This fucking whore
Opinion
Michelle Goldberg
The Right’s Big Lie About a Sexual Assault in Virginia
Oct. 28, 2021
Protesters outside a Loudoun County, Va., school board meeting this week.
Protesters outside a Loudoun County, Va., school board meeting this week. Credit…Leah Millis/Reuters
Protesters outside a Loudoun County, Va., school board meeting this week.
Michelle Goldberg
By Michelle Goldberg
Opinion Columnist
This is a story about how the right twisted the sexual assault of a teenager into a culture war fantasy.It’s about how a distorted tale on a conservative website became grist for a nationwide moral panic.
On June 22, a middle-aged plumber named Scott Smith was dragged, lip bleeding and hands cuffed behind his back, from a raucous school board meeting in Loudoun County, Va. According to the local newspaper Loudoun Now, he’d been swearing loudly at another parent and leaning toward her with a clenched fist when the police tackled him and pulled him outside. He’d eventually be convicted of disorderly conduct and resisting arrest and given a suspended 10-day jail sentence.
Smith’s image quickly went viral as a symbol of the sort of school board strife breaking out all over America. The National School Boards Association, writing to President Biden to request help dealing with the “growing number of threats of violence and acts of intimidation” directed at school board members, included Smith’s arrest in a list of examples.
Soon, however, Smith revealed why he’d been so distraught. In an interview with The Daily Wire, a website co-founded by the conservative wunderkind Ben Shapiro, Smith said that his ninth-grade daughter had been sexually assaulted in a school bathroom by a boy wearing a skirt. Smith was opposed to a proposed policy allowing trans kids to use bathrooms aligned with their gender identities, believing it made girls like his daughter vulnerable.
“The point is kids are using it as an advantage to get into the bathrooms,” he told the reporter, Luke Rosiak
By the time Smith spoke to Rosiak, the story had become even uglier. In July, the boy was arrested in the attack on Smith’s daughter and charged with two counts of forcible sodomy. But pending a hearing, he was allowed to enroll at another high school while wearing an ankle monitor. In early October he was arrested again, this time for allegedly forcing a girl into an empty classroom and touching her inappropriately.
After Rosiak’s article came out, Smith became a symbol of a different kind: a blue-collar martyr to wokeness. Appearing on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show, Rosiak said, “This story is one of the most disturbing I’ve ever worked on. It raises the possibility that the Loudoun County public schools covered up the rape of a 14-year-old girl at the hands of a boy wearing a skirt in order to pass a school policy that Democrats were adamant about passing.” As a result of that cover-up, Rosiak said, a second girl was allegedly attacked, “and to prevent all of this from coming out potentially, they arrested the father of the victim.”
Not surprisingly, the story ricocheted around the right. Conservatives have long argued that letting trans girls and women into women’s bathrooms would lead to sexual predation, and now that seemed to have happened. They’ve argued that wokeness is a form of tyranny, and in Smith they had a man who seemed to have been tyrannized because his family’s lived experience posed a threat to trans ideology.
If they had it all wrong, it’s almost hard to blame them — the narrative was too irresistible.
Former Loudoun superintendent, schools spokesman indicted by Va. grand jury