Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town

  After a few more minutes of watching the movie, however, without saying anything, Johnson rolled on top of her and started kissing her more aggressively. Once again she told him, “No, let’s just watch the movie.” But this time, instead of stopping, Washburn testified, he sat over her “kind of like a gorilla….And I said, ‘No,’ like, ‘Not tonight.’…Because I figured that he was trying to have sex. And I didn’t want that.”

  By that point, however, Jordan Johnson seemed determined to have intercourse, despite Cecilia Washburn’s repeated protestations. She was five feet, eight inches tall and weighed 127 pounds. He was a powerfully built football player who weighed about 200 pounds and spent a lot of time lifting in the Griz weight room. Johnson pinned her down by placing his left arm across her shoulder and chest, she testified, “and then he took my leggings and my underwear off with his right hand, and he pulled them down, and they caught around my ankles.” As he was tugging her clothing off, she continued to protest, “No! Not tonight!” She also tried to hold her legs together, and she raised her knees against his hips in an attempt to push him away.

  As Washburn resisted Johnson’s advances, she testified, “He didn’t say anything. He was just—…He changed into a totally different person….I was terrified.”

  After Jordan Johnson pulled off Cecilia Washburn’s leggings and underwear, and was pinning her down with his forearm across her sternum, he commanded her to turn over onto her stomach. When she refused, Washburn testified, “He said, ‘Turn over, or I’ll make you.’ And then at that point he grabbed my hips and flipped me over.” When this happened, she said, “I just knew I was going to get raped.”

  Once Johnson had Washburn lying facedown on the bed, he forced her legs apart with his knees, placed his hand on the side of her head to hold her down, and used his other hand to unbuckle his belt and lower his jeans. “You said you wanted it,” he told her. He pulled Washburn’s hips up toward him so that she was on her knees with her buttocks raised in the air, and penetrated her vagina with his penis as he kneeled on the bed behind her. As he did these things, according to Washburn, he again said, “You said you wanted it! You said you wanted it!”

  “He grabbed onto my hips and he started pulling my body into his,” Washburn testified, “repeated times, just again, and again, and again. It hurt so bad.” He penetrated her in this manner for “a couple of minutes,” until he felt that he was about to ejaculate, at which point he withdrew his penis and came in his hand and on Washburn’s blanket.

  When Johnson began raping her, Washburn testified, she was “in complete shock. It was like I was hit with a baseball bat. I had no idea what was going on. I had never in a million years would have thought that this would have happened….And then, gradually, as things started to progress, I just slowly started to shut down….And afterwards, I was still in shock. I didn’t want to believe that it happened. It was like this nightmare.”

  After Johnson withdrew his penis from Washburn’s vagina and ejaculated, she scrambled off the bed, stood beside her dresser, and stared at him, shaking, while he wiped the semen from her blanket, picked up his clothes, and walked into an adjacent bathroom. As soon as Johnson was out of her bedroom, Washburn pulled on her clothes, picked up her phone from the nightstand, and texted her housemate, Stephen Green, who was still playing a video game in the living room, a few feet away. “Omg,” she typed, “I think I might have just gotten raped. he kept pushing and pushing and I said no but he wouldn’t listen…I just wanna cry…omg what do I do!”

  Cecilia Washburn grabbed her purse and her wallet, put on a down vest, and walked through the living room, past Green, and into the kitchen, where she noticed that her friend Brian O’Day had sent her a text to ask if she would pick him up downtown and give him a ride home, as she had earlier agreed to do. Washburn replied with a text that said yes, followed by a smiley-face emoticon. Later, when Washburn was asked why she responded with a smiley face, she explained that she didn’t want to let O’Day know she’d been raped.

  After replying to O’Day’s text, Washburn continued out the back door and walked to her car, taking for granted that Johnson would follow her when he realized she had left. “I wanted him out of my house as quickly as possible,” she testified. In her state of shock and disbelief following the rape, she decided that driving him back to his house was the most expedient way to accomplish that.

  As Washburn had walked past Stephen Green, he’d seen that she had tears in her eyes. “She looked really distressed,” Green testified. “And she…just kind of shook her head and said she didn’t want to talk about it right then.”

  Jordan Johnson came out of the house a couple of minutes after Washburn and got into the front passenger seat of her car. During the short drive to his residence, they didn’t speak to each other. “No words were exchanged,” Washburn testified. “Completely silent….I had tears in my eyes, but I wasn’t sobbing….When I dropped him off, he got out of the car and he said, ‘Well, thanks,’ and then he shut the door….I turned my car around, started to cry, and then I drove home.”

  —

  LATER, MANY PEOPLE were baffled by Cecilia Washburn’s actions during the alleged assault and immediately thereafter. When the assault began, skeptics wondered, why didn’t she scream for help from Stephen Green, who was sitting just outside the door to her bedroom? And why would Washburn give Jordan Johnson a ride home after he’d raped her?

  There are several plausible explanations, according to Rebecca Roe. An accomplished Seattle lawyer, Roe worked from 1977 through 1994 in the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, where she ran the Special Assault Unit for eleven years, and in 2008, after going into private practice, she was recognized as “Lawyer of the Year” by the Washington State Trial Lawyers Association. Being raped is such a traumatic experience, Roe explained to me, that it often results in seemingly bizarre behavior. Fear could certainly account for Cecilia Washburn’s unexpected actions, she said. But so could something as mundane as culturalization.

  “It was actually pretty common for women not to scream or call the cops in rape cases I prosecuted,” Roe said, “at least partly because women aren’t wired to react that way. We are socialized to be likeable and not to create friction. We are brought up to be nice. Women are supposed to resolve problems without making a scene—to make bad things go away as if they never happened.”

  —

  WHEN CECILIA WASHBURN arrived back at her house after driving Jordan Johnson home, she walked in through the kitchen door, broke down, and started sobbing so hard she had trouble breathing. “I thought I was going to collapse,” she said, “so I grabbed onto the…oven door handle.” As soon as Stephen Green heard Washburn’s wrenching sobs, he ran into the kitchen to comfort her, then persuaded her to sit down with him in the living room. “I sat on his lap…and he just sat there rubbing my back,” Washburn recalled.

  After Washburn talked to Green for about twenty minutes, she took a long shower. She said she felt filthy and violated and wanted “to get clean and just scrub every crevice of my body.”

  * * *

  * pseudonym

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  By the time Cecilia Washburn finished showering, it was approximately 1:00 a.m. Her friend Brian O’Day still needed a ride home, so she put on her clothes, got back in her car, and drove downtown to pick him up. When O’Day got in the car, he noticed that she looked upset, so he asked what was wrong. Washburn burst into tears and told him she’d been raped. By the time she returned to her house and went to bed, it was 2:30 a.m.

  After waking up on Sunday morning, February 5, 2012, Cecilia Washburn texted a close friend, Ali Bierer, to tell her what had happened the night before. Bierer, a senior at the UM pharmacy school, was a year older than Washburn. During her freshman and sophomore years, Bierer had worked twenty hours a week as a resident assistant, a job that entailed providing advice and support to students. As part of her training for the position, she’d been instructed how to respo
nd to students who came to her to report sexual assaults. Guided by this training, Bierer urged Washburn to go immediately to the First Step Resource Center. (This is the same clinic for sexual-assault victims where Allison Huguet was taken by her mother after being raped by Beau Donaldson and where Kelsey Belnap was taken after allegedly being gang-raped by four teammates of Donaldson’s and Jordan Johnson’s.) Bierer offered to drive Washburn to First Step.

  Washburn was skeptical, but she relented to Bierer’s urging because she wanted to be treated for her genital injuries and for potential sexually transmitted diseases. “I just wanted to make sure that I was physically okay,” Washburn testified.

  When Bierer picked Washburn up to take her to the clinic, Washburn’s appearance worried her. “She was very frazzled, withdrawn,” Bierer testified. “She wasn’t looking at me….She was crying. Just very shaken.”

  At First Step, Cecilia Washburn met with Claire Francoeur, the nurse-practitioner on duty. Francoeur explained that Washburn was not required to report the alleged rape to the police but noted that if there was any possibility that she might decide to report the assault at some future date, it was very important that she receive a forensic medical exam right away, in order for evidence to be collected. Washburn consented to the exam, which turned out to be so painful that she asked Francoeur to stop in the middle of it for a little while. The exam determined that Washburn had genital pain, in addition to “mild redness, swelling, and some small abrasions; marks on her chest; and tenderness to the side of her head.”

  After the exam, Washburn was ambivalent about whether to report the rape to the authorities. She had four options. She could go to the Missoula police and seek redress through the criminal justice system; she could report the assault to the University of Montana; she could file reports with both the police and the university; or she could remain silent. None of these choices was appealing. Each had the potential to affect her life in unpredictable and adverse ways.

  After weighing possible risks against possible benefits, Washburn decided to forgo filing a police report, at least for the time being, but to report to the University of Montana that she had been raped by Jordan Johnson. She hoped that by not filing a formal report with the Missoula Police Department, she would be able to keep the rape confidential and out of the media. A few days after visiting First Step, she gave a statement to UM dean Charles Couture. He immediately launched a formal investigation.

  On Sunday, February 12, Jordan Johnson arrived home from a trip to Pullman, Washington, to find a letter from Couture on official University of Montana stationery. “Dear Mr. Johnson,” the missive began,

  I have initiated an investigation into the allegation that you have violated Section V.A. 18 of The University of Montana Student Code. Section V.A. 18 prohibits rape. Reportedly, on February 4, 2012, you raped a fellow student, Ms. Cecilia Washburn, at her off-campus apartment….Upon the conclusion of my investigation, if I have found sufficient evidence that you violated the Student Conduct Code as alleged, I intend to seek your immediate expulsion from the University.

  As Johnson read the letter, he began to tremble and hyperventilate, according to his housemates, and could hardly speak. Two of those housemates, Alex Bienemann and Bo Tully, suggested to Johnson that he seek advice from one of their assistant football coaches who lived nearby. He wasn’t home, however, so they phoned Robin Pflugrad, the head coach, who invited Johnson to come to his home and talk.

  Pflugrad and Johnson are both from Eugene, Oregon, and Pflugrad was a friend of Johnson’s parents’. Pflugrad had a son who’d attended Eugene’s Sheldon High, where Johnson had gained national attention as an exceptional quarterback. In December 2009, when Johnson was a senior at Sheldon, Pflugrad was named head coach at the University of Montana. Almost immediately, Pflugrad offered Johnson a scholarship to attend college at UM and play football for the Griz. Johnson eagerly accepted.

  When Alex Bienemann drove Jordan Johnson to Robin Pflugrad’s house and dropped him off, Johnson was still extremely agitated by Dean Couture’s letter. During the hour or so that Johnson spent with Pflugrad, he told his coach that the sex with Washburn had been consensual and he absolutely did not rape her. In that case, Pflugrad replied, Johnson had nothing to worry about, because there was no way he could get in trouble for something he didn’t do. The fifty-three-year-old coach assured his nineteen-year-old quarterback that everything “was going to be okay.” Immediately after Johnson went home, Pflugrad called UM athletic director Jim O’Day to alert him that Jordan Johnson was being investigated by Dean Couture for rape, and the UM athletic department promptly mobilized to do everything possible to defend Johnson against Cecilia Washburn’s allegation.

  —

  IN EARLY MARCH, Cecilia Washburn was traversing the UM campus with a friend when she saw Jordan Johnson, who happened to be walking nearby. Although Johnson made no effort to approach Washburn, and apparently never even noticed her, when Washburn caught sight of him, she panicked. It was the first time she had laid eyes on Johnson since the night he’d allegedly raped her. Terrified, she ran inside a nearby building to hide, then called Lori Morin, the assistant dean for student affairs at the UM school of pharmacy. Morin urged Washburn to come to her office right away. When Washburn arrived, Morin testified, she was “sobbing uncontrollably. She just came and hugged onto me and would not let me go….I have never seen a person so terrified.”

  On March 9, prompted by this inadvertent encounter, Cecilia Washburn filed a temporary restraining order against Jordan Johnson; it forbade him to threaten or harass her and required him to stay at least fifteen hundred feet away from her and her home. Reporter Irina Cates learned about the restraining order on March 15 and posted a story about it on KPAX.com at 1:06 a.m. on March 16, under the headline, “Griz QB Served with Restraining Order After Alleged Sexual Assault.” This was the first public revelation that Jordan Johnson had been accused of rape.

  Although Cecilia Washburn’s name was kept out of the reports that immediately appeared in the news media, the rape was no longer a secret. Therefore, she decided that she might as well go ahead and report her assault to the Missoula police; she did this on the afternoon of March 16. In accordance with the University of Montana Student-Athlete Conduct Code (which Johnson had signed), when the Griz football team commenced its spring practice drills on March 19, Johnson wasn’t allowed to participate.

  Confronted with the news about their brilliant quarterback, Missoulians reacted with shock and incredulity. On the popular Internet forum eGriz.com, a fan posted,

  Last year I took my two three-year old girls to a few of the games, and I was looking forward to trying to make it to all of the games with them this next fall. But now, I am thinking that I will find something else to do with them this next fall. If even a fraction of what has been alleged is actually true, then…the Grizzly program still has a serious problem….It is hard to root for players when you just can’t trust that they are decent people. And I surely don’t want my girls to grow up admiring these boys when there seems to be such a large collection of creeps in their midst.

  And I need to hear outrage from the fans, not a bunch of excuses. This cannot all be the fault of the girls, or Gwen Florio, or anything else other than the football team. There is no way there is this much out there, and not some blame to be had on the part of the football team. And maybe Pflugrad didn’t create, or in any way cause this problem, and likely he never even envisioned it, but if he wants to be the leader of this team he had better figure out a way to solve it.

  Thirteen minutes later, in response, a different Griz fan posted,

  Please don’t come to any more games. This is nothing more than a witch hunt.

  —

  ON MARCH 23, 2012, the restraining order against Jordan Johnson was dismissed in lieu of a civil “no-contact order” negotiated by Cecilia Washburn’s attorney, Josh Van de Wetering,* and Johnson’s attorney, David Paoli. It placed the same restrictions on Johnson a
s the restraining order—he was still required to stay fifteen hundred feet away from Washburn—but because the no-contact order was a civil procedure rather than a criminal procedure, Coach Pflugrad and the UM athletic department allowed Johnson to practice with the football team, relying on a very lenient interpretation of the Student-Athlete Conduct Code. Pflugrad told Missoulian reporter Fritz Neighbor that he was glad Jordan Johnson was back at practice. “I think any time you have a person of Jordy’s character and tremendous moral fiber, and he’s your team captain and part of the leadership council,” Pflugrad said, “your players are going to be fired up.”

  Josh Van de Wetering thought Pflugrad’s effusive endorsement of Jordan Johnson in the Missoulian was highly inappropriate under the circumstances and that Johnson should not have been allowed to return to the team. In a letter to a UM administrator, Van de Wetering complained that “the Athletic Department’s decision to reinstate Mr. Johnson is based at least in part on your misunderstanding of the legal process against Mr. Johnson.”

  On March 29, a day after Van de Wetering’s letter was received, University of Montana president Royce Engstrom fired both Robin Pflugrad (who had recently been named the Big Sky Conference Coach of the Year) and UM athletic director Jim O’Day. Although Engstrom didn’t state a reason for dismissing the two men, Coach Pflugrad had come under criticism for his handling of the alleged gang rape of Kelsey Belnap by four Griz football players in December 2010. In February 2011, Pflugrad had learned that these players had been accused of raping Belnap and were being investigated by the Missoula police, but he had neglected to share the information with O’Day, Dean Couture, or any other UM administrators. As a consequence, nobody from the university contacted Kelsey Belnap, and the university failed to initiate a timely investigation of what appeared to be a serious crime.