Attorney details lawsuit against Virginia school district over alleged ‘gang rape’
Attorney Karin Sweigart, representing alleged rape victim, discusses the lawsuit against Fairfax County Public Schools over the alleged rape of one of the school district’s students.
A lawsuit is alleging that Virginia’s Fairfax County School employees downplayed the sexual assault and harassment suffered by a seventh-grade girl that escalated to her repeated rape in a school closet by older boys between classes – and even reportedly sympathized with the alleged attackers – more than a decade ago.
The alleged victim, identified in court documents as B.R., contended that she was gang-raped multiple times between 2011 and 2012 at Carson Middle School in Herndon, Virginia.
The 76-page lawsuit, viewed by Fox News Digital, alleged the school was aware that the girl, then 12, had been experiencing increasing menacing sexual harassment at her locker for months, and allegedly had been sexually assaulted in a secluded area by her bus stop several times, including at knifepoint. The suit also alleged that three unknown male students forced the girl into a hallway closet and raped her in between classes. The filing described the assault as "consistent with the modus operandi of human and sexual traffickers in the Fairfax community."
From December 2011 until February 2012, when the plaintiff began at-home instruction, a group of older boys forced her into a closet several more times and, "repeatedly physically assaulted and battered, sexually assaulted and battered, sexually abused and raped" her, the suit read.
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In a statement obtained by Fox News Digital, a spokesperson for Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) said, "This case is not set for trial soon. In fact, a trial date has not been set. FCPS is gratified that the Court’s March 10 ruling streamlined the claims in the case, and dismissed several counts against FCPS."
Fairfax County Public Schools is accused of covering up a bathroom rape. (AP Photo/Matthew Barakat, File)
Several years earlier, starting around September 2008, the lawsuit claimed "organized gangs and co-conspirators began targeting juvenile females in Fairfax and northern Virginia to intimidate and coerce them into participating in commercial sex acts." The alleged "recruitment scheme" reportedly involved grooming middle and high school girls into prostitution.
The filing cited how several MS-13 gang members, who were teenagers at the time themselves, had been establishing a "prostitution clientele" within the Hispanic community and construction workers until their eventual indictments for human and sex trafficking.
In the case of B.R., the suit accused school leadership of "performing superficial, self-serving investigations and not disciplining students for sexual violence and harassment because the disciplinary rates were measured by governmental entities and non-profits when evaluating the performance of a school division, individual schools, and school officials."
The lawsuit also accused school leadership of dismissing the girl's earlier allegations of bullying – even when her parents came in to complain about a sexually explicit voicemail from another student found on their daughter's phone months before. Instead, an assistant principal was said to have told the family that the boys allegedly harassing the seventh grader "had a very hard life and been in enough trouble" and even asked why they were trying to "ruin a young boy’s life."
A lawsuit alleges school employees did not take appropriate action to protect a former student at Carson Middle School in Herndon, Virginia. (Google)
Instead, the girl was painted as the "troubled" child, the suit accused. Even as the plaintiff suffered "sexual violence or assault at the hands of a fellow student," an assistant principal allegedly tried to dismiss the alleged incidents as consensual and implied the pre-teen was sexually active behind her parents' backs.
In March 2012, the girl's mother, father and brother transported her to the Child Help Center of Fairfax County, where a medical exam found scarring and contusions "corroborating her report of rape and sodomy." The suit noted the school should have investigated the incidents regardless because due to the girl's age, she could not legally consent to sex.
Leading up to that point, the girl had received death threats, including messages that one of her alleged abusers "has a gun and he is not afraid to kill you," "wants to shoot" her, "wants revenge," and "is going to get revenge," according to the filing.
The lawsuit, filed in 2019, was moving forward on the allegations of assault and battery against two students, Fairfax County School Board not following Title IX protections, First Amendment retaliation against three school principals and gross negligence against nine current and former employees.
The names of the employees accused of the cover-up are protected, meaning it is not clear whether those school staffers remain on the job in the classroom, FOX 5 DC reported.
A former student alleges she was gang-raped in the bathroom at Carson Middle School in Herndon, Virginia, multiple times between 2011 and 2012. (iStock)
"It is a horrific situation," the alleged victim's lawyer, Karin Sweigart, said. "She doesn’t want another student to have to suffer like this … I think parents have the right to know if there is an allegation that a school official didn’t take the action to protect minor students that they should have and that’s one of the unfortunate things here."
