How Did This Climber Get Away with So Much for So Long?

When Bonnie Hedlund first started dating Charlie Barrett in 2005, every day was Valentine’s Day.

She would come home from work to find her driveway sprinkled with rose petals, placed there by Barrett, an exceptionally talented rock climber and boulderer based in Northern California. Love notes were hung from trees with messages like “Keep going beautiful girl.” He put more notes inside Hedlund’s cabin, which sat on forested land near the Truckee River. When the weather was right, Barrett sometimes set up a romantic space on the porch, with a table and chairs, candles, dinner for two, and a mattress. He made CD mixes and wrote poems on beautiful stationery.

Barrett, then 21, was 12 years younger than Hedlund. When she was introduced to him by a mutual friend, she never thought of dating as an option because of their age difference. But then he started randomly showing up at her cabin, making his interest clear. He was attractive—tall and dark, with broad shoulders and a big smile—and attentive in a way she’d never experienced. Better still, some of their best times together happened in her favorite place: the outdoors.

“The climbing was phenomenal,” she says. “We would do amazing climbs nearly every day.”

Like Barrett, Hedlund was an accomplished sport climber and boulderer, and she had been ticking off difficult routes on the east side of the Sierra Nevada since the late 1980s, before the region became widely known as a bouldering destination. The couple, along with their core group of Tahoe-area friends, did routes together constantly. As the relationship grew stronger, Barrett moved in with Hedlund and her dog, a rescued wolf hybrid.

“It was some of the best times of my life,” Hedlund says. “Until it wasn’t.”

In January 2006, Hedlund says, she and Barrett went snowboarding and then had dinner at a friend’s house. When they got back to the cabin, Barrett began acting strangely. Holding his head in his hands, he bent over the kitchen counter and stood motionless. Hedlund thought that he was about to pass out; she asked if he wanted to sit. They’d never had a fight or even a serious argument, but she started to feel scared.

“When he stood up and looked at me, it was like he was a different person,” she says. “His eyes were glazed over and he started walking toward me, chanting gibberish.”

According to Hedlund, Barrett said over and over: “You are the prosecution and I am the defense.” He backed her into a corner. Then, so suddenly that she had no time to defend herself, he hit the side of her head with his fist, knocking her out. Barrett was six feet tall and weighed 165 pounds. Hedlund was five-two and 112.

After about a minute, she came to and saw that the cabin’s front door was open. Barrett had left, and he’d taken her dog.

Hedlund ran outside looking for Barrett, who had moved about 75 feet from the cabin and was standing in the middle of a busy state highway that ran past her property, holding the dog by its collar. Cars were honking and swerving while Barrett shouted at Hedlund that he’d been struggling to keep himself from hurting her. Now that he’d failed, he intended to kill himself.

“I don’t care what you do, just give me my dog back!” she yelled.

Barrett let go, the dog bolted, and Hedlund ran into the woods to retrieve him as Barrett headed toward his truck. She stayed there, hunkered down, until she saw that he’d driven away.

“I don’t know why I didn’t call the cops,” she says. “I had just never experienced anything like that before.”

In the weeks after the attack, Hedlund, along with her closest friends, took a path that domestic-violence experts say is a common response to a first encounter with an abuser: they gave Barrett the benefit of the doubt and showed him compassion.

During the previous months, Barrett had made vague references to what he had called “false accusations” and “legal troubles” in Yosemite National Park. After assaulting her, Hedlund says, Barrett told her that the possibility of doing time had been weighing on him, and it had caused him to “snap” that night.

Barrett was referring to a serious episode: In September 2004, he was arrested by Yosemite law-enforcement rangers and charged with a misdemeanor DUI in Mariposa County. According to a federal report, Barrett retaliated against one of the rangers a few days after the incident by slashing the tires on his car. He also made verbal threats against the rangers immediately following the arrest, on the way to a holding station. These actions led to a federal indictment in January 2005 charging Barrett with five felony counts, including witness retaliation and intimidating and interfering with federal officers.

Hedlund was unsure about what to do after the assault. She didn’t let Barrett move back in, but she and her friends tried to be supportive as he spent much of 2006 navigating the legal system. During this time, Hedlund says, he worked hard to win her back and apologized repeatedly for hurting her.

In December 2006, Barrett accepted a plea deal from the U.S. attorney in Fresno, which seemed generous given the severity of the alleged offenses: all of the felony counts would be dismissed if he pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor vandalism charge. He could have spent years in prison; instead he got six months and was banned from Yosemite for three years. There was no mention of the DUI in the deal. It may have been dismissed as well.

After sentencing, Barrett served time at the now shuttered Taft Correctional Institution in Kern County. While there he wrote to Hedlund frequently, complaining about prison life and seeking reconciliation. Some of these letters, which Hedlund showed me, are troubling. Barrett told her that he longed to see her and make love, but he also wanted something else. “I’d like to be more rough, too,” he wrote. “That’s the truth.”

Nearly 15 years later, federal investigators conducting interviews related to Barrett’s alleged assault of another female climber spoke to a woman—not the subject of the case—who had dated Barrett. “He told her she had to prove her love for him by agreeing to ‘rough sex,’” the report says. The woman, unnamed in the document, added: “He liked tying me up and blindfolding me. Choking me, sometimes really hard.”

Records show that during a 14-year period starting in 2008, at least nine criminal protective orders or restraining orders were obtained against Barrett by four women who all said they feared for their lives.

Barrett was released in August 2007, and Hedlund maintained a guarded relationship with him. The situation was awkward, because he was part of the same climbing community that served as her support network. He told friends that he was trying to get his mental health challenges and drinking under control. But during that same period, he began sending Hedlund what she calls “manipulative” messages.

“He would email me and beg me to see him and say he was going to kill himself,” she told me. “So I would agree to meet him in a public place. I was always terrified, but I thought if I placated him then he wouldn’t go crazy and try to hurt me.”

In October 2008, Barrett harmed her again. In an attack that I’ll describe in more detail below, he showed up unexpectedly at a popular California climbing area and beat Hedlund to the point of unconsciousness, with witnesses nearby. She reported the incident to law enforcement, who arrested Barrett six days later. He was convicted of felony domestic violence and sentenced to 180 days in Inyo County Jail. Hedlund hoped she would never hear from him again.

But in the years after his release, Hedlund says, Barrett continued to harass her. And as I discovered over the course of a year spent researching his background and court records, he was accused of sexually assaulting four other female climbers between 2010 and 2017. Federal investigators told me that there could be many more victims who’ve stayed silent. Records also show that during a 14-year period starting in 2008, at least nine criminal protective orders or restraining orders were obtained against Barrett by four women who all said they feared for their lives.

During this time, Barrett was a celebrated member of the Northern California climbing community, praised on social media for his many first ascents and for a popular series of guidebooks he wrote on bouldering in the eastern Sierra and Yosemite.

“Charlie is a very strong, naturally talented climber,” Alex Honnold said in a 2019 article in Tahoe Quarterly, a magazine that covers the Lake Tahoe region. “A friend of Honnold’s and a strong climber in his own right,” the piece said, “Barrett is primarily known for pioneering some of the hardest bouldering routes in California.” Barrett was also the subject of a glowing profile in the July 2016 issue of Climbing.

That kind of coverage ended in August 2022, when Barrett was arrested by federal authorities and charged with sexually assaulting a 19-year-old woman during a 2016 climbing trip in Yosemite. The indictment charges Barrett with three felony counts, including two counts of aggravated sexual abuse.

Barrett has been in federal detention ever since; his trial is scheduled to start February 5 at the federal district court in Sacramento. If convicted on all three counts, he faces a maximum penalty of life in prison. While the trial will focus primarily on the Yosemite charges, testimony could also shine a light on a longer and broader history of abuse.

When Hedlund learned of the Yosemite arrest, she was shocked and sickened. To protect herself over the past 15 years, she cut herself off from social media and stopped climbing to avoid bumping into Barrett. She had no idea that he might be doing to other women what he’d done to her.

“I couldn’t believe it,” she says. “How did this keep happening?”

I’m not a climber, and I had never heard of Barrett at the time of his arrest. My introduction to this story arrived a month later, in September 2022, when an editor at Outside called and asked if I’d be willing to take a deeper look. As the editor pointed out, we had no idea yet if Barrett was guilty or innocent, but he’d heard about other women who may have been assaulted or violently threatened by him. Did I want to make some calls?

I immediately said yes. I grew up in a home where my father—a caring physician and active church member—abused his family and often flew into violent rages, with me frequently on the receiving end. A large part of my healing from that traumatic childhood has involved advocating for domestic-violence survivors and pushing back against a culture that too often seeks to minimize victims’ experiences.

After I started reporting, I quickly learned that Barrett had a way of scaring people. And as I gathered from a variety of sources—federal court documents, city and county police reports, social media posts, climbing websites, and interviews with his friends, acquaintances, and former girlfriends—Barrett has been accused of tactics that include death threats, physical and online stalking, threats of lawsuits, breaking into residences, anonymous calls from burner phones, trolling on Instagram, spreading lies to get people fired from their jobs, and impersonating a police officer. (My attempts to reach Barrett for an interview were unsuccessful, and the lawyers currently representing him didn’t respond to interview requests. In all the cases discussed in this story, Barrett has been represented by public defenders.)

Even after Barrett was jailed and denied bail, some of his alleged victims and other acquaintances were reluctant to talk. “What if he gets out?” one woman said. “I know I’m on his hit list.”

Hit list? Was that an exaggeration?

Maybe not. A June 2023 motion from prosecutors in the Yosemite case contains a description of a call Barrett made to a friend on October 17, 2022. “They discussed what action [Barrett] should take against the alleged victims because they reported him,” the records state. “Oh something will happen, that’s for sure … in the courts or not,” Barrett said, according to a transcript of the recorded call. “If I don’t get out of here, I got people that I made contact with because they fucking put me in here with murderers.”

Court records also show how Barrett’s ability to intimidate people made the Yosemite case difficult to follow up on. In an August 2022 affidavit, National Park Service investigator Kristy McGee stated: “I have talked to dozens of witnesses who have expressed fear regarding what Barrett might do to them or who have otherwise confirmed that he is an unstable and often dangerous person.” She called the case the most difficult of her 20-year career.

There was also a segment of the community who wouldn’t talk to investigators, or to me, for a different reason: an apparent desire to close ranks around one of their own. A Park Service law-enforcement officer assigned to the Yosemite case described this group to me as “old-guy climbers.” They were mostly men in their fifties and sixties who were invested in minimizing sexual assaults and harassment while elevating climbing accomplishments. As friends and mentors of Barrett’s, some of them were angry or mystified that he was being investigated at all. Out of more than a dozen professional climbers who had well-publicized relationships with Barrett, only a few agreed to talk.

As it turned out, the first alarms about Barrett came from members of a grassroots initiative called Safe Outside, and the chain of events that occurred before Barrett’s arrest is illuminating.

Safe Outside—a collaboration among data scientist Charlie Lieu, University of Colorado Denver criminology researcher Callie Rennison, and former Alpinist editor Katie Ives—was founded in 2018 in response to the #MeToo movement. Its main goal was to conduct an extensive online survey that could assess sexual assault and harassment in the climbing world, whether it occurred at an urban gym or in the mountains. The initiative was supported by more than 30 major players in the outdoor industry, including the Access Fund, REI, and Outside magazine.

While Barrett’s buddies managed to gloss over his threatening behavior, the Safe Outside survey made that more difficult. A court document describes how a data analyst for the project, who sifted through thousands of responses from climbers around the world, noticed similarities in various descriptions of incidents said to have occurred in Northern California. It appeared to the analyst that a serial assaulter might be on the loose. Safe Outside facilitated connections among the victims, who confirmed that it was Barrett who had assaulted them. Soon law enforcement got involved and began following a trail of clues that eventually led to Barrett’s arrest.

When the Department of Justice announced Barrett’s August 2022 arrest, Safe Outside posted a notice on its Facebook page, along with a Justice Department press release requesting additional leads. The group celebrated this development in a post on August 30, 2022. “Four years after we launched the Safe Outside survey,” it said, “the first arrest resulting directly from our work FINALLY happened. #believewomen #thereishopeforjustice.”

Charles Barrett, a native of Santa Rosa, California, began climbing when he was a teenager. His father, Ron Barrett, recalls that he bought his son a membership at Vertex, a local climbing gym, when he was 14, and that Charles quickly became obsessed. Climbing wasn’t the only sport he excelled in. “He was a great golfer,” Ron says. “He was also good at baseball and basketball. The kid is a natural athlete.” Charles’s parents divorced when he was 14. Ron lived nearby in Santa Rosa, while Charles, along with his brother and sister, continued to live with their mother.

Chris Summit, a longtime California climber who also lives in Santa Rosa, says he met Barrett around 2000. At the time, Summit and his buddies were at Vertex, sitting in Summit’s car in the parking lot smoking a joint.

“All of a sudden,” Summit recalls with a laugh, “Charlie is knocking on the window asking if he can smoke with us. I said no, you’re just a kid. But Charlie said he smoked all the time, and he convinced us to let him in the car.”

According to Summit, Barrett was around 16 at the time and had recently dropped out of high school. He was spending his days at the climbing gym. Summit, who was ten years older, was impressed. “He could just glide up the wall without any prior experience or training,” recalls Summit, who’s now a climbing instructor and guidebook author.

Summit and his friends brought Barrett into their group and introduced him to popular climbing areas throughout Northern California. This was a lifeline for Barrett, because he’d been getting into fights at the high school he attended—a place, according to Summit, that was full of “gang bangers.” After divorcing Barrett’s father, Barrett’s mother struggled to raise him and his two siblings on what Summit calls “the poor side of town.” (Barrett’s mother declined to be interviewed for this story.)

“The best thing Charlie could have done during that time was to get stoned and go rock climbing with us,” Summit says. “He became one of my best friends.”

Richie Esquibel, who was part of this circle, remembers that while Barrett showed great promise as a climber, he also seemed to have mental health challenges and was getting treatment. According to Esquibel, when Barrett first showed up at Vertex, he’d recently been released from a residential psychiatric facility for adolescents in San Francisco. Esquibel recalls Barrett saying that he had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and clinical depression.

“He was in denial about the severity of his mental health issues,” Esquibel says. “He also said the medication made him feel too loopy.” Instead, Esquibel says, Barrett “self-medicated” with “a ton of alcohol”—and with his newfound passion for climbing.

Once Barrett got into the sport, his singular focus became tackling routes on real rock instead of at the gym. He landed jobs in Yosemite—cleaning cabins in Curry Village, flipping burgers at Tuolumne Grill—so he could spend as much time as possible climbing on its legendary granite. He was living the dirtbag dream.

“We were all in our early twenties, drinking a lot and smoking weed,” says James Lucas, a climber and guidebook author who got to know Barrett when they worked together in Yosemite. “Charlie was super outgoing, with a charismatic personality. He was very flirtatious with women, but he was also a little mean.”

“When he stood up and looked at me, it was like he was a different person,” Bonnie Hedlund says of Barrett. “His eyes were glazed over and he started walking toward me, chanting gibberish.”

When Barrett got in trouble at Yosemite in 2004, Lucas says, it didn’t occur to him that the behavior signaled deeper problems. Wild and over the top? Sure. But the episode fit with the rebel image that was part of Yosemite climbing culture, and Barrett had his own version of events. He said that the rangers—with whom climbers had a long, tense relationship—were conspiring to accuse him of something he didn’t do. Many of his climbing buddies found the explanation easy to accept. “Charlie is the kind of guy where you just really want to believe him,” Lucas says.

As the federal felony charges moved through the justice system in 2005, Barrett migrated to the Tahoe area, where he began dating Hedlund and focusing on eastern Sierra climbing, especially at a place called the Buttermilks. Located in the foothills near Bishop, the region is littered with large quartz monzonite boulders that were deposited by an ancient glacier and reach up to 50 feet high. As the popularity of bouldering exploded in the 2000s, the Buttermilks became a mecca, and Barrett was one of its rising stars.

Climber Jake Dayley—who moved to Tahoe in 2006 and immediately developed a close friendship with Barrett and Hedlund—remembers how impressive Barrett was.

“Charlie polished off all the hardest climbs that existed in the Tahoe area, so he started establishing new routes and boulder problems with higher degrees of difficulty,” Dayley says, noting that Barrett’s exploits caught the attention of famous climbers who’d never been drawn to the region before.

While Dayley admired Barrett’s drive, he was wary of what he calls his “dark side.” Sometimes while climbing, Barrett would inexplicably break off from the rest of the group and isolate himself. “I had no idea what was going on,” Dayley says. “It was something traumatic in his mind that made him very internally preoccupied. He would rejoin us later and seem fine.”

A little over two and a half years after the first assault against Hedlund, that dark side led to violence once again.

In October 2008, Hedlund had driven with her dog to do some bouldering in the Buttermilks. According to a police report, she was camping in her truck and one evening joined a group of climbers from Alabama who’d gathered around a campfire. It was a beautiful night—at least until Barrett showed up, accompanied by a climber named Lonnie Kauk.

Kauk, the son of Yosemite legend Ron Kauk, was a trad climber who wanted to branch out into bouldering. He had recently met Barrett and was looking forward to learning some moves. “He was a talented climber, and he had the beta on the Buttermilks,” Kauk says. “It was a great day. He gave me a tour. But I was also a little concerned about how Charlie would smash down a six-pack in less than 30 minutes.”

Kauk and Barrett joined the group at the campfire. Hedlund tried to stay relaxed. Before long, Barrett started taunting her dog—the same wolf hybrid he’d dragged to the middle of a highway a few years earlier. He squeezed its snout and revealed its fangs, jokingly saying, “Don’t do this to a wolf.” The dog growled.

Hedlund repeatedly asked Barrett to stop, but he kept at it until the dog snapped at him, biting his pinkie finger. Barrett then started beating the dog, according to a witness statement given the next day to police. The group went quiet.

Hedlund says she grabbed her dog and walked toward her truck, planning to “get the hell out of there.” Barrett turned on his headlamp and followed. Kauk remembers feeling confused. “I thought they were just working it out,” he says. “He was down by her truck, and I guess she was trying to load up her dog. But all of a sudden we heard this thud.”

Kauk got up from his spot at the campfire to investigate. He saw that Hedlund was lying on the ground and that Barrett was punching her head repeatedly. Kauk rushed toward Hedlund as Barrett made his way back to the campfire. “Shit just got real,” Barrett said, according to the police report. “I hit Bonnie.” Kauk helped Hedlund, who was regaining consciousness; blood was coming out of her nose and left ear.

Barrett left the camping area that night, while Hedlund stayed and slept in her truck, assured by Kauk and others that they’d keep her safe. Members of the group drove to Bishop the next morning to give their statements to police.

After disappearing for nearly a week, and contacting friends to say that he planned to commit suicide, Barrett was arrested by Inyo County sheriff’s deputies. According to the police report, Barrett told the officer that he “hit” Hedlund at the campground. When asked if this had happened before, he acknowledged striking her in 2006 at Hedlund’s cabin. Barrett pleaded no contest to one count of battery on a cohabitant with traumatic injury—more commonly known as felony domestic violence—a crime that in California carries a maximum penalty of two to four years.

Kauk would later tell federal investigators that Barrett asked him to appear in court and lie to a judge about what happened. In Barrett’s version of events, he was trying to protect himself from the dog and somehow hit Hedlund during the fray. But Kauk refused to go along.

“Dude, you crossed the line and now you are going to jail,” Kauk told Barrett. “Just suck it up and deal with it.” Kauk’s refusal had consequences—Barrett harassed him on and off for more than a decade.

In January 2009, Barrett was offered another plea deal, and he was sentenced to six months in jail and five years probation by an Inyo County district judge. The deal stipulated that if he violated the probation conditions, which included refraining from alcohol and from contacting Hedlund, he could be sent back to jail for up to a year for each violation.

At least one friend of Barrett’s believed that the deal was a serious mistake. In a letter to the county district attorney written before the sentencing was announced, this friend—whose name is redacted in the transcript—made a request.

“Charlie Barrett is mentally ill,” they wrote, asking that Barrett be placed in a long-term psychiatric facility instead of prison. “Please do not underestimate how dangerous his illness is.… He has the capacity to hurt or kill people. He could have killed Bonnie and if his condition goes untreated he could kill others.”

Nine months after Barrett’s release from prison for the second Hedlund assault, he allegedly attacked another female climber. And he would eventually threaten to kill her.

In March 2010, Stephanie Forté was spending the weekend at the home of some friends, a climbing couple who lived in Bishop, and the recreational agenda was all about bouldering. (Forté is identified by name in Mono County Superior Court transcripts, rather than by an alias or initials.) She would later tell police that the man and woman were friends of Barrett’s, too, and that he was living with them while he “got back on his feet” after his release from jail. At the time, Forté ran her own public relations agency in Las Vegas. She was an accomplished rock climber who routinely tackled difficult 5.13-plus routes.

According to Forté’s description of her encounter with Barrett, which she later shared with police, the woman she was staying with informed her when she arrived that Barrett had been convicted of domestic violence. This worried Forté, but the friend said she shouldn’t be concerned, because the charges had been “totally rigged.” (The woman did not respond to requests for an interview.)

Forté was briefly introduced to Barrett on the second evening of her stay, after Forté and her friend returned from a day of climbing, followed by dinner. The group engaged in small talk, and then Forté retired to the study, where she would be sleeping that night. Several hours later, she woke to find a man on top of her, with an erection pressed against her backside. Forté would later tell police that the man was kissing her neck, squeezing her breasts, and rubbing her genital area. The room was pitch-black, but Forté recognized the voice.

“You know you want it,” Barrett kept whispering, according to the police report. Forté, who was just over five feet tall and weighed barely 100 pounds, struggled to push him away.

Perhaps wary of waking the couple, Barrett backed off, called Forté a “cunt,” and retreated to another room. He then left before sunrise. Forté remained awake, frozen on the bed, for the rest of the night, too terrified to move. Cutting the weekend short, she left the couple’s house at dawn and went home.

In the coming days, Forté told several people—including the friend who’d hosted her in Bishop—about what had happened. According to her account to police, the friend encouraged her to brush off the assault and consider it flattering that a guy 14 years younger was attracted to her. She would later regret that she waited until 2021 to speak with police about the 2010 assault; she naively assumed that she could bury the memory of what had taken place.

Meanwhile, Barrett continued to gain renown in the climbing world. The list of first ascents and sends of difficult bouldering problems, most of them chronicled on the popular website 8a.nu, was growing. As he completed his five-year probation for assaulting Hedlund, Barrett lived out of his truck and was a constant presence in places like the Buttermilks, climbing full-time and working odd jobs.

Lonnie Kauk saw that Hedlund was lying on the ground and that Barrett was punching her head repeatedly. He rushed toward Hedlund as Barrett made his way back to the campfire. “Shit just got real,” Barrett said, according to a police report. “I hit Bonnie.”

Back in the early 2000s, bouldering had become popular enough—supported by gear companies and tourism—that climbers like Barrett could make a living at it. After his June 2009 release from jail, he began riding a wave he’d helped create. Over the next five years, he self-published three popular guidebooks and received gear support from Asana, which sells crash-pads and other climbing accessories. Blogs and social media further fueled the sport’s popularity. It seemed that as long as Barrett maintained his reputation as a groundbreaking climber, the community would cheer him on.

“It’s good to finally hear that Charlie Barrett has defeated his nemesis The Spectre” wrote climber and guidebook author Wills Young on the Bishop Bouldering Blog in December 2009. “He’d had the early moves of the problem and the moves around the lip on lock-down last season and yet would spin off every time he tried to hold the swing after the long move left in the middle of the crux.”

Young, who declined to be interviewed, either didn’t know or failed to mention that the likely reason Barrett had been delayed in completing the problem was that he was in jail for assaulting another climber.

A judge had granted Hedlund a protective order in October 2008, stating that Barrett was to remain at least 100 yards from her at all times. (After Barrett was released from jail in June 2009, this order remained in effect until 2012. The judge also issued a protective order for her dog.) Hedlund, hoping to recover from the trauma of the attack in the Buttermilks, was determined to get back to climbing in the eastern Sierra, her “happy place.” But the possibility of running into Barrett and his friends was always a concern. Climbing areas throughout California had become danger zones for her.

“When I would go climbing, I would be so afraid of running into him,” Hedlund says. “But it also made me angry. I didn’t do anything wrong. Why did I have to avoid the outdoor places I loved?”

One day in November 2008, after Barrett had been charged with domestic violence, but before he was sent to jail, Hedlund decided to follow the advice of a court-appointed victim’s advocate and her friends. She walked up to Barrett at the Buttermilks and told him he needed to leave. He was violating the protective order.

“He looked at me and laughed,” she says. “And his friends just stood there. That was when I realized they all believed the lies about me that Charlie had told them. It was devastating.”

Hedlund’s longtime friend Jake Dayley points out that she suffered two traumas during this period: the assault by Barrett, and alienation from the climbing community. Close friends like Dayley stuck by her, but many others distanced themselves. Barrett had convinced them that he was the real victim.

“She was shunned and accused of blowing things out of proportion,” Dayley says. “There were people who idolized Charlie, and he was their connection to greatness. Being around him made them feel cool. They didn’t want to lose that.”

To protect herself and minimize near debilitating trauma symptoms, Hedlund stopped climbing. She fortified her house with locks and motion-sensing lights. She kept Mace in her home, in her car, and on her person at all times. She slept with a baseball bat under her bed and checked behind the shower curtain every time she entered her cabin. “I would be awake all night, sitting on my counter and shaking, waiting for something to happen,” she says.

In February 2014, Barrett was arrested in Mono County for public intoxication, a misdemeanor that in California can result in up to six months in jail. (I was unable to locate records that indicate what became of this charge.) Hedlund says that in the weeks just before and after this arrest, Barrett called her home phone in the middle of the night, breathing heavily. She could tell that it was Barrett because his number appeared on her caller ID. The drinking and phone calls were both probation violations; according to the plea deal Barrett signed in 2009, they could have landed him back in jail for up to two years.

This was the second time he’d violated probation. In July 2010, court records show, Barrett failed a urine test for alcohol consumption. He was ordered by Inyo County officials to attend a 12-week substance-abuse program but wasn’t given additional jail time. According to the probation officer’s report, the program provider called Barrett “a mid-stage alcoholic” who had “a history of alcohol abuse with sporadic binge episodes.” The provider’s recommendation for Barrett: “Don’t drink no matter what.”

After the 2014 violations, Hedlund wrote to the Mono County district attorney’s office and asked that the penalties for probation violations be enforced. But a Mono County assistant DA named David Anderson informed Hedlund that the county would not be taking steps to jail Barrett, even though the 2009 plea deal stipulated that he could be incarcerated for up to a year for each violation. Anderson also pointed out that Barrett’s probation could not be extended. He was just a few weeks away from completing the maximum five-year probation period and was not legally eligible for additional time.

“We would normally give some jail time and put him back on probation,” Anderson wrote. “The only option is to sentence him to prison on his domestic violence case against you and the judge has already said he will not do that.” Instead, Barrett was required to attend another 12-week substance-abuse program, and Hedlund was issued a new criminal protective order, which was cold comfort. (Anderson did not respond to an interview request.)

According to Valarie Hannemann, a psychologist from Flagstaff, Arizona, who I asked to review court documents from Barrett’s case, Hedlund’s fears were warranted. Hannemann was the clinical director of crisis counseling for the nonprofit Victim Witness Services from 2018 to 2023, and she has counseled domestic-violence victims for more than 35 years. Hannemann considered Barrett to be “very dangerous.” While she was careful not to diagnose him from afar, she said that he fit the mold of a certain kind of male abuser, one who often doesn’t respond to anger-management classes or substance-abuse programs and sometimes ignores protective orders.

“They have very strong narcissistic characteristics and are not capable of normal relationships,” she says. “They groom their victims with love bombs and then take them as hostages. And if you cross them, they will find you and hurt you. They think the rules of society don’t apply to them.”

Statistics show that the threat is real. According to the Justice Department, of the nearly 5,000 women who were murdered in the U.S. in 2021, 34 percent were killed by an intimate partner. The rate of partner homicide for women is five times higher than for men.

Even so, it seemed that Hedlund’s attempts to get law enforcement and the climbing community to take her fears seriously were no match for the social capital Barrett had accrued.

“I’m excited to see my friend Charlie Barrett is close to releasing a new guidebook for Tuolumne!” a climber named Kevin Jorgeson wrote on Facebook in October 2014. “Check it out and pre-order your copy!” Like Barrett, Jorgeson grew up in Santa Rosa and climbed at Vertex. They were born in the same year and worked together at the gym as route setters.

Several months after Jorgeson hailed Barrett’s guidebook, he and Tommy Caldwell completed the first free climb of El Capitan’s Dawn Wall in Yosemite. Their feat would be chronicled in the critically acclaimed documentary The Dawn Wall, turning Jorgeson into a crossover star. He did not respond to repeated requests to discuss his past with Barrett.

James Lucas was a friend of Barrett’s who says he didn’t know the real story of the assault on Hedlund. In an interview, he told me that he’d heard Barrett was attacked by her dog and was protecting himself.

In July 2016, Climbing magazine published a profile of Barrett that Lucas reported and wrote. (The story was removed from Climbing’s website in 2018, after the magazine’s editor, Matt Samet, became aware of Barrett’s history of assaults and alleged harassment. Climbing, then owned by Active Interest Media, is now owned by Outside Interactive.) Lucas made passing mention of Barrett’s “legal troubles” and detailed his claim that he suffered debilitating panic attacks. These attacks, Lucas concluded, were the source of Barrett’s problems.

“Charlie did not want me to put anything about his arrests in the story,” Lucas recalled in an interview. “My goal was to just focus on his character as a climber. Looking back, that wasn’t such a good idea. But my thinking then was that he was my friend and I wanted to believe he was a good person.”

Around that time, Barrett met a young woman who court documents identify as “K.G.” and would become the subject of the current sexual-assault case. He’d struck up a conversation with K.G. on Instagram and gave her a few recommendations for hiking in the Tuolumne Meadows area. By then Barrett was no longer banned from Yosemite and was once again working for park concessions at Tuolumne Meadows. He invited K.G. to meet him and his friends on August 13 at Puppy Dome, a popular Tuolumne Meadows bouldering area, when she was done with her solo hike.

While at Puppy Dome, the group asked K.G. to join them later to watch a meteor shower. K.G. agreed, and that evening she trekked with Barrett to an area where she thought they would find the rest of the group. Instead, he led her into an isolated forest. Once there, Barrett pushed K.G. to the ground, put his hands around her neck, and began strangling her. K.G. told investigators that she couldn’t breathe and thought she was going to die.

“She was shunned and accused of blowing things out of proportion,” climber Jake Dayley says of Hedlund. “There were people who idolized Charlie, and he was their connection to greatness. Being around him made them feel cool. They didn’t want to lose that.”

Data on men who assault women show that strangulation is a primary indicator of intent to kill, increasing the victim’s chances of death by more than 750 percent. Prosecution documents cite this as a strong indication of Barrett’s “extremely high capacity for violence, including violence resulting in death.”

According to a March 2023 motion from the prosecution, Barrett then pulled K.G.’s pants down and “violently raped her.” After the incident, Barrett led K.G. to his employee cabin, where she spent the night with Barrett, who slept on top of her. K.G. stayed with him  the next day and evening “out of fear,” according to court documents. He allegedly sexually assaulted her two more times—during a hike and in an employee shower. K.G. later explained to investigators why she didn’t attempt to run away or call for help. If she had, K.G. feared, Barrett would’ve tried to kill her later.

Although K.G. didn’t report the assault to federal authorities until April 2020, she responded to a text from Barrett after their trip and said that she no longer wanted to see him. “I don’t hang out with guys who rape me,” she wrote. This angered Barrett, and over the next several years, according to prosecution filings, he became obsessed with either winning K.G. back or terrifying her into staying silent. “She monitored social media [for things Barrett might post about her], because she was worried Barrett would come after her,” one investigator wrote. Another court document noted: “Barrett harassed and intimidated K.G. by sending her text messages designed to show her he was still aware of her location.”

In October 2019, in part to distance herself from Barrett, K.G. moved to east-central Kentucky’s Red River Gorge, a popular climbing area inside Daniel Boone National Forest. A few days after she arrived, court records say, she got a text from Barrett, who had apparently heard about the move and followed her. “Hey, know we had a weird time and don’t want any awkwardness,” he wrote. “Hope you’re crushing.”

Barrett also apparently interfered with K.G.’s ability to find employment in her new location. The owner of a restaurant where she applied for a waitressing job would later tell federal investigators that Barrett approached him and said that K.G. was “insane and would cause problems for his business,” according to a report. The owner said he “expressed concerns” to law enforcement about Barrett stalking K.G. Investigators would add this to their lengthening list of Barrett’s attempts to frighten and intimidate his victims.

Around this time, Barrett decided that the Yosemite rangers were after him again. An investigator’s report described how Barrett focused on one of the rangers who’d arrested him in 2005, telling “several friends in person and via text over the course of a couple of weeks that he was going to murder” the ranger’s twin nine-year-old daughters. He also talked about taking revenge on Lonnie Kauk, who he believed had betrayed him in the Hedlund case. He started using fake Instagram accounts, with no photos or profile information, as a tool for harassment. According to court documents, federal investigators who seized Barrett’s laptop as evidence for the Yosemite case stated that he’d used this tactic.

“All these fake Instagram accounts were just hating on me,” Kauk says, describing comments he got when he posted photos from climbing and snowboarding trips. Based on how much Barrett had bad-mouthed Kauk to others in the climbing community, Kauk assumed that he was the troll. The comments, attached to photos of first ascents by Kauk, included taunts like “I’m going to kick your ass” and “the Bishop climbing community hates you.”

Kauk is a climbing ambassador for La Sportiva, and he says that Barrett posted negative comments about him on the brand’s social media pages. Barrett would send Kauk texts full of eyeball emojis and call him at all hours from what Barrett would later describe to investigators as burner phones. Kauk told me that when he was interviewed about the assault of K.G. in Yosemite, he learned that some of the other climbers who were interviewed said Barrett had told them he wanted to “kill” Kauk. “I was always looking over my shoulder,” he says.

Meanwhile, Barrett frequently told friends that he was going to kill himself, and he seemed to mean it. One of the most dramatic incidents played out in Yosemite’s Tuolumne Meadows in September 2016, when Barrett sent text messages to a friend telling him that he had two handguns—a .44 and a .45. According to a Park Service report, Barrett said that he was “going to die with her,” though it was unclear who he meant.

The friend called 911. The park’s special response team was dispatched, and negotiators found him in the forest and coaxed him out. He didn’t have any weapons on him. He was taken to Community Regional Medical Center in Fresno, where he was held for psychiatric evaluation, then released a few days later.

By late 2016, Barrett had a new girlfriend, a young woman who court documents identify as “E.B.,” a climber and Pilates teacher based in Sebastopol, just west of Santa Rosa. They dated for a few months, but she broke it off as a result of what, in court documents, an investigator called “increasingly volatile behavior, including attempts to ascertain her movements and prevent her from seeing friends.” After the split, Barrett showed up uninvited at E.B.’s house, demanded to see her, and was allowed inside. He then took her phone away and, according to what she told investigators, “held her down and raped her.” After that, E.B. would no longer let Barrett in her home, and he repeatedly attempted to break in.

A Sebastopol police report describes a break-in attempt that occurred on January 7, 2017, prompting E.B. to call 911. “Dispatch advised me that she could hear over the phone [E.B.] yelling at Barrett to leave her alone,” the responding officer wrote. “Dispatch advised that she believed Barrett was actively attempting to force entry through the back of the residence.”

Police arrested Barrett in front of E.B.’s house. He insisted that he was not Charles Barrett and “was just passing through.” He was charged with three misdemeanor counts, which could have landed him in jail for two years. In yet another deal, the Sonoma County district attorney dismissed two of the charges, and Barrett pleaded no contest to misdemeanor trespassing. He got a 24-month suspended sentence, conditional on him not harassing or contacting E.B.

E.B. obtained an emergency protective order in January 2017, which Barrett promptly violated. Court documents describe how he went to the home of a friend, a well-known climber, and attempted to use his mobile phone to call and harass E.B. The friend later told investigators that he’d refused to let Barrett use the phone, but heard from E.B. the next day that Barrett had somehow called from his number “to threaten her life.”

E.B. would later tell federal investigators that fear of Barrett prompted her not to challenge the plea deal or Barrett’s violation of the protective order. According to court documents: “Barrett threatened that if she continued to pursue the charges against him he would ‘ruin her life’ and do ‘unspeakable things’ to her.”

Mike Wickwire, a climber who grew up in Davis and was a longtime acquaintance of Barrett’s, was in the process of purchasing a home in Las Vegas when he heard from Barrett in mid-2017. Barrett said that he was moving to the city and needed a place to live. He wanted to be closer to a girlfriend there, a nurse, and spend the winter climbing in the Nevada desert. Could Wickwire help him out?

Wickwire says he knew Barrett had a “checkered past” when he agreed that summer to rent him a room, but he decided to trust him. Wickwire let Barrett move in after closing on the house in October. “Charlie seemed like a really nice guy at first,” Wickwire says. “He is really good at fooling people. He fooled me.”

Regarding the 2008 assault on Hedlund, Wickwire told me that he’d heard about it from other climbers who explained it away. “The story that was told to me was that one day at the Buttermilks, Charlie and his girlfriend got in a fight,” he says. “She spit in his face and he backhanded her. That was why he did six months’ jail time. People were saying they both had blame.”

One day in November 2017, not long after Barrett went to Las Vegas, Stephanie Forté was shocked to see him climbing at her gym—and, later, to discover that he was living in her hometown. According to her account in a police report, Forté did not want Barrett invading her safe space or posing a risk to other women. She talked to gym management about Barrett’s criminal history and after repeated requests succeeded in getting him banned from the facility that month.

Alex Honnold’s knowledge of Barrett’s violent behavior primarily consisted of “rumors heard around the campfire,” and those rumors were often dismissed: “People cut him more slack because he is incredibly talented, and he wrote those guidebooks and established really hard climbs.”

Around this time, the nurse Barrett was seeing broke up with him. According to a report filed four years later by a federal investigator working on the Yosemite case, who’d collected information on other victims, “She said she broke up with him … because of abuse directed at her, combined with the way he described past incidents of physical and sexual abuse involving other women. She described their relationship as going from extremes where Barrett was loving and caring and then him immediately changing and becoming physically aggressive and verbally berating her.”

Life also became difficult for Wickwire. On Facebook, Barrett repeatedly posted that he was going to commit suicide, causing distant friends to call 911. The police would show up at Wickwire’s house to do a welfare check, and Barrett would jump the back fence to get away. Wickwire says that he started locking his bedroom door at night, because Barrett would sneak into his room to use his phone for harassment calls.

“He trashed my house,” says Wickwire. “He was probably drinking 30 beers a day. He wasn’t violent. He was just drunk 24/7.”

Wickwire and Barrett agreed that Barrett would move out on December 1, which he did, with the understanding that he would stay away from the place going forward. But in response to being banned, Barrett began making physical threats. Wickwire showed me text messages that said things like “You’re not gonna walk for a while. Stupid fuck” and “Ever taste pavement? I have people who have your address.”

Barrett also threatened the nurse. According to a federal investigator’s report, he gained admission to the hospital ER where she worked by saying that he was suicidal. Then he got out of bed and followed her around, causing staff to worry about her safety. The investigator also described Barrett phoning the nurse and impersonating a police officer “to make her believe he had actually killed himself.”

“She would come home and find Barrett sitting in her backyard,” the report says. “She feared to leave her home because he parked in front of her house, or down the street, and he would follow her if she left.” The nurse obtained a restraining order in June 2018, saying that she was terrified Barrett was going to kill her. In this instance, the police apparently couldn’t locate Barrett, and the order was never served.

Ultimately, most of Barrett’s anger would be aimed at Forté. He took being banned from the climbing gym as a declaration of war, and he embarked on a nearly five-year campaign of retaliation that would turn her life upside down.

In December 2017, while Forté was visiting her family in New Jersey for the holidays, she got a disturbing text message from Bill Ramsey, her friend and next-door neighbor in Las Vegas.

A longtime climber in the area, Ramsey had received a series of text messages from Barrett warning that he was going to “take care of” Forté and then kill himself. According to the police report about this incident, Ramsey had initially tried to support Barrett when he moved to town, but now he was worried about Forté’s safety.

Barrett knew that Ramsey was Forté’s neighbor, and he continued sending cryptic, sometimes ominous messages to Ramsey that later would be filed with the Mono County Superior Court.

“Tell Stephanie she won,” he wrote on December 19, 2017. “I have friends that are going to her house.”

According to court records, Ramsey sought to distance himself from Barrett, who was living out of his truck and traveling between climbing areas in 2018. But the text messages kept coming, even though Ramsey rarely responded. Barrett threatened Forté with violence as well as a defamation suit. Ramsey shared the messages with Forté, who had blocked Barrett on her phone and social media accounts.

“Tell Stephanie she is warned,” Barrett wrote on March 25, 2018. “I’m going to court.”

April 5: “You there? I’m killing myself tonight. Thanks for the good times. Yeah tell Steph she won.”

August 10: “Dude, Stephanie is about to get worked. You can text me if you want. She’s done though.”

Federal investigators would later learn that in 2018 Barrett told a friend, a professional climber, that he planned to kill Forté. The friend said he didn’t take the threat seriously and wrongly assumed that it had something to do with Barrett having a “crush” on Forté “from a long time ago,” according to court documents.

Barrett repeatedly posted on social media that Forté was determined to ruin his life. In September 2018, he removed his Facebook profile photo and replaced it with a picture of Forté climbing. He found other photos of her online and posted them as well. One showed Forté smiling and sitting at the base of a climb. Barrett’s caption read: “I don’t always ruin people’s lives but when I do, I smile.”

Barrett named a new climbing route in Tuolumne Meadows “Fuck You Steph Forté Fuck You.” He promoted the route to his approximately 5,000 Instagram followers, and in October 2019 it was posted on the best_of_8a Instagram account. The Tahoe Quarterly piece came out around that time, and ESPN.com profiled Alex Honnold in September, describing Barrett as Honnold’s friend and climbing partner.

Honnold discussed that period with me at length in the summer of 2023. He mentioned that his friendship with Barrett was sporadic—“I would see Charlie once every few years for like a day or two,” he said—and acknowledged that he had a “blind spot” about him like many people did. Honnold’s knowledge of Barrett’s violent behavior primarily consisted of “rumors heard around the campfire,” he told me, and those rumors were often dismissed: “People cut him more slack because he is incredibly talented, and he wrote those guidebooks and established really hard climbs.”

Honnold said that he’d heard stories about a female professional climber he knew who’d been in a relationship with Barrett and got “punched in the face.”

“I thought: That’s crazy,” Honnold said. “But then I immediately thought: Maybe he was really drunk and they were fighting and that’s how he ended up punching her in the face. And she is a very strong person who holds her own.” (The climber, who Honnold named, did not respond to interview requests.)

Honnold said that he tries to see the best in people and always hoped that Barrett would turn his life around. “[The violence] was a step beyond what I could imagine,” he says. “Which I guess is why I had a blind spot around it. And the depressed-alcoholic thing is an easy way to mask some of the actual violence.”

In late 2019, Forté was twisting in the wind, feeling unsupported by the climbing community and law enforcement. Even though she’d taken no action against Barrett since raising alarms at the climbing gym in 2017, he seemed certain she was out to get him.

When Barrett was climbing in Kentucky in 2019 and 2020—where K.G. had moved—tires on his truck were slashed. He said on Instagram that Forté, who was living in Las Vegas, might have done it. Later, when two different girlfriends broke up with Barrett, he blamed it on Forté. “Harsh reality to wake up to,” read an Instagram post from August 2021. “Steph 2 Charlie 0.”

Barrett occasionally succeeded in sending Forté messages, by using his fake Instagram accounts. These eventually became part of materials retrieved from Barrett’s laptop and phone that prosecutors sought as evidence of how Barrett tried to intimidate people.

On May 14, 2020, using an account called Shuan_5540, he said of Forté: “You are an absolute piece of shit human but I am sure you know that.”

From fro_mtt on September 3, 2021: “You’re going down.”

Barrett told friends that he was trying to get his life back and was working on filing a defamation suit against Forté. He said that women were conspiring against him to capitalize on #MeToo. He often closed his online complaints about Forté and others with the hashtag #MenToo.

By late 2021, Barrett knew that he might be going back to prison soon; federal authorities had opened an investigation into his 2016 assault of K.G. in Yosemite. Kristy McGee, the lead detective, had worked on more than 100 sexual-assault cases for the National Park Service’s Investigative Services Branch and had formally interviewed Barrett in July. For Barrett, this was no scuffle with the county sheriff. Things were getting very serious.

In early 2022, Barrett showed up at the Mammoth Hospital emergency room asking for help. He was admitted January 5 at 2 a.m.; a Mammoth Lakes police report filed two days later, at the request of worried hospital staff, described him as a “suicidal and homicidal patient.” Barrett said that he intended to drive to Las Vegas and kill Forté. He also said that he was being investigated by federal authorities for sexual assault and gave them McGee’s phone number.

Hospital staff called McGee, who contacted Forté the next morning to inform her of the threat. Meanwhile, Mammoth police helped Forté obtain a criminal protective order against Barrett from a judge.

Barrett was held overnight in the ER, where he was evaluated by a staff physician. She would later tell police that Barrett described wanting to kill Forté because Forté had “ruined his life,” but he couldn’t describe how or give her examples. The physician added that Barrett said “he wanted to cut the legs off of everyone that has ruined his life.” She felt “uneasy about being around Barrett,” so she left the room he was in, according to a report. She believed that his threats should be taken seriously.

Barrett was transferred from the ER to a regional mental health facility for 24 hours of evaluation and placed under a mandatory hold to prevent him from leaving on his own. Mammoth police were waiting for Barrett in the parking lot when he was discharged. After an interview at the station, he was arrested on two felony counts: stalking and making criminal threats. While in a holding cell, he tied a shoelace around his neck and then to a doorknob in what he claimed was a suicide attempt. An officer intervened and untied him. Barrett was released on bail on January 8. Court records show that he went back to harassing Forté and other women, using burner phones and fake Instagram accounts.

Over the course of three years, Forté had taken strong steps to protect and isolate herself. In 2018, she stopped climbing and invested in a security system for her Las Vegas home. In 2019, she closed her PR agency, not wanting to maintain a public profile. The 2022 death threat pushed her deeper into hiding. She moved to a high-security gated complex and turned down work that required her to appear in public. Hedlund, too, was still on Barrett’s mind: she got a middle-of-the-night call from him in June 2022, after her protective order had expired. It sent her into a tailspin.

In the summer of 2022, Barrett was offered another deal, this time by a Mono County deputy district attorney named Tobias Hasler. He pleaded no contest to one misdemeanor count of threatening with intent to terrorize. The stalking charge was dismissed.

As I researched Barrett’s legal history, I was struck by how often he’d been offered deals. But several attorneys I consulted—people with years of experience litigating the kinds of charges Barrett faced—weren’t surprised. They said that there’s always pressure in criminal cases to reach a deal instead of going through a costly trial. Being a white male probably helped Barrett, too: prison sentences for black men are typically 20 percent longer than for white men.

On Instagram, Jon Krakauer pushed back at a poster who defended Barrett. “Sexual assault is probably the only crime in which the victim is assumed to be lying,” he wrote. “You should be much more concerned about the victim getting a fair trial, not Barrett.”

Barrett soon returned to his old routine. He texted Bill Ramsey in June, asking Ramsey to take his side while saying something ominous about Forté. “If you want to be part of the stand against women ruining men you’re more than welcome,” he wrote. “I am so damn happy she’s going down.”

On August 29, during a hearing at the Mono County courthouse, Barrett appeared before Judge Mark Magit and was given a deferred judgment for the misdemeanor violation, with no jail time. This in spite of the lengthy investigation report filed by Mammoth Lakes police, which chronicled Barrett’s stalking behavior and death threats aimed at Forté.

Forté was terrified by the prospect of Barrett being free. In a victim’s impact statement she read at the hearing, she talked about how various police officers had advised her to buy a gun to protect herself. “Barrett can snap, and victims end up dead,” one told her.

“Today I am begging the court to help me not to end up as that victim,” she said. “I do not believe the plea deal or telling Mr. Barrett not to drink will bring this to an end.”

After Forté finished, Magit emphasized to Barrett that he was not to contact her under any circumstances. He told Barrett that it was time to straighten up, mentioning his reputation as an accomplished climber.

“You’re … in that subculture of incredibly brave people who free-climb up mountains that most people wouldn’t even think of climbing at all,” he said. “That is strength. That is perseverance. That is mental discipline that few ever reach. But you need to apply that to your personal conduct as well.” With that, Barrett was free.

But not for long. When he walked out of the courtroom, he was immediately arrested by federal authorities. During a September 2, 2022, detention hearing in Fresno, federal judge Barbara McAuliffe denied Barrett’s release on the grounds that he was an ongoing threat to the safety of his victims.

It seems likely, judging by pretrial court filings, that Barrett’s lawyers will attack K.G.’s credibility. Court documents say that she “takes medication to treat a bipolar diagnosis,” and that, at the time of the incident, she maintained a personal website “dedicated to amateur erotic photos.” When she and Barrett met in Yosemite in August 2016, the defense says, she used her phone to show Barrett photos in which she was posing “bound and topless.” In a responding motion, the prosecution pointed out that “there is no logical connection between seeing erotic photos and consent.”

McAuliffe granted a motion from the defense to question K.G. about the photographs during the trial, noting in a ruling from last November: “Defendant argues that seeing these photographs gave him a reasonable impression that K.G. expected to engage in rough sex with him.” McAuliffe also granted a request for Barrett’s attorneys to obtain records from K.G.’s mental health providers.

Motions from the prosecution indicate that its case will focus not just on the Yosemite sexual-assault charges, but on a pattern of predatory behavior revealed by Barrett’s decades-long criminal history with women like Hedlund, Forté, and E.B. This is an approach made possible by a 1996 rule of civil procedure called Rule 413, which allows the court to admit evidence of prior sexual assaults when a defendant is accused of this crime. Finally, it appears, the criminal-justice system is prepared to connect the dots.

News of Barrett’s arrest rippled across social media and climbing websites in September 2022. In threads on MountainProject.com and Instagram, people wrestled with what to make of the news.

Some wondered if it could be true. Charlie seemed like such a nice guy. Why did the victim wait so long to report the assault? Why did she stay with him after he attacked her? Remember, several people cautioned, Charlie is presumed innocent until proven guilty.

That month, author and climber Jon Krakauer weighed in, posting on his Instagram page about Barrett’s arrest and urging other victims to contact police. In a lengthy response thread, many female climbers expressed gratitude.

“Wow, I’m blown away that he’s not able to hide behind the bro code and sweep it under the rug,” a poster called @ambersand wrote of Barrett’s arrest. “Thanks for doing the unpopular thing in standing with women and helping get in front of victim shaming/blaming.”

Krakauer also pushed back against some who seemed to defend Barrett. A poster called @justanotherpaleoguy complained that Krakauer’s words were hurting Barrett’s chances of getting a fair trial. “Best to leave the police work to the police,” he said. “And please bear in mind he might actually be innocent.”

“If Barrett had been arrested for a different crime, I doubt you would be posting this,” Krakauer replied. “Sexual assault is probably the only crime in which the victim is assumed to be lying. You should be much more concerned about the victim getting a fair trial, not Barrett. Rapists almost always escape accountability.”

James Lucas, who broke with Barrett in 2017, can understand why some people, out of misplaced sympathy for his problems, might want to protect him. Lucas believes that these feelings helped keep Barrett in a position to victimize people far longer than should have been possible.

“Charlie had climbing, which gave him a way to grow and focus, and offered him a good life path, but ultimately it wasn’t enough,” he says. “His behavior toward women got more aggressive over the years. It’s a hard subject to talk about because many climbers feel complicit in what happened. If someone is misbehaving in our community, what is our responsibility to intervene?”

For Mike Wickwire, Barrett’s arrest forced a reckoning with a passion that’s been central to his identity. In September 2022, he posted on Facebook about his uncomfortable realization.

“This man has been a parasite in our community for decades and we (myself included) have enabled him,” he wrote. “Charlie is a talented climber and extremely gregarious plus his history of mental health issues made it easy for all of us to make excuses for him. We as a community failed. We failed his victims and allowed him to continue victimizing. I hope that he is finally held accountable and that the women he violated find some closure. Let’s do better.”

Wickwire recalls instances where other climbers lied about their ascents and were quickly banished. “No one would climb with them or believe what they said,” he points out. But when it came to stories about Barrett’s violence against women, people were too willing to look the other way—even after Barrett was arrested and a detailed indictment from a federal investigation was posted online.

“There is a dissonance between how climbers think of themselves and what they actually do,” says Kimbrough Moore, a longtime climber, a guidebook author, and a philosophy professor at San Francisco State University. “In my experience, the climbing community has been hostile to women who have come out saying they were assaulted.”

As for Barrett, Moore says: “I have never heard of anyone doing more to harm the climbing community than Charlie. He has used his status as an elite climber to hurt people for a very long time.”

Moore doesn’t think that the climbing world is any worse than society in general when it comes to sexual assault and harassment. But it’s also no better, he says. Results from the 2018 Safe Outside survey support this view.

Of more than 5,000 climbers who participated—about half of them men and half women—47 percent of women and 16 percent of men said they’d experienced sexual assault or harassment during a climbing activity. These results are similar to various studies of the U.S. workplace, which generally show that some 38 percent of women and 14 percent of men have experienced sexual harassment at work.

“People often climb because it gives them meaning and joy,” Moore says. “It would be helpful for them not to limit their experience to only meaning and joy.” Moore believes that being aware of bad actors in climbing—and life in general—doesn’t detract from the positive aspects of the sport and is critical for creating a safer community.

“You need to have your mind open to the possibility of climbers being hurt by other climbers,” he says. “If you’re not looking around and seeing a messy community, then you’re not seeing the community for what it is.”

“I have never heard of anyone doing more to harm the climbing community than Charlie,” says Kimbrough Moore, a longtime climber and a philosophy professor at San Francisco State University. “He has used his status as an elite climber to hurt people for a very long time.”

After Barrett was arrested in August 2022, Bonnie Hedlund started climbing again for the first time in more than a decade. She has not yet returned to the Buttermilks—a place that remains extremely triggering—but says she’s “working up to it.” And while she no longer sleeps with a baseball bat under her bed, she still checks behind the shower curtain.

A large part of Hedlund’s adult life has been consumed by trauma, but what worries her most is Barrett’s younger, more recent victims—especially if there are some who are reluctant, for whatever reason, to talk about what happened. For those women she has three words: “I believe you.”

If you or someone you know is in crisis, help is available. To reach the National Domestic Violence Hotline, call 1-800-799-7233 or text START to 88788. Call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. For support outside the U.S., visit findahelpline.com.

If you have information related to this case or believe you may be a victim of Charles Barrett, the U.S. Attorney’s Office asks that you submit a tip online, call 888-653-0009, or email nps_isb@nps.gov.

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Editor’s note, March 11, 2024: This story has been updated to reflect additional information about the crimes committed by Charles Barrett against the victim identified as K.G. The account, published on January 31, 2024, by writer Annette McGivney, relied on what Outside and McGivney believed were the most reliable facts available in court documents prior to the first day of the trial, on February 5. McGivney has since learned from other court documents, including a pretrial prosecution brief that became publicly available on January 29, that some of the federal government’s earlier motions had omitted important details about K.G.’s 2016 encounter with Barrett in Yosemite National Park. These details have been corrected in our text. (K.G. and the other witnesses testifying at Barrett’s trial were advised by the prosecution to avoid speaking to the media and were not interviewed for this story.) Additionally, when describing the indictment against Barrett, Outside and McGivney used the term “sexual assault charges.” More precisely, Barrett was accused and found guilty of two counts of aggravated sexual abuse and one count of abusive sexual contact. —Alex Heard, editor in chief, Outside