The attorney for a Loudoun County teen who, yesterday, was found to have committed a sexual assault against a female student in a girl’s bathroom at Stone Bridge High School earlier this year, told the court that the sex act which prompted the allegations happened by accident when the boy’s skirt caught on his wristwatch as the pair interacted in a bathroom stall.
On Monday, a juvenile court judge heard testimony on the incident and ultimately determined that there were “facts sufficient” to believe the teen boy committed a sexual assault — the equivalent of a guilty verdict in the matter.
A Washington Post reporter was on hand to document the testimony and while much of the coverage focuses on the teen boy’s previous relationship with the girl he was accused of assaulting — and the reporter makes clear that the teen boy’s preferred gender identity did not come up in the hearing — the account confirms that the student was wearing a skirt during the attack and that the skirt played a part in the boy’s defense.
“Authorities have not commented on the youth’s gender identity and it did not become an issue Monday in court,” The Washington Post noted. “During the hearing, the 15-year-old victim in the first case testified she had consensual sexual encounters with the defendant on two occasions in a girls’ bathroom at Stone Bridge High School in Ashburn. On May 28, she said, the two arranged to meet again and the youth threw her to the floor and forced her to perform sex acts.”
The pair allegedly spoke for several minutes before, according to the girl, the boy began grabbing her neck and then “forced himself on her.”
“He flipped me over,” the girl testified, per the Post. “I was on the ground and couldn’t move and he sexually assaulted me.”
“The judge found there was sufficient evidence to find the defendant had forced the girl into two sex acts,” the outlet added.
The boy’s defense attorney, however, raised the claim that the boy inadvertently committed at least one of the two sex acts.
“The defendant did not testify during the trial, but prosecutors played interviews he gave detectives investigating the case during which he acknowledged ‘messing up’ and said he did not intend to perform one sex act with the victim and said he stopped once he realized he was hurting the girl,” the Post reported.
“The defendant initially told detectives the second sexual act did not occur, but later said it may have happened briefly and accidentally when a knee-length skirt he was wearing got caught on his watch as the pair were fumbling around in the bathroom stall,” the outlet added.
The allegations seem to support Scott Smith’s claim that the boy was wearing a skirt when Smith’s daughter was attacked. The Daily Wire’s story, recounting Smith’s encounters with Loudoun County, its school district, and its school board, centered around concerns that the boy, who reportedly identifies as “gender fluid,” attacked his daughter in a girl’s bathroom — and that the Loudoun County school board, which was considering a gender-neutral bathroom policy at the time, refused to acknowledge — or outright hid — evidence that a rape had occurred in a girl’s bathroom at one of the district high schools.
The case involving Smith’s daughter is now resolved. Sentencing is anticipated in a few weeks, likely sometime in late November. The boy now faces charges in an additional incident that occurred at a separate high school, where he was transferred following the Stone Bridge incident.