A federal judge rejected a request made by Virginia's largest school system to dismiss a lawsuit that accused it of being indifferent to a middle school student's claims of sexual abuse and harassment.
In November last year, the Fairfax County School Board filed a motion asking a judge to dismiss the long-running suit. It said that it had uncovered evidence that the former middle schooler who made the accusations fabricated allegations that she was raped and sexually abused by classmates inside and outside of the school.
However, in a recently unsealed order, U.S. District Court Judge Rossie Alston said that the school system "overreached" in seeking dismissal at this stage based on a claim of fraud upon the court.
The judge said that the Facebook messages that the school system claimed were proof of the plaintiff's lies have not yet been authenticated. Furthermore, as a legal matter, Alston said that even if the student lied about what happened to her, it alone would not be sufficient to dismiss the lawsuit before it can be tried before a jury, as per Fox News.
The middle school in question raised the allegations in 2011 and is now 24 years old. The plaintiff was not identified by name in court documents and her allegations were the basis of a 2014 settlement between the Virginia school system and the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights over her accusations that the former failed to properly investigate her complaint.
Five years later, the plaintiff filed a lawsuit against the school board and two of her alleged attackers, among others. The case has been locked in contentious legal wrangling ever since then.
The female student claimed that she was sexually assaulted multiple times and was even gang-raped inside a utility closer in 2012. She also said that the attacks escalated while teachers, counselors, and administrators ignored her complaints of mistreatment.
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Failure To Address Alleged Crimes
The lawsuit is scheduled to go on trial in March and is one of several cases that the Virginia school system has battled in the past few years. The cases, and similar accusations in neighboring Loudoun County, drew scrutiny as Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin has faulted local school systems for their handling of sexual assault accusations, according to the Associated Press.
The plaintiff in the recent case argued that the Facebook posts that the school system's lawyers have put forward are irrelevant and were potentially inauthentic. She argued that the messages purportedly sent by her came from an account that was identified only as "Facebook User," adding that they looked suspicious and she does not remember sending them.
The case is similar to when the family of a teenage girl who was sexually assaulted in a Loudoun County high school bathroom in 2021 filed a $30 million civil rights lawsuit against the county school board late last year.
The girl in the case was allegedly sexually assaulted by a male student in the bathroom of Stone Bridge High School on May 28, 2021. The lawsuit argued that school officials told her and her family that they were not allowed to talk about the incident nor could they locate the assailant nearly three hours after it happened, said WTOP News.
