Not-So-Secret Rape Apologist Runs for Missoula County Attorney
LatestKirsten Pabst is running for County Attorney in Missoula, a town in Montana that was lovingly nicknamed “America’s rape capital” in 2012, after the U.S. Department of Justice launched an official investigation into how Missoula County’s Attorney office, police department and the University of Montana worked together to (mis)handle sexual assault cases. And, though she’s running on a platform of “compassion for victims,” she served as chief deputy to the current county attorney during the office’s compassion-for-victims nadir. She also voluntarily testified on behalf of accused rapists in the past and kept a rather sketchy (now deleted) blog.
As Katie J.M. Baker notes at Buzzfeed, Pabst served as current embattled county attorney Fred Van Valkenburg’s chief deputy from 2006 to 2012, a period in which the DOJ report later found that “women consistently told us that Deputy County Attorneys treated them with indifference or disrespect, and frequently made statements to women victims, advocates, and the public diminishing the seriousness of sexual violence and minimizing the culpability of those who commit it.” According to the report, adult female victims of non-stranger sexual assault were often disrespected and revictimized by the reporting process; furthermore, the County Attorneys Office did not “provide Deputy County Attorneys with the basic knowledge and training about sexual assault necessary to effectively and impartially investigate and prosecute these cases.”
This attitude is well evidenced by Pabst’s old blog posts, which she scrubbed from the Internet but Buzzfeed managed to unearth. In a June 2012 post (one month after the DOJ probe was announced), she denounced the sexual assault crisis as an invention of reporters who just wanted to sell newspapers: