A Father Says Loudoun County Tried To Conceal Sexual Assault Against Daughter In Bathroom

He Was Right All Along

Scott Smith, visibly injured, is seen being dragged out a Loudoun County School District meeting after being visibly distraught that his own daughter was raped in the girl’s bathroom of the high school by a “boy in a skirt”. The school district subsequently covered up the incident.

On June 22, Scott Smith was arrested at a Loudoun County, Virginia, school board meeting, a meeting that was ultimately deemed an “unlawful assembly” after many attendees vocally opposed a policy on transgender students.

What people did not know is that weeks prior on May 28, Smith says, a boy allegedly wearing a skirt entered a girls’ bathroom at nearby Stone Bridge High School, where he sexually assaulted Smith’s ninth-grade daughter. 

Juvenile records are sealed, but Smith’s attorney Elizabeth Lancaster said that a boy was charged with two counts of forcible sodomy – one count of anal sodomy and one count of forcible fellatio – related to an incident that day at that school.

As a result of the viral video showing his arrest, Smith became the poster child for what the National School Boards Association has since suggested could be a form of “domestic terrorism”: a white blue-collar male who showed up to harangue obscure public servants on his local school board.

“If someone would have sat and listened for thirty seconds to what Scott had to say, they would have been mortified and heartbroken,” Lancaster said.

Also dismissive of Mr. Smith was then superintendent Scott Ziegler, who repeated the refrain of Trans Rights Activists that This Never Happens. 

"To my knowledge, we don't have any record of assaults occurring in our restrooms," he said.

"I think it's important to keep our perspective on this, we've heard it several times tonight from our public speakers, but the predator transgender student or person simply does not exist."

Except they do exist, and I have all the receipts to prove it.

Last Tuesday, the Loudoun County School Board faced a horde of incensed parents and discussed multiple changes to its policies following the announcement of indictments against the district's former superintendent by a special grand jury.

The Tuesday meeting was the first regular public meeting since a special grand jury released a report last week detailing multiple missteps by district administrators, including then-Superintendent Scott Ziegler, in responding to the sexual assault of a female student by a male student in the girl's bathroom of Stone Bridge High School. The same male student went on to assault another student after he was transferred to Broad Run High School.

During the public comment period, speaker after speaker blasted the board's response to the assaults and the grand jury report.

Over 18 months after he was arrested at the board's meeting on June 22, 2021, following a confrontation with law enforcement, Scott Smith, the father of the first sexual assault victim, returned to address the school board and demanded that division counsel Robert Falconi be fired.

"They all knew," Smith said. "They did their own report on this that they did not release to the public. All those school board members knew. Everybody knows this is just more cover-up, more of the same until there's a cleaner house and more indictments and more people held accountable. We're basically here tonight doing the same thing we were doing a year ago. Nothing has changed."

Well, the one bright spot in all this is the fact that the board swiftly fired Ziegler two weeks ago in the wake of Grand Jury report, but on Monday, a Loudoun County judge ordered three misdemeanor indictments by the grand jury against Ziegler to be unsealed. A fourth indictment for felony perjury was handed down against the district's public information officer, Wayde Byard.

Ziegler was charged with one count of misdemeanor false publication, one count of misdemeanor prohibited conduct, and one count of misdemeanor penalizing an employee for a court appearance. The charges carry possible jail time of up to one year. Byard's perjury charge carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.

The special grand jury was impaneled by Miyares at the behest of Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA), who had vowed to investigate the school district while campaigning ahead of the November 2021 election.

In the report, the grand jury blasted Ziegler for stating at a June 22, 2021, school board meeting that, to his knowledge, there had not been any sexual assaults in school bathrooms. The grand jury said it agreed with multiple witnesses who testified that Ziegler lied at the meeting, including one who said the superintendent's comment was a "bald-faced lie."

In an interview with ABC 7 News, Youngkin said he was not surprised by the special grand jury's findings.

"The fact that it took an election, a new governor, and on Day One an executive order to get this get to get this investigated, I think, really speaks to the fact that I think the Loudoun County School Board let everyone down and didn't do their job," he said. "I'm so proud of the Attorney General's Office. And I want to thank the grand jury for the extensive effort and work that they put in to illuminate what was a terrible, horrific circumstance for all Loudoun County and Virginia."