LOUDOUN COUNTY, VA — A judge on Thursday declined to rule in favor of the father who was prosecuted for disorderly conduct after getting angry that a school superintendent lied about his daughter’s rape, instead setting a trial date for September, when a jury could decide his fate.
Judge Howe Brown said Scott Smith saying the word “bitch” to a leftist activist who was allegedly taunting him about his daughter’s rape was sufficient for the government to take him to trial on charges of disorderly conduct.
The ruling sent Smith, a plumber, into anguish over the prospect of his family’s legal ordeal continuing. It was nearly two years ago that a George Soros-backed attorney tried to put him in jail, and the school board passed a transgender bathroom policy while the superintendent concealed how weeks prior, Smith’s teenage daughter had been brutally raped by a “gender fluid” boy in the girls bathroom.
Shortly after the June 11, 2021 incident, far-left prosecutor Buta Biberaj personally prosecuted him and won a conviction from a judge, with Smith denied a jury because the charge was a misdemeanor. But with Republican state Sen. Bill Stanley as his attorney, he appealed the conviction and got Biberaj tossed off the appeal. In an appeal, the defendant is entitled to a jury, but Smith was hoping the conviction would be thrown out before it reached that point.
Smith became an international symbol of the politicization of schools and the justice system as he was charged with a crime, depicted as a violent bigot on national television, and likened to a domestic terrorist by the National School Boards Association (NSBA) in a letter that was used by the Department of Justice to sic the FBI on conservative parents.
Yet even after Smith’s daughter’s assailant was convicted of rape and the NSBA apologized for its letter, the prosecutor who replaced Biberaj, Eric Olson, fought to preserve the conviction, and the judge ruled that under the “peculiar” language of Virginia’s disorderly conduct statute, Smith arguably committed disorderly conduct by cursing at a woman because it could “incite” her to violence—even though that interpretation would seemingly mean the leftist activist was guilty of the same crime.
“She said ‘I’m going to ruin your business.’ [The police officer] says Mr. Smith leaned in, had a clenched fist [by his waist], and called her a bitch. That’s the totality of it,” Stanley said in court. The officer “said he decided to arrest Smith the moment he said those words.” But “if that’s disorderly conduct, then this courtroom would be filled with people who did actually more than what he did.”
Judge Brown said “I think it incites her to violence. I think he was lucky he didn’t get slapped, let alone arrested. That’s enough” to go to trial.
The officer who arrested Smith and is seen in an infamous picture dragging him away, Smith’s face bloodied, was in the courtroom as Smith’s wife Jessica broke down upon hearing those words, sobbing quietly: “Just put a family that’s been through hell through more of this… when is the healing going to begin?”
“The judge said my husband should have been slapped,” she repeated.
Stanley was sanguine about the outcome, telling The Daily Wire that Thursday’s motion to throw out the charge based on a failure to meet “prima facie” threshold was a long shot and that “I’ll take this to a jury all day long. There is no chance that a jury will unanimously convict.”
But that calculus meant little in the moment to Smith and his wife, who outside the courthouse described being worn down by an emotional, years-long process. Jessica described how—between the prosecution of her daughter’s rapist and the prosecution of her husband—she had spent so much time in the courthouse that she had developed a routine. Smith attempted to call Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who rode to victory in part by calling out the Loudoun schools over the rape coverup, to ask for a pardon.
Jessica said the pair had faced a callous superintendent and school board, a prejudiced prosecutor, biased judges, a dishonest media, and violence-tinged far-left activists calling themselves “Loudoun Love Warriors.”
On Thursday, they tried to convince themselves that the one thing that couldn’t be rigged was a jury of their peers—though even that was in doubt as the quaint Victorian homes that lined the historic blocks around the Leesburg courthouse, long lined with American flags, began to give way to rainbow décor.