Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s administration has dropped the criminal case against former Loudoun County Public Schools Superintendent Scott Ziegler for lying about the now-infamous bathroom rape, The Daily Wire has learned.
Ziegler was convicted in September in a separate trial for retaliating against a teacher who cooperated with the special grand jury convened to investigate the rape coverup. He faces sentencing for that misdemeanor conviction on January 11. He was acquitted of a second charge in that trial.
But the third misdemeanor charge — for the lie at the core of the Daily Wire’s October 2021 bombshell — was separated out into a trial slated for March.
Prosecutors working for Attorney General Jason Miyares filed a “motion for nolle prosequi” on Wednesday that reminds the court that “Defendant Ziegler is charged with falsely publishing, during a livestreamed meeting of the Loudoun County School Board on June 22, 2021, his following statement: ‘To my knowledge we don’t have any record of assaults occurring in our bathrooms.’”
Just three weeks prior, a boy wearing a skirt had brutally raped a ninth-grade girl in a girl’s bathroom, and Ziegler was well aware of this fact. The false statement came as the school board was attempting to pass a new policy that would allow transgender-identifying boys to use the girls bathrooms. Ziegler had a motive to lie because it came as he attempted to dismiss parental concerns about the safety implications, saying they were motivated by unfounded bigotry.
With Ziegler having concealed the rape from the public, the school board ultimately passed the policy, and the rapist remained in the school, where he went on to sexually assault a second victim. The rapist has since been convicted of both offenses.
In explaining why they were dropping the lying charge, prosecutors suggested that they were satisfied that Ziegler has already been convicted of a crime, and didn’t want to put the county through another expensive trial for the third charge, which was a more minor class 3 misdemeanor carrying only a $500 fine.
The law Ziegler was accused of breaking by lying at a school board meeting was an unusual one: a rarely-used statute that made it a misdemeanor crime to tell a lie that was intended for publication.
“The defendant has been tried and convicted by a jury of his peers for an unrelated act of retaliation against an LCPS special education teacher, for which he faces a maximum punishment of 12 months in jail and a $2,500 fine, as well as other collateral consequences,” the prosecutors wrote. “The trial of that case lasted 5 days and required the summoning of numerous jurors and witnesses. LCPS spent additional taxpayer funds providing attorneys to many witnesses.”
The special grand jury also wrote a devastating report that advanced justice by illuminating the facts to the public, it said. The school board fired Ziegler as soon as the report was released.
“The Commonwealth is satisfied that justice has been done in the Defendant’s cases, and that nolle prosequi is appropriate under these circumstances,” prosecutors wrote.
LCPS omitted the rape from mandatory disclosures to the state, further evidence that it intended to conceal it.
At a press conference to minimize the fallout, Ziegler appeared to lie again while attempting to explain away the initial false statement. He said that he thought that the question he was asked referred only to transgender sexual assaults—but for one, emails showed that his own administration believed the boy wearing a skirt fit that definition, and immediately became concerned by how the rape could affect its ability to pass the policy. Second, a follow-up question by the school board member made clear that her question included any kind of sexual assaults, but he did not change his answer at the time.
Since his firing, Ziegler has appeared in court wearing nail polish and earrings.
School spokesman Wayde Byard was acquitted of felony perjury over his role in the rape coverup, and the dropped charge means that the criminal fallout of the rape coverup ends with Ziegler’s conviction on a more serious charge rather than a possible acquittal on a less serious one.
The rape victim is suing LCPS under Title IX in federal court, and could stand to win a large amount of money because LCPS’ own lawyers acknowledged in an internal report that LCPS made egregious lapses. LCPS tried to conceal the report, but it was made public as a result of the prosecutors’ actions.
Youngkin and Miyares convened a special grand jury to investigate the rape coverup, and after it laid out its findings, Loudoun voters chose to boot the county’s prosecutor and the two school board members who ran for reelection from their offices.