Missoula (16 page)

In early December 2011, after a Griz play-off victory, Jordan Johnson went to a party, got buzzed, and texted Cecilia Washburn to ask for a ride home so he wouldn’t have to drive drunk. When Washburn picked up Johnson and drove him to his house, he invited
her inside for a quick tour of the residence, but they didn’t even kiss. More than a year later, during Johnson’s trial, his attorney asked him why he’d called Washburn that evening, instead of one of his other friends. “I don’t know,” he replied. “I just did.”

“Did you kind of like her?” the lawyer asked.

“Not necessarily,” Johnson answered. He explained that he was more interested in Kelli Froland, the woman he’d been pursuing since early 2011. “We weren’t boyfriend and girlfriend,” he said, describing his relationship with Froland, “but we liked each other.”

“Did you like her a lot?” the attorney inquired.

“Yes,” said Johnson.

In late December 2011, Cecilia Washburn left town to spend the university’s six-week winter break with her family, and Jordan Johnson went to Oregon to visit his family. They texted each other often during this period. During the first weekend of February 2012, by which time both of them were back in Missoula, they bumped into each other at an annual campus bacchanal known as the Foresters’ Ball, held on consecutive nights every winter.

It was Friday night, February 3, 2012, the first night of the ball. Approximately fifteen hundred young men and women were in attendance. Although no alcohol was served at the event, most of the students had gotten sozzled before they arrived, including both Washburn and Johnson. Cecilia Washburn had come to the ball with ten or twelve people; Jordan Johnson had come with his two closest friends, who also happened to be housemates and football teammates of his: Bo Tully and Alex Bienemann. Early in the evening, Washburn was dancing with an acquaintance when she saw Johnson walk by. “So I went up to him,” she testified, “gave him a big hug, asked how he was doing.” Johnson testified that he was happy to see her. Washburn slid her hand along the small of Johnson’s back, leaned into him, and drunkenly declared (according to Johnson and Bienemann), “Jordy, I would do you anytime.” The consequences of this nonchalant, alcohol-soaked proposition, as it turned out, were much, much greater than anyone could have imagined.

When the soiree came to an end, Johnson went home with Tully and Bienemann and crawled into his bed alone. Washburn invited some of her friends to come over to her rented house, where they
socialized until 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning, and then she went to bed alone, as well.

Despite staying up so late, Washburn roused herself at 7:30 the next morning to go to work at Missoula’s Ronald McDonald House, a facility that provides support for gravely ill children and their families. She volunteered there every Saturday from 8:00 a.m. until 10:00 a.m., on Sunday mornings from 7:00 until 9:00, and all night every Monday. After her shift that Saturday morning, she went home, made pancakes for her two male housemates, and hung out with a visitor from Great Falls.

Around 2:00 that afternoon, Washburn received a text from Johnson. “Hey you!” he wrote, initiating an exchange in which he inquired what her plans were for the evening. In the flurry of messages that followed, they arranged to watch a movie together at Washburn’s house. Johnson texted her again at 10:29 p.m., and then at 10:40, to ask if she would drive over to his house and give him a ride back to her place to watch the movie, because he’d been drinking and didn’t think it was prudent for him to drive. Washburn didn’t reply, however, because she’d fallen asleep.

Growing anxious, around 10:45 Johnson phoned Washburn. Awakened, finally, by the ringtone on her phone, she answered and said she’d come right over.

When Cecilia Washburn left her house to pick up Jordan Johnson, she had not showered for more than twenty-four hours, had not brushed her hair, had not bothered to put on clean clothes or any makeup—she had done none of the things, in short, that one might expect a young woman to do if she was hoping to have sex for the first time with a man she was pursuing. As Washburn later testified, although she was definitely attracted to Johnson, and hoped to have sex with him at some point in the future, she never had any intention of having sex with him that night. She just wanted to watch a movie, maybe snuggle a little if the opportunity presented itself, and explore the possibility of rekindling some sort of relationship with him. Washburn had consumed no alcohol whatsoever since the previous night.

Jordan Johnson shared a rented house with five other football players. According to his testimony, between the hours of 5:00 and
10:00 p.m., he was drinking beer and hanging out with Alex Bienemann, Bo Tully, and some other Griz teammates. During this period, he testified, he “probably” drank no more than four or five beers, but in a statement to the Missoula police, Bienemann’s recollection was that Johnson drank three or four beers in the forty-five minutes before he departed for Washburn’s house, in addition to whatever he’d imbibed over the preceding four hours. As Johnson walked out the door, Bienemann urged him to “get ’er done, buddy!”

Johnson testified that he thought Cecilia Washburn was “really nice, a smart girl….I liked her as a person.” But, he added, “I didn’t like her as, like, a girlfriend type.” Nevertheless, when Washburn arrived outside Johnson’s house and he got into her car, he later said, he thought “it was a possibility” that they would have sex that night.

As they entered Washburn’s house, she introduced Johnson to one of her housemates, a close friend named Stephen Green, who was playing a video game in the living room, then led Johnson into her room to watch the movie. Washburn had previously made a commitment to pick up a friend, Brian O’Day, sometime after midnight to give him a ride home from the second night of the Foresters’ Ball; because it was already nearly 11:00, she wanted to get the movie started so they could watch as much of it as possible before O’Day called for his ride, at which point Johnson would have to go home.

The room was small. Washburn’s bed monopolized most of the floor space. Johnson took off his shoes and his watch and reclined on the bed. Washburn removed her boots, slid a DVD of a film called
Easy A
(a comedy inspired by
The Scarlet Letter
) into her television, and then lay next to him to watch the movie. After a few minutes they began kissing. According to Washburn’s testimony, although she enjoyed it, she told Johnson, “Let’s just watch the movie,” and they stopped kissing but continued to embrace. He was on his back; she was lying on her left side with her right arm across his chest and her head on his shoulder.

A couple of minutes later, Johnson turned to her and they started making out again. “I thought, ‘Okay,’ ” Washburn recalled. “It seemed fine. And so it got a little heated.” He tried to pull Washburn’s shirt up. When she pulled it back down, he persisted in pulling it over her head, and she let him remove it. Then Washburn took off Johnson’s
shirt. She rolled on top of him and they started grinding their hips against each other. She kissed and nibbled his ear, and he kissed her neck. All of which, she testified, was consensual. But then Johnson grabbed her arm and started “getting really excited,” which began to alarm her, because she didn’t want to do anything more than make out. She told him, “Let’s just take a break….Let’s just watch the movie.” Washburn rolled off Johnson and resumed lying on her side with her head on his shoulder.

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.