Is Missoula racist as well as being the rape capital of the US?

(January 13, 2013: Update about Missoula from Biodun Iginla at the BBC:

This reporter was just thrown out [an hour ago] of Charlie B's, the purported writer's bar in downtown Missoula, today, January 13, 2013, for having one too many drinks. I had these while working at the bar on my laptop--they have WIFI--and not talking to anyone. For one, I was grieving about Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide who committing his life to Internet transparency.

The burly bartender manhandled me, throwing out my luggage and laying his hands on me. I called the cops about all this. The bartender denied laying his hands on me. I will file charges. They also have everything on video.

Please stay tuned about this incredible town. Missoula seems to be the gift that keeps on giving.

As far as I know, this town might even be racist. I don't say that lightly.)

      

Missoula, Montana: What happened to thee?

bioduniginla

May 11th, 2012

Current Location:

london, uk

by Biodun Iginla, BBC News Analyst

Folks:

This is what I wrote about Missoula, MT, in 2002:

The Regimes of capital and Technology: The Digital Divide: The Example of Montana

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• Translation

by Biodun Iginla | 02.09.2002

How capital and technology have created regimes that enslave us all. An analysis of the digital divide, using the example of Montana.

Chapter 5: The Digital Divide: The Example of Montana Contemporary Montana can be said to be a production of European literati, specifically, a Gallic invention
in the best of the Romantic tradition. In the eighteenth century Montana was already an invention when
white Frenchmen (the La Verendrye) penetrated the "virgin" (in the word of one historian) territory for
the first time. At that time the trapper followed the explorer, and was in turn followed by the priest and
the prospector. Also at that time George Catlin in painting and James Fenimore Cooper in fiction had
fixed for the American imaginary the fictive Indian and the legend of the ennobling wilderness, allowing
the possibility of Montana as a mythic Utopia. We know from American history that America had been relentlessly dreamt (the "Dream") from East to
West as a testament to the original goodness of "man": from England and the Continent to the East Coast
of the New World; from the East Coast to the Midwest and the Northern Territories; and from there all
the way to the Pacific. Montana has always functioned as a Frontier. In a sense the Old Frontier was
transformed into the Old New Frontier. And currently it is in transition once again: the frontier between a
minimum-wage slave economy into what can be called the "ether" economy of cyber technoculture. Let's talk a little bit about the history of the Frontier. By Frontier we mean the margin where the Dream
encounters resistance. In the Old Frontier this encounter was between Rousseau's fantasy of the Noble
Savage (the Indian) and the Cowboy, with his ritual drunkenness, the shooting up the town, the "rape" of
nature, and the slaughtering of the buffalo. Now the inhabitants of the Old Frontier, struggling for their
lives, had neither the time nor the energy to reflect on the contradiction between their reality and their
dream. The contradiction remained unrealized and was split geographically: People still living safely on
the East Coast continued to dream the Dream, and those living in Montana (the Northern Territories)
became total Westerners deliberately cut off from history and myth, immune to the beauty of their
landscape. Next came the second stage of the Old Frontier (what we have called the Old New Frontier). The school
mistress followed the whore (the signifier of the denial of romance), moved from the East to marry the
rancher or mining engineer, and the Dream and reality finally confronted each other. The school mistress
brought with her the sentimental and romantic Frontier novel, consequently producing a demand for an art
that nurtured the myth, an art that transformed a lifestyle into a cultural practice. The legend quickly
became readymade and then found form in hokey pulps, B-movies, and fake cowboy songs. This second
stage of the Old Frontier moved from a certain naiveté to a virtual history produced from a discrepancy:
On the one hand, this stage idealized a recent past into the image of the myth. On the other hand, it
exposed the failures of the original settlers to live up to Rousseau's ideal. The West was reinvented. Montana's own recent past (say up to around 1990-1992) in some respects could be said to share aspects
of this second stage of the Old Frontier: It was torn between its valorization of its virtual past (a pristine
culture held up defiantly against the sophistication and "corruption" of the East Coast--Montana has been
the Other of New York for some time now, and vice-versa), and a malaise resulting from the collision of
this virtual history with the "real" history that kept breaking through. I first went to Missoula in the summer of 1992 to visit an old graduate-school friend from the East Coast
who was now teaching at the University of Montana. First off, I was quite impressed (in the original
sense of this term) by the monocultural Montana demographic: white, parsimonious, healthy,
nature-loving, and friendly, set at the vortex of reality and myth, and surrounded by all those splendid
mountains and stunning vistas where several weather systems were visible from a distance. And
Missoulians were friendly. The friend I visited was born in France, and he had come to the US to study and then decided to stay and
work. He got married to an American, and they had a son together before they eventually split up. After
graduate school he was an itinerant professor in several midwestern colleges before he finally landed at
the University of Montana in 1988, where he eventually attained tenure in 1994. Never really the outdoor
type in France when he was growing up (born in Paris and raised in Toulouse), he quickly came to
appreciate the mountains, hiking trails, and camping sites in Montana. Missoula was changing and
expanding quite rapidly in those years. Signs of this expansion were everywhere, especially in those outer
neighborhoods, like Pattee Canyon and South Hills, that were littered with new bungalows with tacky
architecture. Shortly before I went to Missoula, his friend (let's call him Pierre from now on) had just
bought one of these bungalows in South Hills (a house currently worth three times what he paid for it in
1992), and he was dying to introduce me to the thrills and pleasures of whitewater-rafting and wild
camping. And I most certainly was dying to get out of claustrophobic New York City. The many hikes
they did up Blue Mountain and Lolo Peak that summer, the camping at Glacier National Park, the
exquisite dining on buffalo burgers washed down with red wine, and the skinny-dipping in the hot springs
and mud-baths of Hot Springs were definitely tonics for a psyche exposed to and blasted by the subways
and the gritty sidewalks of New York City. In any case, that was my first concrete encounter with the
Other that Montana is to New York. (I had had a previous virtual encounter with Missoula via Kim
Williams's colorful and folksy dispatches in the mid-80s for Susan Stamberg for her "All Things
Considered" on National Public Radio.) From the Old New Frontier, Montana then shifted onto the next stage, the Virtual Frontier, with history
simply constructed for commodification and folded into the time and space of Capital. This stage is
crucial because it more or less prepared the terrain for the stage that is currently emerging: the "ether"
economy (in all senses of financial, social, political, and psychic) of cyber technoculture. This Virtual
Frontier is characterized by dude ranches, chamber-of-commerce rodeos, Indian pow-wows (to a certain
extent), and sometimes state government and corporate-sponsored "Pioneer Days." The East Coast
came to see its Dream in action and demanded it on order for the two-week vacation. In the Virtual
Frontier average Montanans (including some transplants) became the pimps or prostitutes of the local
"culture" and myths of the state. Obviously the most "cosmopolitan" and culturally diverse town in Montana, Missoula is curiously
positioned with respect to this Virtual Frontier. This dusty town (pop. 70,000) has no tourist attraction in
itself--aside from the dime-a-dozen boutique stores and faux "trading posts" on North Higgins Avenue
and environs. Missoula functions in this economy of the Virtual Frontier as more or less a trajectory for
transients--either professional ones or tourists passing through from Glacier National Park to Yellowstone
(or vice versa) or heading for (or from) the lakeshore cabins of Flathead. Let's talk a bit about Missoula
before getting back to my discussion of frontiers. Before I went back to Missoula to live there intermittently for a year, from July 1998 till June 1999, I had
been back in the intervening years every summer, each time to visit Pierre. They had spent most of the
time with Pierre's friends and colleagues at the university at private (sometimes dinner) parties, at
drinking sessions at downtown bars, or at outdoor picnics at Caras Park and elsewhere. In July 1998, I
was again living in New York, and again he was becoming claustrophobic and dying to get out into open
spaces and skies. Pierre invited me to join him and his group of seven on an extensive camping trip to the
Olympic Peninsula and Glacier. The six-week camping trip was soon transformed for me into an
extended one-year sojourn in Missoula because I needed a break from New York to work on revising my
novel according to the specifications of his publisher. And Pierre was extremely generous letting me stay
at his bungalow in South Hills. Now that I was living in Missoula, I had to depend on mass transit to get around (I grew up in New York
City and never learned how to drive). Because there are very few blacks in Missoula (there are always
few blacks in American frontiers), I quickly became popular with most of the Mountain Line bus drivers.
In fact, he very soon became known to more or less everybody in Missoula. Somewhat replicating the spectrum of his life in the US since high school, at first, I hung out mostly with
Pierre's university colleagues and friends. But then I began to meet people not affiliated with the
university: wannabe and best-selling writers; cyber-entrepeneurs who owned their Internet companies
(see more below); failed graduate students; divorced women trying to recover from failed marriages or
careers or abusive husbands (or two or all three combined); and nature-loving (and sometimes
tree-hugging) college dropouts involved in local politics, some of whom were also aspirant writers or
artists. I was close friends with an aspirant artist who was also a forest-preservation activist, a local, born
on the Northside of Missoula, whose "day job" was doing deli retail work at Worden's on the corner of
North Higgins Avenue and Pine Street (let's call her Bryn). High on the sauce herself, she (sometimes
including her friends, who were in fact quite interesting in many respects) introduced me to seedy
karaoke bars on and off Brooks Avenue, and to legendary (for the locals) bars on North Higgins and
environs (Mulligan's; CharlieB's; Oxford, AmVets, Missoula ("Mo") Club, and others). Bryn told me that
as a writer I had to experience first-hand local scenes and flavors before writing about them (which we
must be reminded is an exemplary American "Western" requirement in the enterprise of writing.) I was recognized in restaurants, in already mentioned karaoke bars at night, downtown during the day on
North Higgins (drivers would honk and wave to me), in the South Gate Shopping Mall, and at drunken
dinner parties (fueled by nicotine, alcohol, gossip, and casual sex) around town, from the dilapidated
houses on the Northside, to the "bougie" cottages in Rattlesnake, to the nondescript bungalows on the
slopes of South Hills. Currently, Missoula residents can be classified into three economic categories: university faculty and staff
(like Pierre); telecommuters; and minimum-wage slaves (like Bryn). Some people traverse two
categories: writers (who by definition are telecommuters) teaching at the university part-time; faculty
moonlighting as freelancers; and a number of minimum-wage slaves trying to earn either undergraduate
or graduate degrees or who have already earned graduate degrees (like a few of the divorced women I
knew: one of these had studied in France with the famous French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and was
now working in a used-clothing store on South Higgins Avenue and Fifth Street). Indeed, a lot of
minimum-wage slaves in Missoula are highly educated. As in many American college-towns, there is a
robust labor force of perennial and professional students and nature-loving graduates eager and desperate
to be slaves in order to earn the privilege of living in a town surrounded by mountains and hiking trails. To
belabor our point: in Minneapolis (where I now reside full-time), where the landscape is flat--albeit with
lakes--but where the labor market is tight and unemployment is around 2 percent, workers get paid $10
an hour to flip hamburgers. Whereas in Missoula, writers get paid $7-8 an hour at a local editorial
sweatshop to summarize the content of websites. (The cyber-community of Hollywood-film and New York-media transplants in huge ranches around
Bozeman, Flathead Lakes, and elsewhere west of the Continental Divide in Montana is definitely beyond
the scope of this essay and deserves an extensive discussion.) To repeat: Missoula, and by extension the state of Montana, is once again at another Frontier, which we
can call Cyber: the transition from a minimum-wage slave economy into the ether economy of cyber
technoculture. The slave economy is already shrinking in Missoula: Families who cannot afford rising
housing and living expenses have been moving out to the trailer parks in the outskirts of town.
Consequently, enrollment in public schools has dropped precipitously, resulting in the closing of two
schools. Because the yuppies and Internet people moving into town (and constituting the
cyber-community) were either not married with kids or were married with no kids yet. The last group I
fell in with during my tenure in Missoula are pioneers (if we may use this term) of this Cyber-community.
Because my work is definitely facilitated by high-speed Internet access, which I got in Missoula at an
Internet company (located downtown on South Main and Ryman Streets) that a friend (to whom
Pierre--his friend--had introduced me, one example of the commingling of the university and commuter
groups: let's call him Rob--a transplant from northern California) owns with his seven employees, each of
whom he pays a six-figure salary plus stock options. All his employees have spouses (some with kids)
who don't work because their income is more than enough to support their moderate lifestyles in
Missoula. (Definitely more than enough: In fact, during my last two months in Missoula Rob and his
employees all bought huge houses in Missoula and environs.) I spent at least four-five hours each
weekday at Rob's company (Click News-Net) doing his online work. The atmosphere at Click News-Net
was most certainly something out of central casting for Net-Heads working for a cyber company: of the
eight employees (two women, six men, Rob included), two worked at home (a female programmer and a
male web developer). The ones who came in everyday had flex-time. The refrigerator in the office
kitchen was stuffed with frozen pizzas, Diet Coke, Mountain Dew, and Pepsi. When Pierre and his
business partner are in town, they often walked around the office speaking into their headsets while
holding their Palm Pilots. When they're in town: They often fly around the US and sometimes to Europe
on business. To repeat: These people, these pioneers of the Cyber Frontier are displacing local
Montanans by the day. When I went to restaurants, he saw signs of incredible wealth, wondering where the money came from.
Montana was certainly depressed economically. A friend of mine--a native Missoulian--who worked at
the post office on Brooks Avenue, told me that when people came in to fill out a change of address form
(which happened quite frequently because of the cyber-people moving into town from out-of-state), they
often put the same phone number for their daytime and evening phone number: a clear sign that they
were telecommuters. They lived in Montana but all the money they earn come from out-of-state and
even out of the country. And these same cyber-people (again constituting the Cyber-Frontier) were
driving up the real-estate market and forcing the locals and their families out of town. And this Cyber Frontier might be the last Frontier in Montana, fully armed, as it is (like Athena sprung
from Zeus's head) with the new Global Capital. In another nanosecond, the nature-loving slave (like
Bryn) will no longer be able to afford herself in new time and space of Global Capital. (I personally
observed the wreckage of Rousseau's fantasy on the faces of the teeming beer-guzzling locals fastened
to one another or to the pool tables amid the funky interior decor of Charlie B's.) Capital is in the process
of transforming and folding the geographical space of Missoula into the time of Capital. And the
contemporary Missoulian still yoked to a nostalgia for myth and history is at this point being transformed
into a relic in a museum. The cyber telecommuter (like Rob), yoked in his own way to the time-light (that
is, the time it takes to transmit data: the speed of light) on the screen of the monitor in front of him, and
who produces and circulates codes, words, graphics, data, or money through the Internet, is becoming the
new resident of Missoula--and to a certain extent Montana. In fact, this new Montana resident is himself
simply an interface in the Internet of Capital. And the new technology that makes this telecommuter
possible is dissolving the boundaries of town, constructing a new digital topology without limits, and most
significantly, exploding the figure of the Pioneer and the Cowboy in dude ranches that were never
real--that is to say that were virtual--to begin with. Now I turn my attention to the third world, where the digital divide is more palpable than that of Montana
because it is subtended by political and economic regimes set up more by capital than by technology.

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This is what is going on there today that has made national media:

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By Katie J.M. Baker May 10, 2012 2:20 PM

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My Weekend In America’s So-Called ‘Rape Capital’

"It's the altitude," the sweaty, red-cheeked fraternity brother explains. It is my first night in Missoula, Montana, and I am sitting on a stool at Stockman's Bar, watching girls in rhinestoned crop tops and boys in baggy jeans grind up on each other, pound tequila shots, and prowl around before pairing off and stumbling home before last call. Nick*, my traveling companion, is waiting outside for me with a switchblade; he can't come into Stockman's, which he and his friends call "Cockman's," since he is only 20 years old and forgot his fake I.D., but he told me it wasn't exactly safe to go there by myself. Nick, by the way, used to be what he tactfully calls a "supplier" to college kids, and he left Missoula a few months ago because he was being followed around by unmarked cars and couldn't stop shooting up heroin. So when Nick tells me to be wary of Stockman's, I listen.

"So, yeah, it's just the elevation," my new friend continues to yell into my ear. "The girls here drink too much, and the elevation fucks with their heads. So then they say they got roofied." He furrows his bushy eyebrows and raises his beer in the direction of the dance floor, which is teeming with cloudy-eyed kids gyrating to Taio Cruz. "People think we're the 'rape capital' of America now, but we're not. Missoula is just like any other college town."

Maybe. Maybe not.

On May 1st, the Federal Department of Justice launched an investigation into possible gender bias in the handling of sexual assault allegations by the Missoula Police Department, the County Attorney's Office, and the University of Montana. Officials say there have been at least 80 reported rapes in Missoula over the last three years, with 11 of the sexual assaults reported over the last 18 months involving UM students, including an alleged gang-rape by members of the Grizzlies' lucrative Division I football team.

Missoula's authority figures were stunned by the announcement. In a press conference following the announcement, Missoula County Attorney Fred Van Valkenburg said he had "no idea what triggered this investigation," and Police Chief Mark Muir said he "frankly would be shocked to learn of discriminatory practices by our department." Although Thomas Perez, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division, stressed that the primary focus was "not on the number of alleged sexual assaults but … on the response," no one seemed to understand why the Feds would target sleepy Missoula, a city of 70,000 nestled in the Rocky Mountains that, as Mayor Jon Engen told CNN, is "about average" when it comes to its rate of sexual assaults. "Clearly this is not ideal, but at the same time, we don't have anything to hide here," Engen said. "If we had pervasive problems, I would know about them."

80 reported rapes in three years is, indeed, on par with national averages for college towns of Missoula's size. "This is a problem that every college campus in America experiences, every community experiences at some level, so it's not unique to the University of Montana," UM president Royce C. Engstrom said at a sexual assault forum earlier this year. Even Elizabeth Hubble, Co-Director of Women's and Gender Studies at the university, said the media attention was frustrating, although beneficial in terms of garnering more support for advocacy work. "I think we are getting a lot of publicity right now for something that is not really an aberration," she told me. The community is equally displeased with the newfound infamy; "The Rape Capital of America is not the slogan we want for Missoula," one commenter recently wrote on a local blog.

If the situation in Missoula is not atypical, what prompted the headline-making federal investigation? Why do residents say they're being bombarded with calls from the New York Times, CNN, and Anderson Cooper? Why did Engstrom fire head football coach Robin Pflugrad and athletic director Jim O'Day in March, right after the Grizzlies had won the Big Sky Conference title — at which point Mr. Pflugrad was named the conference's coach of the year — without comment?

When I heard that Nick, my friend's younger brother, was planning a trip back to Missoula, I asked him to take me along because I, too, was curious: Why Missoula?

***

Missoulians describe their 24 square mile city as "idyllic," a liberal enclave in an otherwise red state. A giant peace sign is carved into one of the many grassy mountains that surround the downtown area, and a large "M," lit each fall during the university's annual homecoming celebration, sits on another. 1992's Oscar-winning film A River Runs Through It was filmed herenearby, and a river does, indeed, run through the center of the town, which is filled with a funny mixture of football fans and hippies. The kids I'm staying with — Nick's friends from his past life as a drug-dealing UM dropout — are mostly UM seniors and live in a dilapidated three-story house with an untended backyard, two cheerful dogs, and an endless parade of friends streaming in and out of the always-unlocked doors. They smoke a lot of weed and own a lot of guns. When I admit I don't have any friends who own guns, one girl tells me that's "literally the funniest thing" she's ever heard.

Nearly everyone I meet in Missoula — on porches, at coffee shops, in bars — agrees on three points. The first is that the city's police force is a joke, ill-equipped to deal with the heavy interstate narcotics flow (the federal government has officially designated the area as a "high intensity drug trafficking area"), drunk driving (even the head of the student health center has a DUI under his belt), and — yes — sexual assaults that occur on a regular basis. The second point is that rape is very bad. And the third is that the girls in Missoula are the type who "make shit up for attention." Girls "cry rape" in Missoula, say the girls of Missoula, who are often quicker to blame "sluts" for getting themselves into sketchy situations than are guys. I'm told over and over again that, thanks to the allegations that have surfaced over the past few months, more and more girls are blaming their post-hookup shame on the guys they — in the minds of so many of the Missoulians I meet — happily and carelessly took home the night before.

My chief goal during my four days in Missoula is to blend in. I tell people I'm a reporter, of course, but I don't mention the fact that I'm also a feminist unless specifically prompted. I do this because I want people to feel comfortable speaking honestly around me; I don't want anyone to think I'm judging them. But, at times, the victim-blaming and slut-shaming is so overwhelming that I can't help referencing statistics, such as: Only five percent of sexual assaults are ever reported to the police. Only about six percent of rape reports are false, about the same rate as other crimes. About 25 percent of women are victims of sexual assault or attempted sexual assault during their college years. Roughly 90 percent of college women who are victims of rape or attempted rape know their assailant, and these "date-rapists" are just as likely to be serial offenders as the "jump-out-of-the-bushes" stranger variety.

Everyone looks at me, the reporter from Manhattan who has never shot a gun, like I have no idea what I'm talking about.

"I think a lot of the sexual assaults are pretty fucking legit except for there are a lot of really slutty girls here who want to get with a lot of people and then they want to claim rape," Rachel, a UM senior and one of Nick's friends, tells me while smoking a bowl at her kitchen table and shuffling a deck of cards. "That sounds horrible, but it's true, because I know a lot of girls like that." She tells me, matter-of-factly, about a friend of hers who got wasted one night and invited a guy back home with her who ended up stealing her car. She filed a police report claiming that he had raped her, too, but Rachel thinks it's just because she was pissed about the car. "I mean, I wasn't there, but I don't know. I don't think she was raped." Shuffle. "They call it the ‘Zoo' here because we party like animals. A lot of girls don't know their limits."

Most people I speak with struggle to differentiate between drunk sex and drunk sexual assault. They're unable to parrot the politically correct buzzwords they think they should say ("no is no") without adding a caveat or two ("but girls here are attention whores.") For example, everyone agrees that, in the words of a man I meet under the disconcertingly fluorescent lighting at a divey sports bar called Missoula Club, football players in particular "don't need to rape to get fucked." This is despite the fact that at least six of the school's football players were involved in the cases currently being investigated by the federal probe.

I am dying to meet some football players, and ask everyone I meet if they can help that happen. A few people try, but their Griz friends never text back once they hear there's a reporter in town. "Go to Stockman's" is their next best suggestion. I actually start tallying the number of people who tell me to go to Stockman's if I want to get roofied or raped. (Also, bizarrely, most people I meet, both guys and girls, claim to have been roofied in Missoula at some point.) The one unabashed Stockman's fan I meet tells me it's the best late-night bar because "everyone is so wasted at Stock's that anything can happen. Everyone is wasted, dancing, and it's the perfect excuse to flirt with the people you've seen in class all semester." But I lose count of those who call it the "creep bar," or the "date-rape bar," or the bar that's impossible to leave without getting groped at least once. These are often the same people who say girls in Missoula are "well, kind of asking for it."

***

I don't meet any football players on Saturday night, but I meet Tori, a peppy UM sophomore who tells me she is "best, best friends" with the guys on the team. We start chatting when I ask her why she and her friends are wearing moustaches and men's undershirts. "It's Cinco de Mayo," she reminds me. "We're Cholas!" We plan to meet for coffee the next day because everyone is too wasted to speak coherently about Missoula's least favorite subject, although one guy — who says he's "not the right person to ask" about rape because he's "a good guy" — does tell me that girls are confusing. "For example," he slurs, "Lots of times girls have invited me over to watch a movie, saying ‘nothing will happen,' and then I've pounded them."

The next day, Tori is hungover but full of energy, and insists on buying me coffee because I'm "a guest." We talk for a while about the alleged football team gang-rape; she knows the details because she's "on and off" with one of the players who was involved and recorded the whole thing on his phone, "because guys are like that." She tells it like this: two best girlfriends got drunk with the team and took turns going around in a circle and giving the players blowjobs. One of the girls also had sex with one of the football players that night, and when her boyfriend caught wind of the affair, she said it was non-consensual. He convinced her to file a police report, but the County Attorney's Office decided not to prosecute, citing a lack of evidence. Tori thinks that's because her friend showed them the video, which depicted the girl excited and laughing. "In other words," Tori says, "She was into it." The girl went to the college administration next, and thanks to the OCR's recently enacted "Dear Colleague" letter, which lowers the standard of proof on campus for sex charges within the rubric of Title IX, got him kicked off the team and possibly expelled.

"We're in college," Tori says. "People do stupid stuff. If girls keep lying, everyone's going to think Missoula is the town that "cried rape." She offers to connect me with her Griz friends, but sends me an apologetic text the next day saying that the coach forbade the players to talk to the media. "They never want to talk about the rape charges," she had told me earlier. "We have a rule: Don't bring it up unless they bring it up with you."

Sitting there, listening to Tori's earnest account of the reckless party girl who may have cost the well-meaning, good-times-having football player his career, I can't help but think that this is not an inconceivable scenario. I hate myself for it. But this is obviously the problem with allegations of sexual assault: no one but the alleged attacker and victim know exactly what transpired — and that's assuming that both parties were sober enough to remember at all. When the person recounting the events seems to genuinely believe in what she's saying, it's hard to remember my beloved statistics. In Missoula, I'm learning, drunk guys who may have "made mistakes" nearly always get the benefit of the doubt. Drunk girls, however, do not.

***

UM senior Kerry Barrett is one of those drunk girls, as well as the first student I meet that will let me use her real name; she's become somewhat of the poster child for Missoula's burgeoning anti-rape movement ever since she approached the city's local paper, the Missoulian, as a last resort after she was told by police that her sexual assault allegations, along with those of her close friend, lacked enough evidence to press charges. We meet at Break Coffee, where Kerry, who is slight and spunky and clearly used to rattling off the details of her story, is studying for finals. It goes like this: Last September, Kerry hit it off with Gabe Downey, a recent transfer student, at a bar called Sean Kelly's. The two walked back to Gabe's apartment, but Kerry told him she didn't intend to sleep with him before they walked through his front door. "I'm a good guy," Gabe told her. "Sleep over and I'll drive you home in the morning." Kerry, drunk but not wasted, acquiesced.

Kerry says she fell asleep with her clothes on and woke up at around 5 a.m. with her pants down to her ankles and a heavy body on top of her. When she pushed Gabe off, he lunged at her again. Kerry ran out of the apartment and straight to the police station to report the attack — since her dad is a retired lieutenant, she never doubted that was the first place to go. Imagine her surprise when a policeman asked her if she had a boyfriend right off the bat. "Sometimes girls sleep around and then regret it," the cop said when she told him she did not.

The next few weeks were even more frustrating for Kerry. The detective assigned to her case canceled meetings, failed to call her back, and told Kerry "not to expect much." After interviewing a tearful Gabe, the detective concluded he was so distraught that he was possibly suicidal. "I was like, great, I'm glad you're so concerned about his well-being," Kerry said. When she asked Police Chief Muir why it mattered if she had a boyfriend, he told her that most rape reports are false. After she argued that, in fact, generally accepted data suggests only about six percent are indeed false, Muir emailed her a dubious 2009 report from The Forensic Examiner supporting his claims. "I guess I just didn't want you to think I was just pulling stuff out of thin air," he wrote.

Lacking any semblance of support, Kerry gave up trying to press charges. But shortly after Kerry went home with Gabe, her close friend was raped by a UM freshman who followed her into her dorm from the parking lot. Video surveillance shows the student following her into the building and then walking out alone 40 minutes later, carrying her pants, which he inexplicably stole. Afterwards, there were blood stains not only on her bedding but on her mattress, causing officials to ask if the girl had her period. She did not. Like Kerry, her friend was told that her case lacked sufficient evidence.

Kerry convinced her friend to take her case to the university, which ultimately expelled her alleged assailant – much to the chagrin of then-Chief Deputy County Attorney Kirsten Pabst LaCroix, who came to the academic hearing to testify on behalf of the student. LaCroix later told theMissoulian that, while she wouldn't comment on the hearing, "when we file sex charges against someone, it's going to ruin their life. Filing charges rings a bell that cannot be unrung."

Kerry's friend dropped out of school shortly after the incident. Kerry often sees Gabe walking around campus, and wonders if he's tried to attack other girls he's met on the weekends. "The only reason he didn't rape me is because I woke up," she believes.

***

Back at home base, I tell Nick's friends about Kerry's ordeal. They admit it sounds legit – "If she's telling the truth and she wasn't just blacked out" – and are horrified by her friend's more obviously unwarranted trauma. They tell me those girls are totally different than the attention-seekers, like Ali, a UM senior who recently wrote an editorial for the campus paper about being raped twice during her time at the university.

"By putting my name on this story, I worry people might not accept it. I have a reputation of, well, being drunkenly promiscuous," the article begins. Her story of being raped twice – once by the friend of a close friend, to whom she lost her virginity, and then to the best friend of an ex-boyfriend – is honest and harrowing:

I asked him to get off me. He said just a little bit more.
I asked to put my underwear back on. He kept going.
I don't remember what happened next. He wasn't wearing a condom and I wasn't on the Pill. I got out of his bed because it was just too awkward to stay.

Ali, who didn't realize she had been raped until she sought out counseling at the university health center, argues that so many rapes go unreported because victims want everything to "stay the same":

Female victims are afraid of hearing what others might think of them if the word gets out. We'd rather blame ourselves for the situation than believe our ‘friends' could ever do something like this to us. We'll shoulder the responsibility, chalk it up to a wild drunken adventure or just a bad night all around, and then forget about it. Pretend like we meant to do it so it becomes a part of our character. It lowers our self-esteem. We think we're only worth guys who treat us like that.

"I just don't think that's rape," one of Nick's friends says of Ali's story. "I mean, the guy was definitely pushing too hard, but is that rape?" Another, who vaguely knows her from class, says she seems like "she just wants attention."

Here's the funny thing: Ali and I spent two hours together on Saturday morning, eating breakfast burritos and having what I thought was a successful, important conversation. Twelve hours later, she sent me a stream of long, apologetic texts begging me not to quote from her interview because she didn't want to draw more attention to herself. "Please please please don't use anything I said yesterday," she wrote. "Once again, I am sorry."

***

Why are policemen and coeds alike so fixated on weeding out fake rape accusations instead of weeding out rapists? Is it possible that the federal probe will help dispel the myth of the girl who cried rape? Cynthia Wolken, the City Councilor who first initiated a hearing when the stories first broke, is hopeful that it will. "The response from our largely male leadership has been somewhat tone deaf," she told me. "That makes women less likely to come forward and report sexual assault. Who wants to report if no one is going to believe you?" But will the investigation stop Mayor Engen from writing more editorials, as he did in December after the first allegations came to light, on how to avoid being a victim but not how to avoid being a rapist? Will it stop Missoulians from calling Stockman's the "roofie" bar? Will it stop football players from making "mistakes"?

I genuinely like Missoula, and I genuinely like Nick's friends, so I try not to argue with them about, say, pervasive gender stereotypes or victim-blaming. But one evening at Nick's friends' house, after a long day at an outdoor beer fest and before the group is ready to go get wasted at the bars, I get into an argument with a very drunk and emphatic UM undergrad.

"The guys are rapists, but the girls want to get fucked," she says, over and over again.

I try to tell her that statistics say –

"I don't give a fuck about your statistics," she says, pounding the table for emphasis. "Things are different in Missoula. I'm not saying they're not rapists. But the girls help it along."

But things are not different in Missoula.

Hopefully, the federal investigation will help the university and the city more effectively report sexual assaults in tandem — the lack of communication between the two has been a huge barrier over the past few years — and more rapists will be held responsible for their actions. Maybe, next year, a man who attempts to rape a woman while she sleeps won't be able to casually cross her path months later. But a federal probe won't stop the Alis of Missoula — and of the country — from being viciously shamed, or the Toris from idolizing and defending the high-status "good guys" on campus without a second thought.

It's easier to think of rape as the nasty collateral damage that comes with binge drinking and progressive female sexuality than it is to come to terms with the fact that rapists live among us — despite research that proves over and over again that they do.

As its citizens claim, Missoula is just like any other college town. What is happening in Missoula can — and is — happening all around us.

*Some names have been changed.

Special thanks to Gwen Florio, whose fantastic coverage for the Missoulian was extremely helpful.

Image via trekandshoot/Shutterstock

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