Finally! The ‘Who, What, and Why’ of Scott Smith and His Daughter’s Rape
Martin Mawyer, president, Christan Action Network
If the story of plumber Scott Smith was anything but a father grieved over his daughter’s rape by a boy “wearing a skirt” in a gender-neutral school bathroom, Hollywood would be beating down his door to write a screenplay.
On his front lawn, 60-Minutes would be duking it out with 20/20 to be the first to tell his story.
But as it is, most Americans (if they know anything at all) are only familiar with bits and pieces of this David versus Goliath story taking place in Loudoun County, Virginia.
America deserves better than patchwork journalism. The Who, What, and Why of this story is about as difficult to obtain as “the truth” coming out of the mouths of the Loudoun County school board members.
There’s a reason for this shoddy journalism, a reason that goes beyond the typical ineptitude of modern-day journalism. The mainstream media doesn’t want the truth out.
In The Beginning…On the First Day…Loudoun County Creates a Coverup
The genesis of this story began on May 28 when a 15-year-old female student was raped in a gender-neutral bathroom by a boy of the same age who was ‘wearing a skirt’ claiming to be a gender-fluid student at Stonebridge High School in Leesburg, VA.
Immediately, school officials went into high gear to conceal this criminal accusation that would have threatened their transgender, gender-neutral school bathroom agenda.
At the time of the incident, Christian Action Network was in the middle of a lawsuit against Virginia’s Department of Education over its proposed ‘Model Policies.’ Those policies require ALL state schools to permit students to enter opposite-sex bathrooms simply by claiming to be transgender without providing ANY ‘substantiating’ evidence.
A Lynchburg judge ultimately dismissed our case on July 27 due to ‘lack of standing.’ Had we known about the rape, our legal case may have very well moved forward. We could have reached out to the girl’s father and invited him and his daughter to be a plaintiff to our lawsuit.
It would have easily given us legal standing.
But as events turned out on the day of the May 28 rape, school officials never made a 911 call to the police.
They wanted to conceal it.
Call the Police on the Father…Downplay the Rape
The school did, however, notify the girl’s parents. The child’s father, Scott Smith, arrived at the school to discover that no police officers or medics had been called to do a proper investigation. He was angry, naturally.
Finally, police were called, but NOT regarding the rape of the female student, but over the father’s “assertive” behavior.
‘Six cops cars show up like a SWAT team,’ Scott Smith recalled, who was immediately detained by police for creating a disturbance. In a short time however, the father convinced the police that his daughter’s rape should be the real focus of their attention rather than his ‘assertive’ behavior. The police agreed and accompanied him and his daughter to a clinic where a rape kit was administered, which confirmed the sexual assault.
Later that afternoon, school principal Tim Flynn sent an email to all parents. But rather than mentioning the rape at the school, the principal focused solely on the father.
Flynn told parents that there was an ‘incident in the main office,’ referring to the father’s behavior, but assured parents, ‘There was no threat to the safety of the student body.’ The alleged rape of the female student was never mentioned.
School principal Flynn had but one goal in mind: Demonize the father. But to do that, he had to hide the rape from other parents.
The coverup was just beginning. Things would get worse, much worse, for Scott Smith.
In fact, if you type in ‘Scott Smith’ into Google’s search engine, the first story is not about his daughter’s rape, but about his arrest and conviction at a school board meeting. The word ‘rape’ never appears in any headlines I could find while searching Google for his name. The same could be said for Bing. But on Yahoo, at least it’s found on page 3.
Deny the Rape…Kick Out Parents…Take Down a Grieving Father
On June 22, the Loudoun County school board held a meeting where many parents took to the microphone during public comment period. They complained about Critical Race Theory being taught and a school policy that allowed students claiming to be transgender to enter opposite biological sex bathrooms.
During that meeting, Superintendent Scott Ziegler claimed that “the predator transgender student or person simply does not exist.” Furthermore, he said, “we don’t have any record of assaults occurring in our restrooms.”
These statements would prove to be a lie and the superintendent’s denial outraged Smith, who was in attendance.
As anger erupted at the meeting, school board chair Brenda Sheridan closed the public comment portion, which was followed by parents shouting, “Shame on you!”
Smith then got into a heated exchange with a woman after he insisted his daughter had been raped in a gender-neutral school bathroom.
“She looked me dead in the face and said, ‘That’s not what happened.’ That struck me – how do you know what happened, you don’t even know me,” he would tell Fox News.
The school superintendent quickly declared ‘the meeting an unlawful assembly’ and said those remaining inside would be charged with trespassing.
Smith refused to leave and continued arguing. Police drug him to the ground, put him into handcuffs, and then carted him to jail. He was charged with two misdemeanor counts.
Throw the Book at the Dad…Demand Jail Time
In a highly unusual move, Virginia’s top prosecutor, Buta Biberaj, showed up at the August 17 court date to demand jail time for Scott Smith.
Smith’s attorney, Elizabeth Lancaster, told the Daily Wire that it was ‘completely unheard of for the prosecutor to handle a misdemeanor.”
She added, “The idea that they would actually be seeking jail time, I’d guess in my 15 years the number of times I’ve seen that happen would be zero.”
Smith was found guilty by the judge and told to pay a small fine. He was also sentenced to a 10-day suspended jail sentence contingent upon his good behavior.
Still, hardly anyone in America knew about the rape of Scott Smith’s daughter.
Enter…the National School Boards Association
But the National School Boards Association, headquartered in Washington D.C. knew about it. And on September 29, the NSBA wrote a letter to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland requesting the FBI to help school board members from ‘mobs’ of parents who were threatening them.
The NSBA, which represents more than 90,000 school officials across the United States, claimed teachers and school board members were under ‘immediate threat’ from ‘acts of malice, violence and threats.’
Insulting parents further, the NSBA compared them “to a form of domestic terrorism.”
The DOJ responded to their demands in less than a week.
Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a memo on October 4 called ‘Violent Threats Against School Officials and Teachers.’
Though the memo does not describe angry parents as ‘domestic terrorists,’ the vast majority of news outlets used the memo to paint parents as ‘domestic terrorists.’
The reason was because the NSBA referred to Scott Smith as a prime example of a domestic terrorist.
Parents Defined as Domestic Terrorists…Call in the Reinforcements!
Headlines flew around the country that the DOJ was planning a witch hunt against parents attending school board meetings. Anxious parents worried they could soon be arrested on domestic terrorism charges.
They had every right to be concerned.
Garland’s memo specifically cites ‘harassment’ as an example of a chargeable offense.
But who defines ‘harassment’? The memo does not explain but Scott Smith’s behavior was seen as the only possible example that could apply.
And one has to question the following eye-popping story as to whether it also prompted the DOJ memo.
On August 6, Loudoun County School Superintendent Scott Ziegler sent an email to the county sheriff requesting such an “extraordinary” police presence for its upcoming August 10 school board meeting that it left Sheriff Mark Chaplain both angered and in disbelief.
Ziegler requested three sheriffs, a K-9 explosive sweep, a five-team quick-reaction force, a team of undercover units, a civil disturbance unit, a special ops team, a joint command post and an onsite commander.
Sheriff Chapman wrote back, “Your request is extraordinary and would likely constitute LCSO’s commitment of a minimum of approximately 65 sworn deputies.”
Humorously, this small army of law-enforcement officers would be for a board meeting that would see only ten speakers allowed in the building at a single time.
Chapman denied Ziegler’s request and wrote, “You fail to provide any justification for such a manpower-intensive request.”
The disgruntled sheriff also believed the request was for “optics” only and he was tired of having his police force look like the “bad guy” trying to suppress the free speech rights of Loudoun County citizens.
He accused the school board of “firing people up and calling LCSO to clean it up.”
A spokesman for the sheriff’s office, Kevin Lewis, said his office “has been made to appear as the muscle for the school board and work at the school board’s direction.”
Did this rejection of the school board’s mammoth police request also help convince the DOJ that local police can’t be trusted and the feds needed to intervene? 60-Minutes, where are you? Ask these tough questions!
Father Bites His Lips…But Not for Long
Even after all this, Scott Smith maintained his silence about his daughter’s rape, at least publicly. Everyone had told him to keep his mouth shut if he wanted a successful prosecution of the rapist.
But that silence died on October 6 after the arrest of the same boy, who had been secretively transferred to another school, where he sexually assaulted another female student at Broad Run High School.
The boy, who has yet to be named because he is a minor, forced a female student into an empty classroom where he held her against her will and committed a sexual assault. He was charged with sexual battery.
After this second arrest, Scott Smith finally went public, fed up with Virginia school officials covering up his daughter’s sexual assault. ‘I won’t stay quiet anymore,’ he told Fox News. His story would be a shot heard – if not worldwide – certainly around the United States.
It became evident that the NSBA letter that sparked the DOJ memo was based largely on Scott Smith’s arrest at the Loudoun County school board meeting.
Do You Hear that Sound?…It’s Bad News Coming
But bad news would soon be forthcoming for the DOJ, NSBA and Loudoun County school officials.
On October 13, it was discovered that Merrick Garland’s son-in-law, Alexander Newman Tanner, was a co-founder of a company that advances critical race theory curricula in 23,000 schools.
Republican U.S. Senators immediately pounced on the apparent conflict of interest and accused Garland of committing an “ethics violation.”
Soon after that revelation, 17 state attorney generals signed a joint letter on October 18 blasting the DOJ for the memo. The letter accused Garland of “seeking to criminalize lawful dissent and intimidate parents into silence.”
More backlash quickly followed on October 22 when the National School Boards Association issued an apology and criticized its own CEO for demanding the FBI get involved in targeting parents.
The panicked board said, “there was no justification for some of the language included in the letter.”
On October 23, newly discovered emails revealed that school superintendent Scott Ziegler lied during the June 22 board meeting when he said there wasn’t “any record” of a sexual assault against a female student by a “boy in a skirt.”
In an email sent out by Ziegler on the very day of the assault, he wrote to the school board, “This afternoon a female student alleged that a male student sexually assaulted her in the restroom.”
Ziegler would later apologize for his lie, saying, “I regret that my comments were misleading and I apologize for the distress they have caused families.”
Misleading? Misleading would be a brunette claiming to be a blonde after dying her hair, not lying about a documented police investigation into a student’s rape.
Down Comes the Hammer…But After Obama Puts His Foot in His Mouth
Despite Superintendent Ziegler’s acknowledgment of his lie, and despite the National School Boards Association apologizing for the letter that sparked the DOJ memo, former President Barack Obama went on to claim that the whole uproar was nothing by a right-wing conspiracy.
“We don’t have time to be wasting on these phony, trumped-up culture wars,” he told an October 24 rally in support of gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe in Virginia.
He claimed the rape of Scott Smith’s daughter was nothing but “…fake outrage that the right-wing media peddles to juice their ratings.”
But then came the hammer. And it came down hard.
On October 25, juvenile court judge Pamela Brooks convicted the boy of sexual assault against Smith’s daughter. Parents, naturally, demanded an apology from Obama. None came.
Bill Stanley, Smith’s lawyer, stated after the conviction:
“No one should have to endure what this family has endured, and now their focus is completely upon their daughter’s health and safety as she progresses forward with her life,” he said.
When Sen. Chuck Grassley asked Garland during an October 27 Senate hearing, “I assume you’re going to revoke your extremely divisive memo that you said was instigated because of the (NSBA) letter?”
Garland said he would not, saying the memo was needed to address “concerns about violence, threats of violence and other criminal conduct.”
Doubtless, this story will continue for months to come.
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