It seems that Loudoun County, Virginia, isn’t the greatest place to work or go to school.

Remember the sexual assault by a ‘transgender’ student against a girl in the girls’ bathroom, which came to light when the victim’s father was demanding answers from the school board, and then dragged to the floor and arrested. It was all a big right-wing myth, the credentialed media told us:

• The New York Times: The Right’s Big Lie About a Sexual Assault in Virginia, October 28, 2021
• Reason: Conservatives Wrongly Portrayed the Loudoun County Sexual Assault as a Transgender Bathroom Issue, November 1, 2021
• New York Post: Mom of Virginia teen convicted of sex assault says he doesn’t identify as female despite wearing skirt, November 2, 2021
• Amanda Marcotte at Salon: Conservatives conjure up a 21st-century Satanic panic. Will it work? October 22, 2021

The media’s defense of transgenderism fell apart quickly when the rapist was found guilty.

Grand jury report condemns Loudoun schools’ handling of sex assaults

By Hannah Natanson and Justin Jouvenal | December 5, 2022 | 7:25 PM EST

A special grand jury has released a report condemning Loudoun County Public Schools officials for their handling of a pair of sexual assaults committed by the same student last year that drew significant attention and anger.

The investigation was authorized by Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) and Attorney General Jason Miyares (R) in early January as one of their first acts in office. The grand jury was charged with investigating how the school district responded to the assaults, which took place in May and October 2021. Youngkin and Miyares’s actions followed months of community outrage, aimed largely at Loudoun school officials’ decision to transfer the student assailant from one high school campus after his first assault, only to see him commit a second sexual assault at the second campus five months later.

The jury’s impaneling also came after Youngkin and Miyares repeatedly referenced the Loudoun assaults in their campaigns, accusing the school system — and U.S. public education generally — of a lack of transparency and failure to support parents’ rights. The incident also became a national issue in the heated debate over transgender student rights, especially bathroom access.

During the first assault, which took place in a girls’ bathroom, the student was reportedly dressed in women’s clothes — a finding Monday’s jury report corroborates. This gave ammunition to opponents of school policies that permit transgender students to use bathrooms matching their gender identities — although there is no evidence the male student is transgender and, at the time of the first assault, Loudoun determined bathroom access by biological sex.

In a 91-page report published Monday, the jury concluded that Loudoun administrators badly mismanaged the sexual assaults because of incompetence and a lack of interest in the events. But the jury also found there was no “coordinated cover-up” of the assaults between Loudoun school officials and the school board, as some had alleged. Instead, the school board was mostly kept in the dark about the assaults, the jury found. And the jury concluded the incident demonstrated a lamentable “breakdown of communication amongst multiple parties,” including the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office, the Loudoun County Juvenile Court Service Unit and the Loudoun County Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office.

The report also says Loudoun Schools Superintendent Scott Ziegler lied about the incident at a June 2021 board meeting, denying a sexual assault had occurred in a school bathroom when he knew such an assault had taken place. The superintendent has previously said that he misunderstood the question and that he thought the board member was asking whether the school had records of bathroom assaults committed by transgender or gender-fluid students.

The superintendent was subsequently fired.

Now we hear about this one:

Jury awards Va. teacher $5 million over wrongful sex abuse case

The teacher was accused of sexually abusing a 17-year-old student, though she denies his claims

By Tom Jackman | Sunday, February 26, 2023 | 6:30 AM EST

The first clue that Kimberly Winters, a high school English teacher, had that a former student had accused her of sexually abusing him was when Loudoun County sheriff’s deputies in full riot gear burst into her bedroom one morning with their rifles drawn.

“It was very terrifying,” Winters said. “I still have nightmares. Big guns.”

Winters said the deputies yanked her out of bed, handcuffed her, and made her stand in the front yard of her Sterling, Va., home in her pajamas while they patted her down, in full view of the neighborhood.

When she went to the Loudoun jail, Winters said, she was strip-searched, which her lawyer said violated the sheriff’s policies because she wasn’t booked into the jail. But her mug shot was taken and distributed to the news media along with a press release saying she was charged with sexually abusing one of her students when he was 17. Soon, she was fired from her job at Park View High School, after teaching in Loudoun for eight years.

The original is from The Washington Post, and if you cannot get past the Post’s paywall, you can read it here as well.

When Loudoun prosecutors looked at the case brought by Detective Peter Roque, they promptly dismissed all charges. Winters sued Roque and Loudoun Sheriff Mike Chapman (R). And after a five-day trial earlier this month, a Loudoun jury took less than two hours to find the two law enforcement officials liable for Winters’s economic and punitive damages. They awarded her $5 million.

It’s simple: the case against Miss Winters was presented without any corroborating evidence, and things that Detective Roque said were based on evidence, such as the Detective’s statement on the search warrant application, “Witnesses’ statements are corroborated by phone records,” did not have any such records presented to the prosecution.

Sexual abuse by teachers is an emotional thing, and when a minor makes a claim that he had sex with a teacher, law enforcement is going to react, as they should. But the authorities still have to follow proper procedure, and have at least some evidence to back it up.

So, what has happened? In one case, authorities lied about not one but two rapes in a school bathroom, trying to sweep it all under the rug, because the accused rapist was a boy wearing a skirt, and they were deathly afraid of offending homosexual and ‘transgender’ rights activists. In the other, law enforcement overreacted, lying about evidence that they did not have, and costing a teacher her job, reputation, and four years of suffering. Underreaction and overreaction, but both had the same issue: public officials lying.