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obviously fucking need some help,” Donaldson agreed, no longer crying. “I’m so sorry.”
    Allison reminded Donaldson, “If I walked down to the police station right now, it would ruin your life. And that’s why I’m not going to do it….I don’t want to have to live with that. But I’m not okay with what happened….I’m not telling you that by not going out and filing charges that it was okay, because it wasn’t….It needs to never happen again….Get help, Beau.”
    Donaldson assured her that he would. “He promised me that he would get treatment for his drug, alcohol, and sexual issues,” Allison recalled. “And I made it clear that this promise was the only reason I wasn’t going to the police.”
    ----
    * pseudonym

CHAPTER FOUR
          “A few days after it happened,” Beth Huguet told me, “I remember Allison sitting on the couch down in the basement of my house, wrapped in blankets. She wasn’t saying anything, but you could see it looping in her mind. You could see it in her face.”
    “I was overwhelmed,” Allison remembered. Classes for her junior year at Eastern Oregon University were due to start in a few days, she said, “But I wasn’t ready to leave the security of my home. I wanted to be near my family and feel protected by them.” She decided to remain in Missoula for the semester and take all her classes online. Then, a week after being raped, she got a phone call from her younger sister, Kathleen, who was attending college in Boise, Idaho.
    Kathleen Huguet told Allison that a mutual acquaintance was informing people that “you and Beau had sex last weekend.” Kathleen didn’t even bother asking Allison if the rumor was true, because she knew it was preposterous: Beau Donaldson was the last person in the world Allison would ever sleep with. In high dudgeon, Kathleen reported that she had sent their acquaintance a nasty Facebook message commanding her to stop spreading ridiculous rumors.
    “I was sitting there in shock when Kathleen told me this,” Allison said. “I couldn’t even process it.” Donaldson and his friend Sam Erschler had assured Allison and her mother that they would say nothing about the rape to anyone. Yet a rumor that she had willingly slept with her rapist was already circulating in Missoula, Montana; Boise, Idaho; and La Grande, Oregon.
    Allison said nothing to Kathleen about the rape. Instead shecalled Keely Williams for commiseration, telling her, “I can’t believe this.” Then she thumbed a text to Beau Donaldson to let him know what people were saying about them. She warned, “I can promise you that if I hear one more person saying that I slept with you, I am going to the police.”
    Donaldson immediately texted her back, saying that although he had no idea who was responsible for the rumor, he would “shut it down and get it taken care of.”
    The text from Donaldson seemed genuinely contrite. Allison Huguet found it surprisingly reassuring. It gave her a sense of control, or at least an illusion of control, that continued for more than a year. “At the time,” she told me, “I felt I had some real leverage, so I wasn’t so scared of him. And I had confidence he would really seek the help he needed.” Huguet convinced herself that as long as nobody knew she had been raped, she could resume living as if it had never happened, and everything would return to normal. She didn’t see any reason to seek psychotherapy.
    “That next year turned out to be weird for me,” she said. “I can’t remember if I thought much about the rape or didn’t think about it during that period. I can’t remember if I was sleeping okay or having nightmares. That whole period is kind of blank. I’m pretty sure I managed to just keep it out of my mind.” That semester, she recalled, “I was working full-time for my dad at Office Solutions. I studied a lot and did well with my online classes. And on weekends I would go to Pullman sometimes.”
    Two of