Erika Krouse

Erika Krouse never planned on becoming a private investigator, said Molly Odintz in LitHub.com. Twenty years ago, she was browsing in a bookstore and struck up a conversation with a fellow shopper—a lawyer—who reached for the same book. “After a moment, he stopped, shocked at himself for telling a complete stranger so much,” she says. “When I told him that this happened to me all the time, he hired me on the spot as a PI.” Krouse learned to rely on her knack for interviewing. “Because I wasn’t a cop or a lawyer, people had no real reason to talk to me, and I had no way to demand information from them,” she says. “It was all voluntary, information bought with free beer and nachos.”

Krouse’s “blistering” new memoir Tell Me Everything explains how her gift for getting people to talk led to the biggest case of her career, said Kathryn Eastburn in The Colorado Sun. From 2002 to 2007, Krouse worked on the first Title IX case that directly addressed sexual assault on campus. Interviewing students and employees at the University of Colorado Boulder, where a female student had been raped by college football players and recruits, Krouse found that people she spoke with either “wanted a change, or they wanted to prevent change,” she says. “Both kinds of conversations were equally revealing.” The case, now recognized as a Title IX landmark, set the legal precedent that universities are responsible for students’ safety. It also helped Krouse reckon with her own experience of sexual assault. Now, “voices of survivors can be heard in a safer way,” she says.