Assault victim sues Loudoun County Public Schools for $30 million.

The daughter of Scott Smith who was 15 at the time she was sexually assaulted by a boy in the girl’s bathroom has filed a lawsuit against the school system for $30 million.

A teenage girl who was sexually assaulted in a Virginia high school bathroom has sued Loudoun County Public Schools, alleging that school officials failed to heed warning signs about her attacker and responded to her May 2021 assault by trying to cover it up.

The teenager, who filed the lawsuit under the pseudonym “Jane Doe” along with her parents, was 15 years old when a younger, male student in a skirt assaulted her in a girls’ bathroom at Stone Bridge High School in Ashburn on May 28, 2021.

The incident garnered national attention. Conservatives protested a policy in Loudoun County schools — put in place after the assault — that allowed transgender students to use bathrooms matching their gender identity. Meanwhile, outraged parents in Loudoun County questioned why the perpetrator was moved to a different school, where he assaulted a second female student months later.

The story is a lot more complicated than this simple summary can convey. The girl had previously had some kind of sexual encounter with the boy in question in a school bathroom. This rendezvous was also planned but the incident became aggressive and the girl wanted it to stop.

Also, while it’s true the trans bathroom policy wasn’t in place at the time, it’s also true that the day of the incident the first report back to the school board was that the assault might be connected to the forthcoming bathroom policy. In other words, the very things “conservatives” protested was also the first thing school officials were worried about.

The boy’s mother has since claimed he was not trans or non-binary but no one denies he was wearing a skirt to school that day. Former school superintendent Scott Ziegler told the NY Times in August that at a meeting on the day of the assault the school’s principal told him, “He runs with the drama crowd, and you know how the drama crowd can be. They’re attention-seeking. And he’s been experimenting with different looks.” So, yes, he wore skirts but “he has never come out to the school as either nonbinary or transgender.” More on the lawsuit.

In the lawsuit, attorney Bill Stanley, a Republican state senator who has represented Smith’s family for more than a year, wrote that they are seeking at least $30 million in damages and alleged that school officials’ “failure to respond promptly and adequately to reports that Jane Doe was sexually assaulted by another LCPS student constituted sex discrimination, in violation of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972.”

The girl “was admitted to the hospital for two weeks for physical, mental, and emotional trauma she suffered because of the sexual assault,” Stanley said in the lawsuit. She was bullied and harassed by other students after the incident, and a Loudoun County judge in January granted a two-year protective order forbidding contact from one student “who threatened her with death,” Stanley added.

It’s going to be hard to argue that the school board handled this well. The boy guilty of the first assault was sent to another school where he assaulted another girl. A grand jury report concluded that members of the board seemed to be suffering from “intentional institutional amnesia” regarding what happened. The school board continued to fight against turning over the internal investigation it had conducted into the incident but in May a judge ruled they would have to hand it over to the state’s attorney general.

Superintendent Scott Ziegler was fired last December, in part because he clearly lied about the first assault telling a crowd at a school board meeting that he was unaware of any sexual assaults in school bathrooms. In fact he had been informed about the assault of Scott Smith’s daughter on the day it happened.

Ziegler was indicted last December by the grand jury. A trial on two misdemeanors took place last month. In one case, Ziegler was accused of retaliating against a teacher who had complained about inappropriate touching by a special needs student.

Most of the testimony delivered Wednesday came from a former special education teacher who testified before the grand jury in 2022.

The former teacher was on the stand for several hours Tuesday, detailing a situation involving herself and a teacher’s assistant. Both reportedly alerted administrative staff about one of their students touching them inappropriately. This situation happened about a year after the student-on-student sexual assaults were reported at Stone Bridge High School and Broad Run High School.

Ziegler is accused of retaliating against her for testifying to the special grand jury and later unlawfully firing her.

Last week, Ziegler was found guilty on that count.

A jury found former Loudoun County Public Schools Superintendent Scott Ziegler guilty of retaliation against a former special education teacher.

In a split decision on Friday, jurors found Ziegler guilty of retaliation but not guilty of penalizing an employee for jury service. Ziegler faces a maximum of 12 months in jail and will appeal. He’s set to be sentenced on Jan. 4.

Just last month, Gov. Youngkin pardoned Scott Smith. He had been arrested during the school board meeting where Ziegler claimed there had been no sexual assaults in school bathrooms. As for Scott Ziegler, in addition to his sentencing in January he has one more trial to go which is set for February.