ALEXANDRIA, Virginia — A 24-year-old woman told jurors Tuesday that she was repeatedly raped and sexually assaulted a decade ago as a seventh-grade student in Virginia, and that school officials turned to her for help. reacted with indifference to the appeal.
Lawyers for the school system say she is making it up, and she cried when cross-examined about the evidence that showed her allegations were false.
An eight-member civil jury in the U.S. District Court in Alexandria must decide whether the woman — identified in court papers only by her initials BR — is telling the truth, and whether school officials are held liable for their response. Should be ordained.
The case is one of several high-profile sexual misconduct cases that have been filed against Northern Virginia school systems in recent years. Virginia’s Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin has blamed school systems for their responses to student safety issues.
The case involving BR extends to allegations that she was raped and molested as a 12-year-old student at Rachel Carson Middle School in Reston, part of Fairfax County Public Schools, the state’s largest school system.
BR’s allegations were the impetus for a 2014 settlement with the U.S. Department of Education and the school system over allegations that the district failed to adequately investigate the student complaint.
But the school system admitted no wrongdoing as part of that settlement. And in the ongoing civil suit by BR, the district alleges he fabricated rape allegations.
In court papers, the district has accused BR of committing “fraud on the court.”
Attorneys for the school system on Tuesday presented evidence from social media posts and text messages from 2011 that show that BR and her alleged rapist — a 13-year-old eighth grader — were actually a boyfriend and girlfriend who willingly had sex. Acts included.
In one text, BR explicitly tells the boy “I love you” at a time when she now says she was being repeatedly raped by the boy at a bus stop after school.
According to the school system, BR claimed only that the boy had broken up with her and that her mother had seen an erotic voicemail message on the girl’s phone and alerted school officials, after which she had sex with him. Did against.
However, BR stood firm on her testimony that she was raped multiple times by the student at the bus stop and in some nearby woods, and that other children regularly surrounded her and fondled her over her locker on the school grounds. Used to do.
She testified Tuesday that she allegedly sent text messages showing sexual advances only because her attacker threatened her and forced her to send them so that no one would believe her if she ever claimed rape. .
And she denied that she was the author of several other social media posts that indicated a consensual sexual relationship between the two, despite details in the messages that included her locker number at school and other details that directly related to her. Were.
The school district also argues that BR’s claims have evolved over the years. The first written complaint she made to school officials, in November 2011, did not make any allegations of rape or unwanted physical contact. Instead, it says she was called by the wrong name, was falsely accused of immorality, and that boys were crowding her and giving her “seductive glances.”
BR admitted in his testimony that he never told the school authorities about the rape allegations. But she said she told them in conversations that boys at school were touching her breasts and genitals, and that her complaints were largely ignored for several months before she ultimately left the school.
“I felt like I lost my voice at age 12,” he said. “I felt like no one believed in me.”
Her allegations have also evolved since the lawsuit was first filed in 2019. In a revised version of her complaint, BR said that groups of unidentified men gang-raped her multiple times in a school closet, and she suggested in court papers that the attacks were related to gang trafficking. However, in her testimony at the trial. BR made no mention of those alleged gang rapes.
The trial is due to end next month.
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