LOUDOUN COUNTY, Va.—To say the Smith family has had a tough year-and-a-half would be an understatement.
In May 2021, Scott and Jessica Smith’s then-ninth-grade daughter was raped in a school bathroom by a teenage boy wearing a skirt.
The family’s ensuing quest for justice has seen them pitched against the school district, county prosecutors, and those supportive of pro-transgender school policies.
Along the way, Scott was arrested after getting into an argument about his daughter’s sexual assault at a school board meeting. The incident was later cited as an example of alleged “domestic terrorism” committed by parents targeting school boards.
The psychological and financial toll on the family has been huge, and they’re still grappling with the aftermath.
May 28, 2021
“My daughter was beaten up by a boy in the girl’s bathroom. That’s what I was told,” Jessica said, recalling how she was notified by the school about her daughter’s rape.She remembers the exact time of the call: “At 1:27 p.m. on May 28, 2021.” It was the Friday before the Memorial Day long weekend.
Unable to reach her husband, she called an employee at their plumbing business to relay the message before heading to the school, Stone Bridge High School in Ashburn, Virginia.
“Why? What really happened?” her thoughts were racing during the 15-minute drive.
When she reached the school, an administrator received Jessica and led her to join her daughter in the vice principal’s office. The administrator told Jessica to not ask any questions. So Jessica asked her daughter a few short questions and learned that her daughter had been raped.
About half an hour later, Scott arrived at the school but didn’t have an ID on him. The school security didn’t allow him in. So he called Jessica and asked her to help him gain access.
“Scott, this is not a physical [assault]. This is a sexual assault,” Jessica recalled telling him.
“Okay, I’m coming through the door,” Scott immediately said to himself, he recalled. He kicked the building door a few times.
Then he told the officer: “You need to make a decision right now. You’re either going to tackle me, or you’re going to have to peacefully escort me to my wife and child.”
Scott said, “I was coming through the door one way or the other.”
“When your wife and child are behind the door, it gets to a point real quick. I’m not that kind of guy. I’m not going to just turn around and go home. Nor am I going to just turn around and go call my lawyer. I’m coming through the door to get my wife and child. And that’s what I did.”
He barged through the building doors and arrived at the reception area outside the vice principal’s office. Jessica was expecting his arrival. Through the glass on the office door, she could see school security, the School Resource Officer (SRO) and the principal surrounding Scott.
“Oh my God, no, no, no. This is not happening. This right here is not happening,” Jessica remembered saying to herself.
Meanwhile, the school staff was dealing with Scott, who was getting more frustrated at how he was treated. Jessica recalled that the SRO, who was supposed to be the Sheriff’s deputy, held Scott at the door, protected the principal, and didn’t answer Scott’s questions.
“Oh yeah, I’m yelling. Yeah, you’re damn right,” Scott said.
The father said he told them how he felt about them. The staff then called 911.
Scott was then escorted outside the school building. When the police arrived, the officers convened with the SRO and principal, while Scott watched from a distance. They told him that they would let him know the things he would need to know. At this point, his wife and daughter were still inside the vice principal’s office.
Two hours after Jessica’s arrival at the school, the family finally got a police escort to the sheriff’s office, where they met the special victim’s unit. Tensions eased up a little when they got to talk to the police.
The detective at the unit was “awesome,” said Scott, who said that once they were off the school property, the sheriff’s office took care of them.
That Memorial Day weekend went by as a blur.
“That weekend ... I don’t even remember the weekend,” Scott said.
It took months for the rape kit to come back in September 2021. Finally, in July 2021, the teenage boy was arrested and charged with two felonies: forcible sodomy and forcible fellatio.
School Board Meeting Arrest
Before the teenage boy faced charges, it was Scott who found himself on the other side of the law over what happened during a contentious Loudoun County School Board meeting on June 22, 2021.Scott had just finished up a plumbing job in the area and made a last-minute decision to attend the gathering. It was his first-ever school board meeting. He wanted to check out the debate on a proposed policy, an issue that had now become too close to home. On the agenda was a proposed pro-transgender student policy that would allow students to use school bathrooms in accordance with their self-defined gender identity. It was a hot-button issue, and the board room was packed with hundreds of concerned parents, residents, and LGBT groups. More than 250 people had registered to speak during the public comment session.
When former state Sen. Richard Black criticized the board for the draft policy, the crowd burst into cheers. The school board immediately ended the public comment session, citing a disruptive crowd. The meeting then entered into a recess, during which the remaining 200 registered speakers continued their public comment through self-organization.
Soon after, Loudoun County Public Schools Superintendent Scott Ziegler declared the meeting an “unlawful assembly” and called for everyone to leave the premises.
Around this time, Scott got into an argument with a woman whose daughter and Scott’s daughter used to be in the same Girl Scouts group. The woman said the rape of Scott’s daughter didn’t happen and threatened to ruin his plumbing business on social media, according to Scott.
When another person tried to grab Scott, he didn’t realize it was a police officer.
“I turn around, the police are grabbing me, and next thing I know, I’m tackled to the ground,” Scott told Fox News in October 2021. “I’m just shocked and horrified.”
He was arrested for disorderly conduct and obstructing or resisting a police officer without force.
Scott saved the T-shirt that he wore that evening.
“Never been washed,” he said as he pointed to various parts of the shirt. “Blood over my heart. Blood on my back. This hangs next to my bed.”
Jessica said, “We feel injustice throughout the process. It’s been a fight.”
After the public was cleared out of the room, the school board meeting resumed, during which board member Beth Barts asked the superintendent if assaults were happening regularly in bathrooms or locker rooms—a key concern for opponents of the policy.
“To my knowledge, we don’t have any record of assaults occurring in our restrooms,” Ziegler responded, noting later that “the predator transgender student or person simply does not exist.”
After the disclosure of the emails, Ziegler acknowledged on Oct. 15, 2021, that his June statement before the school board meeting was false but said he had misunderstood the question.
Injustice in the Justice System
As the cases of his daughter’s rape and his arrest proceeded, Scott’s frustration with the county justice system grew.“Do you know that guy tried to steal my daughter’s justice?” he said, referring to Barry Zweig, deputy commonwealth’s attorney at Loudoun County.
According to Scott, Zweig told his daughter that her case wasn’t strong enough because she knew the teenage boy and had consensual sex with him before the rape.
“Our daughter was pissed at Barry and came home angry that she wasn’t gonna get to go on the stand and fight for her justice, that they were going to make this plea deal and take the word sodomy away, so the charges were completely lesser,” Scott said.
“Barry made it very clear it was his case. The crime was committed against the Commonwealth ... and our daughter just happened to be the victim. And it was going to go his way. So we were kind of hamstrung on that. Well, what are we going to do?
“Well, next thing we know, we get a phone call that the boy did it again.”
On Oct. 6, 2021, a parent called Jessica and told her about the second incident that happened earlier that day.
But Scott didn’t believe it. As per the court order in late July 2021, the couple had expected the boy to be under house arrest with an ankle monitor until the next court hearing on Oct. 14.
“That particular boy is at his home on an ankle monitor. This must be something else; we don’t have time for that problem right now,” Scott recalled thinking.
A few hours later, their attorney confirmed that it was the same boy. The boy had been transferred to Broad Run, a different high school in Loudoun.
The plea deal was now off the table.
Zweig didn’t respond to a request by The Epoch Times for comment by press time.
In late October 2021, the 15-year-old boy was found guilty on counts of forcible sodomy and forcible fellatio for raping Scott’s daughter. In November, he pleaded no contest to his sexual assault of a fellow student at Broad Run High School
Before announcing her ruling, Brooks said she had dealt with many juvenile sex offenses, crimes more common than the public realized. She noted that she had read many psychosexual and psychological evaluations, but the defendant’s report “scared” her.
“Yours scared me for yourself, your family, and society in general,” Brooks told the boy. “Young man, you need a lot of help.”
She said even though his attorney argued that the May 28 incident was “consensual,” the court had ruled otherwise.
“When someone says ‘yes’ one day, it doesn’t mean they say ‘yes’ every day,“ Brooks said. ”‘No’ means no. You exhibited predatory behavior.”
She said she had never put any juvenile on the sex offender registry but would rule so in this case.
The victim impact statements at the beginning of the sentencing hearing noticeably impacted the teenage boy. He cried, shoulders shaking, when Scott spoke directly to him: “You could change. You are young. I don’t believe you are a monster. I thought you looked like a monster, but you really don’t.”
Later, the boy said he didn’t know how much hurt he had caused until he heard the victim’s testimonies.
“I sincerely apologize to the court, families, victims, you, and you,” he said while turning to the two victim families in the room.
For Scott’s daughter, the first victim to give her impact statement at the hearing, the moment the boy started crying was impactful.
“I felt like he finally understood what the other victim and I went through,” she told The Epoch Times afterward.
“My wife and I are not just heartbroken about today’s ruling, we are quite frankly mad at how the justice system and the Loudoun Commonwealth’s attorney have let down both our daughter, as well as the other victims of his predatory actions,” Scott told The Epoch Times on the day of the reversal decision.
“We are now concerned more than ever that this change in his legal status [not having to register as a sex offender] may put other parents’ daughters at risk of harm in the future.”
In his own case, Scott was found guilty on both charges in mid-August 2021. He felt the county’s prosecutors were very strict with him yet lenient with the rapist. During his appeal, he insisted on seeking to remove Loudoun County Commonwealth’s Attorney Buta Biberaj from his case, even though it meant an extra cost of a few thousand dollars in legal fees. Scott didn’t think he would get a fair case with Biberaj on the other side.
‘Domestic Terrorist’
After the teenage boy harmed another victim, Scott, in mid-October 2021, decided to come out to speak to the media. Previously, he didn’t see the point of “exposing himself” to publicly stand against the pro-transgender policy because he thought the measure was a done deal already. However, the second incident changed everything for him.On Sept. 29, 2021, the NSBA sent a controversial letter to President Joe Biden requesting “federal assistance to stop threats and acts of violence” against public school board members, administrators, teachers, and staff.
The letter, for which the NSBA later apologized, states that “acts of malice, violence, and threats” against school board members over issues such as masking and equity policies could be equivalent to “a form of domestic terrorism.”
On Oct. 12, 2021, Scott appeared on Fox News and criticized the Department of Justice: “You know that our government is going to weaponize itself against parents and they’re using my video [of arrest] across the nation to spread fear? That’s wrong.”
At roughly 6 p.m. the next day, two military Black Hawk helicopters flew directly above his house. That had never happened before since they moved to their current residence in January 2004, according to the couple.
Scott described the state of national politics as being similar to watching a bad movie.
“Then all of a sudden, I’m starring in it,” he said.
“A lot of people get frustrated with me because they’re like, ‘Scott, you’re just all over the place.’ But I’m like, ‘Okay, guys, sit in my [expletive] shoes for a second.’
“I’ve been arrested; my daughter’s been raped, beaten up, the prosecutors clearly got a vendetta against us, and we can show you a whole list of things.
“And then next thing I know, I’m a domestic [expletive] terrorist by the Biden administration in the lying DOJ!
“I’m pretty sad that we have to pay money for justice.”
Scott said the lawyer fees were “bankrupting” him, and it was a full-time job for the family to do their own crime fighting
At the sentencing hearing of the rape case on Jan. 12, the Smiths said the economic and emotional toll on the family was “immeasurable.” Their daughter is “managing her days day by day, hour by hour,” according to Jessica. The couple also had to spend so much time on legal matters that they didn’t have time to do their family plumbing business.
Scott said their business lost customers because his family was accused of lying about the rape, and these customers “chose not to call us.” He also told The Epoch Times that he spent more than $20,000 on fences and security cameras to protect his home.
“Anytime my wife, my daughter, and myself walk out of those fences, we are in a jungle, and we are unprotected. The only time I feel safe is when all three of us are sitting here [home],” Scott told The Epoch Times in December 2021.
“I can tell you that every time a helicopter flies over the top of the house, I’m afraid that the ATF [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives] is coming in because of lies.
“I can’t find peace. I can find peace for an hour here and an hour there because I’ve got a great wife. I’ve got a great daughter.
A Turning Point
When speaking with The Epoch Times in late September, Scott was calmer. He described his commitment to protecting his family as “a personal war.”“This wasn’t about getting somebody elected to a school board or getting somebody fired. This was war,” he said.
Scott said he was “still very angry at the justice system,” but time had calmed him down, along with a few victories, including the dismissal of Biberaj from his appeals case.
An attorney general’s special grand jury investigation into his daughter’s rape case was announced on the first day Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin took office.
But it was a cross-country trip over the summer with his friend Jon Tigges that helped bring some spiritual healing. Scott called the journey “my spiritual pilgrimage.”
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Scott had wanted to “renew my relationship with God” but didn’t want to do that over Zoom.
“I remember thinking to myself, ‘Whether God’s real or not, whether these people are crazy or not, I haven’t seen a better gathering of like minds than the Christian faith. So why doubt it?’”
He didn’t know Tigges before June 22, 2021. They were arrested at the same school board meeting; Tigges was arrested for refusing to leave the boardroom. After their arrests, they rode on two different sides of the same police van. Scott remembered Tigges’s loud protests of his arrest.
“I’m going to repeat what he said when they came to me,” Scott thought.
But he was sent to jail that night, while Tigges was released on a summons.
He later learned Tigges’s name via the national news. Then both of them were referenced in the NSBA letter.
Tigges later hired Scott to build bathrooms at his agribusiness venue during the first quarter of 2022. While Scott had a repair business before, he didn’t do any building anymore. But he accepted the contract.
“It gave me somewhere to hide out, feel safe, and be part of his family. Eating lunch and dinner with him and praying before meals ... I just picked up on it from him and his family,” Scott said.
Scott managed to get some respite for a few months after the perpetrator’s sentence. But the peace didn’t last long.
In May, Loudoun County Public Schools shared its Title IX investigation results with the Smith family. The couple received screenshots from the hallway security camera footage of all parties entering and exiting the bathroom where the rape happened, videos of the detective speaking to the perpetrator and his mother, and other information.
“Almost a year later, it was devastating because we had to go through all of these again, testimonies, and listen to all these and go, ‘What?’” Jessica said.
Scott said, “That’s when I started falling apart again.
“I have drawn a horrific picture on my own of the crime scene through all the information we have seen.”
Determined to get all the facts, Jessica made Freedom of Information Act requests to the county Sheriff’s office and paid for the documents. As a result, the family got a stream of new information from May through July that only made Scott angrier.
At his first stop in Scottsdale, Arizona, Scott remembered telling a table of 10 people after hearing them say, “We will run this by God,” “What does God have to do with this? I need all 10 of you to act!”
Afterward, one member of the group spoke to Scott.
“You might be frustrated with us, but don’t give up on us,” the person said.
Scott remembered him as very genuine and was impressed by his “nonconfrontational way of de-escalating the situation that made me walk away feeling okay about it.”
Scott had wanted to tell everyone about the wrongs done to his family. But, to Scott’s surprise, people he met on the tour were already aware. On the trip, different groups that didn’t know each other would say the same prayer—Ephesians 6:10-13—for Scott.
“It was crazy,” Scott said.
He asked Tigges if the prayer was popular and that all Christians would have a copy in their wallets, and Tigges said no.
At their stop in Tulsa, Oklahoma, they met another Christian who told them that as she was cooking and cleaning to prepare for their visit, she had the urge to read some scriptures.
Then, the following verse came to her: “Who are you, O great mountain? Before Zerubbabel you shall become a plain. And he shall bring forward the top stone amid shouts of ‘Grace, grace to it!’”
She thought it was dark and didn’t understand the purpose until Scott walked into her house. It was then she realized that the prayer was for Scott.
Tigges said the messages from the prayers throughout the journey were that “your efforts will be glorified, and God will be glorified by you standing firm for your daughter in this fight.”
“And that gave him tremendous peace,” Tigges told The Epoch Times. “I think it’s the first time he’s heard someone affirming that this is going to be dealt with.”
Scott said the pure anger had become more manageable over time and that the family was “more laser-focused and more determined to get them [Loudoun County officials] to tell the truth.”
The father said he was lucky that his daughter had responded to equine therapy, which she started in August 2021, and came around. And the family became closer during the a-year-and-a-half ordeal.
The cross-country trip was a gift to Scott. He embarked on the journey without a clear purpose other than sharing his grievances.
“After a couple of stops, spending time with strong Christian believers, my purpose became clear. It was not to spread my message but to hear theirs,” he said.
“The message I received was that God’s door was already open to me, he has a purpose for me. I just had to believe in him, learn to trust him, and he would take care of the rest.
“Once I put my troubles in his hands and let go, a peace came over me, one I hadn’t experienced before.
“And just like that, my questions were answered, my doubts gone. I decided to walk with the Lord, a greater power than myself, something I had been missing all along.”
