Of all the recent trends in American political discourse, none are so grotesque or dangerous as the reflexive dismissal of allegations of wrongdoing merely because the accused has the support of one’s political opponents.
You want evil to go unchecked in this world? This is how you do it.
Just this week, a special grand jury indicted two officials at the heart of the Loudoun County, Virginia, high school sexual assault scandal that played a key role in the state’s 2021 gubernatorial race.
The indictments come months after conservatives first begged and pleaded for the public to take the matter seriously, all while the major newsrooms either ignored or dismissed the allegations altogether. Because if it’s important to conservatives, it’s apparently not worthy of consideration.
Scott Ziegler, who was fired this month from his position as superintendent of the Loudoun County school system, has been charged by a special grand jury with three misdemeanors: false publication, prohibited conduct, and penalizing an employee for a court appearance. District spokesman Wayde Byard, who is currently on administrative leave, has been indicted on one count of felony perjury.
The indictments come after the grand jury released a damning report that determined Ziegler and other Loudoun County Public Schools officials cared more about “their own interests” than “the best interests of LCPS” insofar as allegations of sexual assault were concerned. The jury determined the district’s laserlike focus on self-interest and self-preservation produced a “stunning lack of openness, transparency, and accountability both to the public and the special grand jury.”
“There were several decision points for senior LCPS administrators, up to an including the superintendent, to be transparent and step in and alter the sequence of events leading up to the [sexual assaults],” the special grand jury’s report reads.
It adds, “They failed at every juncture.”
It’s important to recall what happened last year in LCPS. On May 28, a “genderfluid” male student raped a female classmate in a bathroom stall at Stone Bridge High School. School officials were informed of the assault immediately after it occurred. Shockingly, officials that day were concerned more with keeping the victim’s father at arm’s length, going so far as to discuss obtaining a “no trespass letter” against him, than they were about tracking down the attacker, the jury found.
The assailant was charged later in juvenile court and barred from returning to Stone Bridge.
In June, the father and mother of the Stone Bridge High School victim attended a school board meeting wherein administrators debated a proposal to expand special protections to transgender students, including allowing them to use the bathroom that corresponds to the gender with which they identify. (The measure passed in August.) At the meeting, the parents of the Stone Bridge victim were allegedly accosted by a woman who claimed their daughter had not, in fact, been raped. The father and woman traded words, culminating ultimately in police officers violently removing the father, bloodied and battered, from the meeting.
By the way, at that very same meeting, school board member Beth Barts asked then-Superintendent Ziegler, “Do we have assaults in our bathrooms or in our locker rooms regularly?”
Ziegler responded, “To my knowledge, we don’t have any record of assaults occurring in our restrooms.”
More shocking than the LCPS officials’ lackadaisical handling of the May 28 assault was their decision after the assailant was charged to transfer him quietly to a different school, declining, of course, to warn his new classmates about why he was transferred.
On Oct. 6, settled in now at Broad Run High School, the “genderfluid” male student struck again, sexually assaulting yet another female classmate.
The attacker was convicted later in juvenile court of both assaults. He has been ordered to a residential treatment facility, where he will remain until he is 18 years old. He will likewise be placed on the sex offender registry for the remainder of his life.
“[T]he October 6, 2021, abduction and sexual assault of a female student at Broad Run High School could have, and should have, been prevented,” the special grand jury concluded. “A remarkable lack of curiosity and adherence to operating in silos by LCPS administrators is ultimately to blame for the October 6 incident.”
The grand jury went on to add that blame for the scandal extends far beyond school officials.
“While we strongly believe LCPS bears the brunt of the blame for the October 6 incident and the transfer of the student … a breakdown of communication between and amongst multiple parties – including the Loudon County Sheriff’s Office, the Court Services Unit, and the Loudon County Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office – led to the tragic events that occurred,” the report said.
Adding insult to injury is the fact that we know what we know about what happened in Loudoun County in spite of the broader press. The major newsrooms either ignored or reflexively dismissed the assault allegations as the crackpot fantasies of right-wing lunatics. The press even sided against the father of the Stone Bridge victim after footage of his forcible removal from the school board meeting went viral, characterizing him as just another fanatic whipped up by right-wing propaganda and yet another example of the Right’s supposed anti-teacher, anti-education, anti-LGBT extremism. He was a father seeking answers from the people who enabled, and later protected, his daughter’s rapist, and he was grossly smeared by major newsrooms on both coasts.
In fact, after Loudoun County officials admitted in October 2021 to mishandling the scandal, many of the newsrooms that rushed to report on the father’s removal from the school board meeting dragged their feet reporting the details of Loudoun County’s admitted mismanagement. The Associated Press, NBC, ABC, and CBS News all declined to offer the district’s admitted malfeasance the same breathless breaking news coverage they immediately awarded the school board incident.
In late October 2021, when NBC News eventually followed up on its coverage of the June school board meeting, it did so only to accuse the Right of attempting to leverage the district’s sexual assault scandal in its favor.
“It’s the latest example of this divided district turning into a culture war battleground. Other issues include mask mandates and critical race theory,” said NBC Nightly News correspondent Catie Beck. “But some in the school community say the voices at board meetings don’t speak for the majority of parents and that some may be trying to sway the governor’s race.”
Beck then turned to Catrice Nolan, a failed left-wing school board candidate, who claimed the outrage had been ginned up to hurt Democrats.
“I would describe it as created chaos,” said Nolan. “I think it’s been created.”
Beck responded, “One Loudoun teacher [is] saying, while there should be accountability on the assaults, she questions the timing.”
“It all came about all at once,” Nolan agreed. “It exploded when all of the elections [are] so close.”
This is a lie. The victim’s parents had been begging for answers since at least June 22 of that year. Remember the school board incident?
At the New York Times, columnist Michelle Goldberg likewise accused the Right of twisting the sexual assaults into a “culture war fantasy,” bemoaning the likelihood it would help then-Virginia Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin.
She argued in her column, titled “The Right’s Big Lie About a Sexual Assault in Virginia,” that the May 2021 rape and its implications are merely an illusion through which conservatives are creating a “nationwide moral panic.”
Also, maybe the victim wanted it, Goldberg suggested.
“[The girl] testified that she’d previously had two consensual sexual encounters with her attacker in the school bathroom,” the columnist said. “On the day of her assault, they’d agreed to meet up again.”
She added, “Even as the facts of this case have come out, the damage done by all the disinformation about it will be hard to undo.”
The grand jury sees things differently. Thanks to its efforts, and no thanks to our esteemed Fourth Estate, the public has a more complete picture now of what, exactly, went wrong in the district. With any luck, justice will be meted out to the officials who lied and attempted to cover up the sexual assaults.
As it turns out, conservatives were exactly correct when they warned something deeply, horribly wrong was taking place in Loudoun County. As it turns out, the sexual assault allegations weren’t just a culture war wedge issue or right-wing fantasies. Crimes were committed against teenage girls, and the people tasked with keeping them safe did everything wrong, including lying to their parents and treating the families of the victims as enemies. They did all this while enjoying reflexive support from the nation’s largest and most powerful newsrooms.
On the Loudoun matter, the corporate press — the supposed defender of truth and fact, the advocate for victims and the “little guy” — deserves not an ounce of credit. It deserves only our disdain.
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Becket Adams is the program director of the National Journalism Center.
