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don’t know what possessed me,” Huguet said, “but I told Carol what had happened. Right then and there. She looked at me in horror.”
    Carol then turned toward Donaldson, scowled, and said, “You need to leave right now.”
    Donaldson glowered back at her, silently mouthed the words “Fuck you,” and laughed.
    “He was mocking me,” Huguet said. “He had this smug, entitled expression. He was like, ‘This is my territory. These are my people. You don’t deserve to be here.’ ” Extremely unnerved, she and Carol hurried out of the bar. Upon arriving back at her mom’s house, Huguet went downstairs, got on the Internet, opened the web page for the Missoula Police Department, and looked up the e-mail address for Detective Guy Baker.
    Huguet had met Baker during her junior year at Big Sky High School, when he spoke to a criminal justice class she was taking. A year later, because Huguet was interested in police SWAT operations, she decided to conduct research about SWAT training for her senior project, and asked Baker to be her mentor. In addition to writing a ten-page essay examining whether the physical fitness requirementsfor joining SWAT teams discriminated against women, she took the same grueling physical fitness test administered to all men and women who aspired to join the Missoula Police Department’s SWAT team. Applicants had to complete a three-hundred-meter obstacle course in less than seven and a half minutes while wearing a twenty-five-pound bulletproof vest.
    The most challenging obstacle for Huguet was a smooth, six-foot-high wall that she had to pull herself up and over twice. “It gave her fits,” Detective Baker told me. “She kept trying and trying to get over it, and refused to give up. She ended up completing the course in just over seven minutes and got a qualifying score. Which was interesting, because no other female in our department had ever passed this test at the time.” Baker was impressed. And Huguet came to respect and trust him, as well.
    By the time Huguet found Detective Baker’s e-mail address, it was 2:30 in the morning. She was too angry to sleep. “When I saw Beau that night,” she recalled, “it was like a dam broke. It triggered this rush of buried feelings I didn’t even know I had. I went from never thinking about the rape and believing I was no longer affected by it to realizing that it had been having a huge effect on me all along. I realized that Beau had all this power over how I felt, and I didn’t want him to have that power anymore. I began to think that maybe it had been a mistake not to go to the police.”
    Nearly four years had passed since Allison Huguet had last spoken to Detective Baker, before she had graduated from high school. Huguet was still deeply ambivalent about reporting Beau Donaldson to the authorities, but she trusted Baker enough to broach the subject in a noncommittal fashion. She sent him an e-mail that read,
Dear Detective Baker,…This is Allison Huguet. I worked with you on SWAT training my senior year of high school. There is a situation I have been put in, in Missoula, and I would love to talk about it with you. I want to know my options on a legal matter that is very personal. If you could email me back that would be great.
    Baker replied a day later, the Friday after Thanksgiving, suggestingthey meet that very afternoon to discuss whatever was on her mind, but by then Huguet was having second thoughts about starting a process she might not be able to control or stop, so she didn’t respond to Baker’s e-mail. Instead, she persuaded her mother to ask a family friend, an attorney who worked as a public defender, whether he thought Huguet should report the rape to the police. “He basically said, ‘You better prepare for the hardest, nastiest fight of your life if you go that route,’ ” Huguet remembered. “He said my life would be torn apart, and every aspect of it would be exposed in public, and these cases are