NY Times: ““I wasn’t even concerned about the fact that it was a boy wearing a skirt in the girls’ bathroom at the time,” Scott Smith later told me. “I’m focused on the fact that my daughter just got raped.” On the day of the assault, he went to the school and erupted at the principal. A sheriff’s deputy assigned as the school resource officer escorted him out of the building. After that, Smith found himself subject to what seemed to him to be a series of escalating affronts. When Loudoun County Public Schools sent an email later that day to Stone Bridge families to inform them of an incident there, it was about Smith’s outburst and made no mention of a sexual assault.
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In time, Smith came to believe that he knew why all this happened. So did Smith’s many champions in conservative media and Republican politics. The assault of his daughter, they would argue, revealed a hidden architecture of power: the power that liberal elites had accrued in the school system of Loudoun County and counties like it all over the country. They were wielding that power to force bewildering cultural changes upon not just schools but American society as a whole, through measures like Loudoun County’s proposed Policy 8040. “It was clear,” Scott Walker, the Republican former governor of Wisconsin, wrote about the Loudoun County episode in a 2022 Washington Times op-ed, “that the school board and administrators were more concerned about furthering their transgender agenda than protecting the safety of students.”
The particulars of Smith’s daughter’s case — an attacker in a skirt, a girls’ bathroom — posed an obvious threat to the new policy. And so, critics charged, school officials buried it, and because they buried it, more harm was done. When it all came to light months later, this theory of the case would galvanize a local conservative parents’-rights movement, help swing a governor’s race and rattle the politics of gender in America far beyond Virginia.
This was one version of the story of Loudoun County. But as prosecutors took up the matter over the next two years, a different story began to take shape — one that is told here based on court records and testimony, as well as months of interviews with participants in the events at the heart of the scandal, in some cases discussing them on the record for the first time, and hundreds of pages of documents obtained through public-records requests. This evidence presents a much more complicated picture of what happened, in Loudoun County and beyond, in a period of escalating culture wars that have consumed the same communities and institutions that the combatants insist they want to save.”