Sexual Assault and Jon Krakauer's "Missoula," In Missoula

Even if Jon Krakauer hadn't just published a book called Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town, there's a good chance that hundreds of people would have come to see him talk last Wednesday at the Missoula Doubletree Hotel. The home of Norman MacLean, Richard Hugo, and James Crumley is a writers' town on any day, and big crowds turn out for the annual Montana Festival of the Book each fall. Under the present circumstances, Krakauer's appearance is the biggest local news of the week. On the morning after his talk, the photo of him on the Missoulian's front page will be four times as large as one accompanying a story about a double murder-suicide.

Missoula is the biggest story in Missoula. The short time between the announcement of the book's title in February and its late April release only intensified local reaction. Barbara Theroux, who has been running the local bookstore Fact & Fiction since 1986, heard the announcement while out of town at a conference. "I was stunned as to when the book was coming out and what the title was," said Theroux. Locals asked her if Krakauer would be making an appearance. "I would say 'I have no idea.' This is not a book that lends itself to having a book signing event. If anything were to happen, we'd need to do some sort of a forum," she said.

She immediately decided to donate $2 from each sale of Missoula to local sexual assault response organizations First Step and SARC. When Krakauer's publisher got word of Theroux's thoughts on a forum, they reached out and told her that Krakauer would very much like to come to town, and asked if she would like to arrange a public discussion for the author. Larry Abramson, dean of the journalism school at the University of Montana, agreed to serve as interviewer, and they solicited questions from the public by email.

Krakauer made it clear from the start that he made the appearance because he felt an obligation to Missoula, reiterating that he didn't do book tours and disliked public appearances. This isn't the first time he's provoked an uproar; the Mormon Church found it necessary to issue an official response to Under The Banner of Heaven, and here in Montana there are people who think the Attorney General unnecessarily investigated memoir fabricator and nonprofit con artist Greg Mortenson after Krakauer published his e-book Three Cups of Deceit, which aimed to debunk Mortenson's Three Cups of Tea. Krakauer writes books people have strong opinions about, and Missoula is about a town that has strong opinions about books. Especially when that book is about how that community did and did not respond to a series of sexual assaults between 2008 and 2012, the worst of which involved members of the University of Montana's football team.

Early in their discussion, Abramson asked Krakauer "Did it never occur to you, in choosing Missoula and having the name of this town slapped across this book, that some people would be pissed off and feel that they were being picked on or that you didn't care, because it's a just a small town?"

"I really, honestly thought it wouldn't be a problem," Krakauer responded. He said that considering that the book was about Missoula, there wasn't really a way to give it a title that would spare the town the scrutiny. "I like Missoula, it's a wonderful town. It doesn't seem like this town would be so defensive. And I was wrong." said Krakauer. "That's the title, I don't regret it, I'm sorry it caused so much turmoil. I mean, it certainly, it caused me problems, too."

Like Theroux and many other Missoula residents, I had an instinctive response to the title of Krakauer's book, a reactionary "oof." I lived there only from 2008 to 2011, but came away with an indelible affection for the place. Krakauer writes "it's the kind of community that charms first-time visitors into putting money down on real estate within hours of arriving." Or into keeping your Airstream there all summer and renting an apartment when fall comes, depending on the circumstances.

During my initial two-week summer stay, I walked along its broad downtown avenues, looking at buildings like the semi-incongruous Art Moderne Florence Hotel against a 360-degree view of mountains, and checked out the shops. There's no Starbucks downtown. There's Butterfly Herbs, where the floor-to-ceiling wall of gallon glass jars holds any herb the discerning home cook or home witch could want, and which serves the best coffee milkshake in the world. There's Liquid Planet, where the first french press travel mug was invented. There's Break Espresso, which has phenomenal pies. I stood on the sidewalk, looking up at the mountains, down at the river, and back at the town, and thought, "I could live here."

Missoula's appeal is layered. It enjoys a setting of great natural beauty, ensconced in a fertile valley between tree-covered mountains, divided by the Clark Fork of the Yellowstone River. Amid all that small city charm and scenery are the cultural amenities of a college town: art house movies, live music, good places to eat, interesting people from all over and former students who never left. Missoula gets called the Berkeley of the Rockies, but it is more accurately a sort of Portland East, because there is less dogma and more overlap between progressives and the traditionalists. The outdoors enthusiasts and university students and staff who migrate here blend with the native-born in a way that's only occasionally contentious. And it doesn't feel particularly dangerous for women, no more so than the average college town at least. This is one of the points of Missoula; the crimes it describes are devastating because they merely represent what happens all the time, everywhere.

Missoula has been self-defined for so long that this attention was all a bit of a shock, even for those skeptical of the county attorney or university. There is, of course, that part of the community that thinks the system worked great, and that there aren't problems, that Krakauer manufactured them from dubious sources, like the Department of Justice. Mostly, though, there's been a gentle defensiveness moved by a desire to demonstrate the progress Missoula has made in the last several years in the handling of sexual assault cases (acknowledged by the DoJ) and to emphasize the positives of the town. How Kirsten Pabst will work out as County Attorney since she returned to public service after successfully defending accused rapist and Griz QB Jordan Johnson, remains to be seen.

Loving a place and hating its problems, then getting upset with outsiders who draw attention to them is a familiar feeling for anyone with a home; I'm from Texas, where it's a way of life. Missoulians are doing the best they can to reconcile these conflicts. The mood is not so much defensive as it is one of gentle, persistent correction. Missoula wants to be seen as more than the sum of its problems.

The week after the book's release, I was walking downtown to look at a flower memorial on the courthouse lawn for sexual assault survivors when some construction workers mildly catcalled me. They quoted "Chantilly Lace." Flowers were left on the lawn for 24 hours as part of the observation of Sexual Assault Awareness month. The windows of most of the downtown businesses had the number 92 in them in memoriam of Kole Swartz, a redshirt freshman who died in an accidental self-inflicted shooting last month. At Fact & Fiction, a tabletop display of Missoula contained cards for local sexual assault prevention organizations and a notice that they'd receive a portion of the book sales. Over at Albertson's, the books share a display with the local huckleberry souvenirs.

In the window was a poster by local artist Andy Smetanka, a détourned version of Missoula's cover that blocks out letters in Krakauer's name and the subtitle so that it reads "OUR Missoula." The weekly Missoula Independent reverse-themed the cover with the issue they published the week before Missoula came out; it shows University Hall in golden hour sunlight instead of cold winter snow, and is headlined "Hope and Progress in a University Town (or 12 reasons to love Missoula right now)."

"As Missoula prepares to be put under the microscope," reads the introduction, "we figured what better time to look at aspects of the community that are also putting us on the map, bringing us together or otherwise making this a pretty cool place to live." I told you the defensiveness was gentle; "pretty cool place to live" is an understatement. By the way, the new Black Coffee Roasting Co. location on Spruce has a good gourmet toast menu.

Long before Krakauer came to town, there was a contingent of residents who blamed the messengers, whether they be former Missoulian reporter and current U of M journalism professor Gwen Florio or reporter Katie J.M. Baker, both of whom are cited in Missoula. Missoula is no stranger to clashes between the press and the local institutions, and the size of everything here makes it difficult to take clean sides. Former Missoula County Attorney Fred Van Valkenburg, the one who sued the Department of Justice over its investigation into his office's handling of sexual assault cases, stopped talking to the Missoulian. The paper used to employ his wife, Carol; she's also a professor emeritus at the U of M journalism school.

In 2009, the Grizzlies' then-head coach, Bobby Hauck, tried to freeze out the Montana Kaimin student newspaper. From the Kaimin: "On Tuesday, after the football team's weekly press conference, Hauck was asked to comment about the allegations surrounding Johnson and Swink. 'You're done for the day,' said Hauck, while covering up the tape recorder. 'And you'll be done for the season if you keep bugging me about this thing that I've answered four fucking times.'"

It was Hauck's luck that ESPN the Magazine contributor Chris Jones was a visiting Pollner professor at the journalism school that semester. Serving as an advisor to the Kaimin, he helped make the story of Hauck's feud with student sports reporters go national. One of Jones's fellow ESPN writers is Kevin Van Valkenburg, a former Griz player and Kaimin staffer, and the son of Fred and Carol Van Valkenburg. Kevin will be next semester's Pollner professor, which should make for some interesting class sessions.

This is a small city with a lot of connections, like any college town, but even with all the passionate football fans in the community, Missoula is no Tallahassee. There's a reason the book isn't subtitled "Rape and the Justice System in a College Football Town." This is FCS, not FBS college football. Griz gear is visible but not ubiquitous the way it might be in College Station or Eugene. It's just that football fans and their message boards have been the locus for most of the anti-Krakauer sentiment, since football players comprise the majority of the accused rapists in the book, and the most egregious misdeeds of the justice system seem to concern the cases in which defendants are Griz players. And, as one would expect, sports fan internet isn't often the place for the most reasoned discussion of sexual assault.

As Krakauer's appearance approached, the looming question was whether those gentle sports fans who wanted the Griz to be left alone would show up or stay behind their keyboards. The only time I've ever struggled to park in Missoula was that night, and I was wondering if I'd make it inside the hotel's ballroom. I did, but just barely. Hundreds waited in line for hours for the doors to open, and a couple of hundred people were turned away, sent to watch it on a live stream at the Badlander, or on cable access at home, or listen on Montana Public Radio.

The crowd was older ("This is not a college crowd," I hear a woman in front of me say, although why would college kids show up early to anything, especially the week of finals?) and women outnumbered men by about two to one. Even with that ratio, I was certain a man was going to say something stupid and looked around wondering which one it would be. From the beginning of the event, the room welcomed Krakauer warmly with a standing ovation and repeated cheers and applause throughout. A couple of women behind me talk about how strong and safe the community will be now, and how glad they are for the attention he's brought.

At the end, the audience gave Krakauer a second standing ovation. There wasn't to be a public Q&A, and instead the organizers intended to point the audience to the representatives present for local sexual assault resources, and to thank the special guests in the audience, some of the women who had shared their stories with Krakauer. Before the applause died down, a man came up to the stage and grabbed the microphone that had been in front of Abramson.

"Thomas Dove, D-O-V-E," he said, holding up a stack of papers. They were most likely the 11-page letter that the five-year Missoula resident and retired attorney sent to Doubleday and local news outlets before publication. The letter used quotations from cranky one-star Amazon.com reviews and comparisons of Missoula to Rolling Stone's UVA story to attack Krakauer's accuracy and claim that publication of the book would "be injurious to the University, the town, and the state in which it is set."

Dove, in the way men do at such events, said he had a question, after which he proceeded to talk for a really long time about his own qualifications as audience members heckled him. Krakauer, losing patience, walked over, said "Let me just take that away and just ask me face to face and I'll tell you." He took the mic from Dove and came down from the stage to stand in front of the taller, angrier man.

At this point, his Montana attorney Mike Meloy—he's the father of Decemberists bandleader Colin and author Maile—stood up between the two. Krakauer, tiring of waiting for an actual question, walked away and Dove continued into a tirade, yelling "He writes for money!" The crowd began to boo, angry that Dove was breaking the no Q&A rule; a hotel employee used the PA to make an announcement that they could please move to the exits, bringing an end to the evening.

Dove's actions were a surprise to the audience, but he had warned Theroux and Abramson before the event that he intended to ask Krakauer questions. "We knew there was a possibility, the hotel, everybody was alerted. But you know you can't get defensive, that's not what the night was about either," said Theroux. "And you just hope you can react and control anything before it does get out of hand. And quite frankly, it was one person."

Theroux came to the mic to announce that everyone was welcome to speak with the First Step and SARC representatives in the back. By then, everyone was already out of their seats and heading for the exits, one man's declamations having seized the evening's focus. It was over.