or put on clean clothes or makeup the night he came to her house, and she testified that she didn’t plan to have sex with him. Watching the movie on her bed, the two agree, they started kissing and Washburn let Johnson take her shirt off. He said they then had consensual sex. But Washburn said that she protested, “No! Not tonight!” as Johnson pinned her down and pulled off her leggings and underwear.
Washburn’s male housemate was in the living room just outside her door, playing a video game. She didn’t call out to him, but when Johnson went to the bathroom, she grabbed her phone and texted, “Omg, I think I might have just gotten raped, he kept pushing and pushing and I said no but he wouldn’t listen.” A few minutes later, she drove Johnson home; when she returned, her housemate said, she cried inconsolably.
Faced with this case and others, the university president fired the football coach and athletic director. The football team responded with an open letter that contained no words of apology and warned the school’s authority figures “to carefully consider the impact of their statements and actions on our team and our great tradition.” Three months later, following an investigation, the president of the university decided to expel Johnson. This could have been the rare case in which a school throws out a star athlete for sexual assault. But after a secret review, the Montana commissioner of higher education restored the quarterback to campus and to football.
The case against Johnson moved to court, where he went on trial. The university had used the standard of “preponderance of the evidence” (or more likely than not) to find Johnson culpable, but the standard for a criminal conviction is higher — beyond a reasonable doubt. After Washburn testified, an expert explained why victims who are raped by a person they trusted sometimes freeze or act on autopilot, as they try to stave off the trauma with denial. But the jury found Johnson not guilty.
Krakauer presents this outcome not as a reflection of the differing evidentiary standard, and a jury’s best effort to resolve a difficult and confusing set of facts, but as a bitter failure of the adversarial process. “Because the legal system stacks the deck more heavily against sexual-assault victims than victims of other crimes, it’s easier to keep the whole truth from coming out,” he writes. Yet the jury puzzled over the details of this case, according to a juror Krakauer interviewed, and finally hesitated to convict in part because of a key detail: ambiguity in Washburn’s testimony about whether she told Johnson it was O.K. that he didn’t have a condom.
Krakauer doesn’t seem to have spoken to Johnson or Washburn. (In an author’s note, he says he tried to interview the victims and accused men whose cases he covered.) And it’s not clear that he spoke to any prosecutors or police officers in Missoula, or to university officials. As a result, the book feels one-sided. It also lacks texture. Much of the story is told through transcripts of court proceedings or recordings of police interviews and news coverage. Krakauer doesn’t take us inside the student culture at the university or the community of Missoula. He lets his contempt for certain city officials show, but they’re neither memorable villains nor three-dimensional characters afforded the opportunity to explain themselves.
And strikingly, the women who should be at the book’s emotional center don’t really come to life either. Krakauer did speak to some female students, like Allison Huguet, whose assailant, another football player, confessed to raping her and was convicted, in one of the book’s bright spots. But he tells us little about these women outside of the experience of reporting rape and coping with the aftermath, reducing them, however inadvertently, to victimhood. It’s an odd lapse for a past master storyteller.
More generally, Krakauer doesn’t fully grapple with the complexities of campus sexual assault. He notes the heavy drinking that leads up to some of his book’s most wrenching episodes without exploring the role alcohol plays in making perpetrators dangerous or victims vulnerable. He briefly mentions critics who take campus rape seriously as a social problem but worry that “universities have overreacted to it, resulting in the denial of due process to men accused of rape.” But Krakauer dismisses this concern as “specious.” Instead of delving deeply into questions of fairness as universities try to fulfill a recent government mandate to conduct their own investigations and hearings — apart from the police and the courts — Krakauer settles for bromides. University procedures should “swiftly identify student offenders and prevent them from reoffending, while simultaneously safeguarding the rights of the accused,” he writes, asserting that this “will be difficult, but it’s not rocket science.”
Maybe not, but it sure is bedeviling a lot of smart people at the moment. Krakauer’s bland assurances don’t reflect the emerging consensus that these university procedures aren’t easy to get right but are worth struggling over because legitimating the outcome is crucial for both sides. Predatory football players or insensitive authorities can’t be blamed for all the current tumult. “Missoula” ends up sounding only one cautionary note in a debate that’s becoming ever more layered and cacophonous.
MISSOULA
Rape and the Justice System in a College Town
By Jon Krakauer
367 pp. Doubleday. $28.95.
