The Daily Wire-Loudoun County story has come under question. What's the truth of things?

The Daily Wire's blockbuster story, that the daughter of a man arrested at a Loudoun County, Virginia school board meeting held on a policy related to the transgender issue (contentious race/CRT/equity issues were also discussed, according to Jesse Singal) — one of many examples of these raucous meetings that the National School Boards Association had controversially asked the FBI to look into as possible acts of "terrorism" — had been sexually assaulted in the girls' bathroom of a nearby school by a boy wearing a skirt, and that this had been covered up by Loudoun County Public Schools (LCPS), has been a major story, one that's had legs and significant political implications. It's now come under question more than once though (two examples are Jesse Singal (linked above) and Robby Soave). These objections will be reviewed here and the truth of things determined.

Many people on the right may not have even noticed that the veracity of the story has come under question, but having significant political implications, whether or not it's accurate matters a great deal. In any case, the truth always matters.

So, to get to the bottom of things, first, let's briefly (as possible) review what the Daily Wire piece said. It's a long article that says a lot of different things.

The original Daily Wire piece

The headline is: "Loudoun County schools tried to conceal sexual assault against daughter in bathroom, father say." That alleged coverup is dealt with but much of the article is about how the father, Scott Smith, was badly misrepresented and mistreated by the media and those on the the left, and how the full story of what happened in this case puts the hot issue of these raucous school board meetings in a different light — the school board's handling of his daughter's case, the false statement made at the meeting that they had no record of any sexual assaults taking place in LCPS restrooms, and a progressive fellow parent they thought was a friend who treated the Smiths with hostility and denied their daughter's experience, all contributed to the blow-up that ensued. There's also a lot on the corruption of local politics and breakdown of relationships in Loudoun County due to the infusion of progressive politics into the community, some of which is explained to have originated from partisan politics at the national level.

The centerpiece of the article is probably the school board meeting where Scott Smith was arrested but considerable context on and history of the sexual assault and the system's handling of it is provided before they go into more detail on the incident itself. As stated, Scott Smith's daughter, a ninth-grader, was sexually assaulted by a boy wearing a skirt in the girls' bathroom of their school, Stone Bridge High School. The Daily Wire doesn't go into detail on the assault beyond noting that charges were filed for "Forcible Sodomy." In a Washington Post article on the teen's conviction for this crime the victim says that her attacker "flipped [her] over" and pinned her on the ground. The assailant's mother told the Daily Mail that he "insert[ed] himself in her anus."

The Daily Wire piece tells of how Stone Bridge High School and LCPS allegedly handled the incident and another time the police were called on/used against Scott Smith, in the principal's office where he found out what happened. Note that parts of this narrative are some of the things that have come under question on the story.

Scott Smith says that he was called to come to the school because his daughter had been "physically assaulted in a bathroom by a male" and that he determined what happened was more serious than his daughter being beaten up. He says that the school told him it was "handling the incident in-house" and that deputies from the sheriff's office only responded to the incident when they were called on him, and he claims that it was thanks to his pressure that they were able to escort his daughter to the hospital and administer a rape kit that night.

He acknowledges making a scene in the principals office, stating that he "went nuts" and called the principal a "p—-," for which six cop cars are said to have showed up. We're told that on the day of the incident the principal sent out an email to the community that said nothing about the sexual assault that took place there and treated the upset father as the only potential threat to students, even going so far as to offer counseling services specifically for the few students who witnessed the blow-up. The text of this email was reproduced in the Daily Wire piece and shared here:

Good evening Stone Bridge families this [sic] is Stone Bridge Principal Tim Flynn. There was an incident in the main office area today that required the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office to dispatch deputies to Stone Bridge. The incident was confined to the main office and the entrance area to the school. There was no threat to the safety of the student body. The incident was witnessed by a small number of students who were meeting with staff adjacent to the main office. Counseling services and the services of our Unified Mental Health Team are available for any student who may need to talk about today’s incident. Students might have noticed Sheriff’s Office personnel on campus and I wanted to let you know that something out of the ordinary happened at school today. The safety of our students and staff is the top priority of Loudoun County Public Schools.

Scott Smith says that "LCPS wash[ed] their hands of this" and that it was only taken seriously because of the sheriff's office.

The article goes into the history of Beth Barts, one of the progressive school board members who dismissed the public's concerns, and her involvement with a private activist group, "officially known as the Anti-Racist Parents of Loudoun County and later known to critics as Chardonnay Antifa," that we have a record of due to a criminal investigation into the group from the sheriff's office. These sorts of things are a form of political vigilantism. 

We're told that Beth Barts had a bad reputation even among her peers. The group she was in expressed exasperation towards dealing with the public, treated them as "evil," talked of "exposing [them] publicly," shared lists of parents who organized against "diversity library books," and even discussed lobbying the SPLC to label these parents as "hate groups." The story of one of the parents in this private group, Jackie Schworm, crosses over with Scott Smith's daughter at the school board meeting in question.

Everything the Daily Wire says about and the context they provide on the school board meeting where Scott Smith was arrested, where all these stories intersect, follows.

Nearly 250 members of the public had signed up to speak at the meeting. Many of them were critical of the progressive initiatives — this being the tone of previous meetings as well. The topic of discussion was the trans issue, with one of the things debated being, as Jesse Singal puts it, "a new policy that would enshrine transgender and gender nonconforming students’ ability to use the school facilities matching their gender identities." The Daily Wire tells us that from the dais Beth Barts painted the public's concern over these things as paranoia and prejudice. "Our students do not need to be protected, and they are not in danger," she said. 

In response to her question if assaults in their school bathrooms occur regularly, Superintendent Scott Ziegler replied that "to [his] knowledge," they didn't have any records of assaults occurring (at all). The board chair then asked if they had had "any issues involving transgender students in our bathrooms." To this Ziegler gave a speech with common arguments you hear from proponents of these things: that the data does not support the idea that trans students were more likely to assault cisgender (i.e. people without gender dysphoria) students in restrooms than were other students, and that it's irrelevant because it "would be investigated and dealt with to the full extent of the rules or the law" regardless.

An encounter with Jackie Schworm leads to the scuffle that ended in Scott Smith's arrest. At the meeting, Schworm sought out the Smiths and demanded to know what side they were on. Scott's wife, Jess, had mentored Schworm's daughter and they had been friendly. When Schworm found out what they thought though she berated them that they were wrong. When Scott Smith tried to tell her what happened to his daughter he says Schworm looked him straight in the eyes and said "that’s not what happened." He says she then noticed that he was wearing a shirt with the name of his plumbing business on it and threatened that she was "going to ruin [his] business on social media." Scott Smith responded by calling her a "bitch." At this a police officer monitoring the exchange is said to have pulled on his arm, which he yanked away, leading to the arrest. Amidst the chaos his wife cried out, "my child was raped at school, and this is what happens!"

The Daily Wire tracked Schworm down and when asked about the incident she first claimed to have had nothing to do with it, before modifying that testimony and stating that Jess Smith actually provoked the incident by claiming that CRT was a made-up issue. The article seemingly confirms Schworm's involvement, as well as certain implied aspects of her character.

Scott Smith was widely mocked and demonized after embarrassing images of the incident (his bulging stomach bare and pants pulled down) went viral and had to put up temporary fencing around his house to keep the media out while dealing with the embarrassment of having his face plastered all over newspapers and television. The county's top elected prosecutor, Buta Biberaj, a progressive who has close ties to ideological allies in the school board and who ran on a platform of ending "mass incarceration," made special effort to punish him by personally appearing in court to prosecute him (this is a county of 400,000 residents) for disorderly conduct and resisting arrest, pushing for jail time for misdemeanors.

Scott Smith's lawyer says she expected the charges would be dropped, and she notes how odd it is for a disorderly conduct case to even go forward, yet alone for Biberaj to be seeking jail time. Her actions are said to be particularly galling considering that she should have known about the case of Smith's daughter. An example is provided of her alleged double standard in prosecution where she let off a man facing charges of strangulation, abduction, and assault on a family member with a small unsecured bond who went on to murder his wife. Biberaj's story also ties into the Anti-Racist Parents Facebook group — she was a member — and the corruption of local politics, another significant aspect of the Daily Wire story. One such example they provide is quoted in full here:

When citizens collected enough signatures to begin a court process recalling Barts, partly for her activities in the Anti-Racist Parents Facebook group, it would fall, under the vagaries of Virginia law, to Biberaj to prosecute the recall. Biberaj did not recuse herself, even though she was part of that group and promoted a letter to the editor that mocked the recall effort and those opposed to transgender policies. A judge ultimately had to intervene to disqualify her.

The article tells of how hardline partisan activists took over local politics in Loudoun County, backed by big donor money and an infusion of cash from Democrats across the country. One cause of this was Juli Briskman, the person who was famously fired for flipping off then-President Trump's passing motorcade. She set up a GoFundMe and used the windfall she earned on that to run for a position on the county's board of supervisors. She won 54% of the vote and we're told she turned "an obscure position previously concerned largely with activities like paving roads into a soapbox for national partisan affairs." Biberaj was elected by just a 1% margin and supported by $845,000 in cash from George Soros, a number over seven times what the Republican incumbent spent altogether. Progressives took advantage of the fact that these are typically low-turnout elections, partly due to being held in odd-numbered years and partly because they're not intended to be particularly political positions.

We're also told that the elected sheriff was a "relief valve" in this and that the Democrat-controlled board of supervisors pushed to strip them of their powers and create a police force that would report to them instead. This could be one way in which the school board worked to cover up the incident, and that may be the implication, but the Daily Wire article doesn't provide enough information to say.

The school board would eventually go on to approve the transgender policy in question. Smith couldn't participate because he was banned from the school board building. He says he was told to keep quiet to let the legal process against his daughter’s assailant play out and that it was hard for him to keep quiet on what happened. But then, while expecting a guilty plea for the accused on October 14, he heard from a Sheriff's Office press release that there'd been another sexual assault, from what unexpectedly turned out to be the same perpetrator. The Smiths say they were never told that the person was a repeat offender and they don't know why he was still in school and able to re-offend. His court case was postponed to October 25 to handle both charges together.

One important thing the article notes is how typical a community Loudoun County is in America, not the kind of place you'd expect these sort of left-wing affairs to occur. It's implied that it could happen anywhere. The article also at one point goes through a tangent where the they suggest Jackie Schworm and the Smiths go through a process of "restorative justice" somehow. Aside from what Schworm's evasive and hostile responses to the Daily Wire's questions says about the mindset of the progressives involved, there's little here affecting the core of the story.

The article ends by noting that "so far" (at the time of writing), with two girls sexually assaulted, "the only person to be convicted of a crime is the victim’s father," and also that Scott Smith's victimized daughter has adopted increasingly progressive views since, suggesting that these progressives in power may find that a happy ending.

Reviewing the objections

Now let's review some objections that have been raised over the story.

The first I saw was from Jesse Singal, someone I'd describe as a relatively independent liberal and sometimes critic of the illiberal left. On his Substack, though he notes that "most of the basic facts in [the] case have...been confirmed by other media outlets," he investigates a "jaw-dropping" passage in the piece that implies, as he puts it, that the school "at best dallied in escalating this alleged rape to the police, and at worst had no plans to do so." 

Singal got a hold of police logs and obtained information from the spokesman for the Loudon County Sheriff's Office that confirmed that the police had been alerted to the incident and begun their investigation before they were called on what's described as a victim's disruptive parent. Singal says that when he contacted the Daily Wire reporter, Luke Rosiak, over this, they didn't reply before publishing another article defending their interpretation of the incident through the police logs, that they got from Singal.

The Daily Wire response that Singal posts a paragraph of notes that what Scott Smith meant was that "the case was being handled by personnel who work in the school full-time and not a team of police specialists capable of collecting evidence necessary to support a criminal prosecution." Singal argues that they're still being misleading by implying there was some mismanagement of the case — he says by the police, but the question is how the school system handled the incident — without reason. There's no doubt in the original piece that the real police had been addressing this perpetrator in some fashion. How he was able to re-offend may be another issue, or related to their handling of the first case — a lot of things are unclear.

Singal ends by sharing his embarrassment from sharing a story based on misleading reporting (he reports critically on the left's handling of the trans issue so may have been receptive to it for that reason) while noting that "this was one of the only parts of the storyline that hadn’t...been confirmed by other outlets." One can imagine how Scott Smith may have misunderstood the process that was underway in the understandable fit of anger he felt over what happened to his daughter, and it's possible that the school and police together handled it properly. It's just one small part of the story he's objecting to though, and it's hard to say without knowing more about how these investigations work just how misleading the Daily Wire's reporting was on even that point. More on this in a bit.

One important article in the development of what we'll call the counter-story on this may have been The Washington Post's report on the conviction of the boy who sexually assaulted Scott Smith's daughter and another girl. It provided fuller context for the sexual assault of Scott Smith's daughter, from the testimony of the victim herself, as well as the defense's narrative on the case, some of which seems to have been taken up by others as proof that the Daily Wire story was misleading.

The victim (Scott Smith's daughter) testified that she and her attacker had agreed to meet up in the school bathroom that day, where they'd engaged in sexual activity before, though as The Washington Post says, "they had not explicitly discussed having sex beforehand" ("explicitly" is the Post's wording and its meaning is unclear). This has been taken to mean (e.g. in Robby Soave's piece in Reason) that the attacker and victim were in some sort of relationship, and that this reduces or cancels the significance of the case, especially the political implications of it. What the victim describes though is very clearly rape, regardless of the history between them: she explicitly refused her attacker and she was "flipped over" and pinned on the ground before being penetrated.

The second critical take I saw I came across just recently. It's from Robby Soave at Reason, the libertarian online magazine. He questions the relevance of the sexual assault to the transgender issue, based partly on the additional context for the sexual assault provided by the Washington Post piece just reviewed. The headline claims that "conservatives wrongly portrayed the Loudoun County sexual assault as a transgender bathroom issue," followed by the subheading: "The perpetrator did not target a random student, and he did not choose the girls bathroom because of his gender identity." 

Here's what may be the main point of his piece:

The Daily Wire's interview with Smith portrayed the idea that the daughter's assailant was "gender fluid" as central to the story. The implicit idea is that the perpetrator wore a skirt in order to gain access to the women's bathroom at Stone Bridge High School and carry out the attack. Over the summer, Loudoun County approved a new policy making it easier for transgender individuals to use the bathroom of their choice, and thus a connection was established between this policy and what happened to Smith's daughter.

That policy wasn't actually implemented until August, it turns out. But even if the school had begun enforcing it before that, there's no reason to think the assailant's actions had anything to do with accommodations for trans people.

As he puts it, the attacker "did not target a random student, and he did not choose the girls bathroom because of his gender identity." He quotes Cathy Young in Arc Digital as concluding something similar: "it does mean, at the very least, that the boy did not ambush a random girl after using his supposed 'genderfluid' status to enter the bathroom."

But it is literally a case of a gender-fluid person sexually assaulting someone in a bathroom of the opposite sex, something progressives in general have either insisted does not happen or argued that the data doesn't support being any special threat, and that the superintendent of the schools in question claimed there were no cases of (that he knew of). 

The Daily Mail interviewed the boy's mother (see link above) and despite her, what can only be described as, desperate attempts at defending her son's behavior the piece essentially confirms everything. The mother insists that her son is not transgender — she says that he identifies as male — and that the incident and her son's repeat behavior have nothing to do with the transgender issue, but she acknowledges that he wears skirts and is trying to "find himself" through exploring gender identity, and that he identifies as "pansexual." The original version of this Daily Mail article had a photo of the student dressed as a girl and standing in front of a pride and another LGBT flag. It certainly looks like it has something to do with the LGBT agenda, and critically, progressive activists seemingly interpreted it that way too — that would explain why Jackie Schworm forcefully denied Scott Smith's daughter's experience at the school board meeting.

The case involves a boy who in dressing like a girl repeatedly managed to engage in sexual behavior, leading up to rape, in a place in normal times he'd never be allowed in. The mother's insistence that he didn't wear a skirt to trick his way into sex is irrelevant, and so is the fact that the school's policy to allow people to enter the restrooms of the gender they identify with was technically yet to be implemented. The opportunity he had to commit the rape came from his entry into the restroom of the opposite sex, something that was forbidden in the past and has become normalized due specifically to the transgender agenda.

It gets worse too because the boy's mother's telling of the story implies that her son was not very aggressively pursued. She says that when she accompanied her son on the Tuesday following the incident the principal tried to "delicately tap dance" the sensitive subject of his gender identity. When she told them that he was male they responded that they never knew that. So interestingly enough, the boy's own mother says that the school found her son's case to be awkward due to the progressive politics involved.

After the boy was arrested and charged in July he was released pending trial. The court ordered that he not return to Stone Bridge. We hear that his mother contacted the Stone Bridge principal who she claims was still preparing for him to return there. She then spoke with LCSD's director of school administration who informed her that due to Title IX rules her son had the right to return to Stone Bridge because "LCPS could not conduct an investigation or determine disciplinary action until the law enforcement aspect was completed." She then claims that there was confusion because Virginia courts say one thing while the education department, which she notes is under the executive branch, says another. The district ended up transferring her son to another school where after missing only the first 10 days, he committed another sexual assault, this time dragging a girl into a classroom and inappropriately touching her.

It's hard to know how much of what the mother says about the handling of her son's case is meant in defense of him but her testimony actually tends to imply that the story is even more embarrassing for the local system and progressives. She gives the impression that the school system found her son's case to be politically awkward due to the LGBT politics involved, that he may have been offered additional protection under Title IX rules because he was taken as LGBT (or adjacent), that consideration was given even to letting him return to the same school, and that there was seemingly nothing done to protect other students from this known sex offender.

It's worth noting too that one objection raised against the piece is his mother's attempt at a defense of her son's behavior — that he's now been convicted for — but it's desperate and fairly reprehensible, literally arguing that it wasn't so much rape because the victim didn't fight back enough. Though one picks up some hint of that thinking in the general discussion of the case, it's not fair to sully the people mentioned in this article as supporting it in any way.

Where things stand

The two most serious objections to the story there have been, as I see it, are as follows:

• That the original Daily Wire story was misleading in implying that Stone Bridge High School, the school board, and/or the police dragged their feet on the investigation and prosecution of the sexual assault, including failing to push forward the case the day of until Scott Smith pressured them to.
• That the story was misread as having to do with the transgender issue, and that some or all of the story comes across differently in this light.

I was concerned about the first objection going into this review (to be transparent about my bias), but it's not even clear if the Daily Wire was misleading on the incident in the principal's office. Without knowing more about how investigations of sexual assaults like this are handled — how they typically work and how they should — nothing much can be said about how alarming it was for it to be being handled by just a police officer stationed full-time at the school, or what was conveyed to Scott Smith by the principal. It's proven from the police logs that there was some investigation of the assault already underway, but as explained, there are several reasons to think it may have been an insufficient effort, and that the school board was reluctant to talk about it, owing partly to the LGBT politics involved.

The second objection I think is the most significant. Even the school treated the boy as if he were effectively transgender though. The argument that he didn't intentionally exploit the loophole to rape the girl is irrelevant (there's no way to get into his head and know his thinking but there's also no reason to rule it out, given his history of predatory behavior) for the reasons gone over above, and there are good reasons to think that the system failed to properly deal with the boy, specifically due to those politics.

There's one bit at the end of the Daily Wire piece that can definitely be seen as misleading. It's where they say that though two girls have been sexually assaulted in school, by the same person, "so far, the only person to be convicted of a crime is the victim’s father." Although the system may have failed to more aggressively pursue the assailant and protect other students, there's little doubt that they were working towards a conviction after the full investigation had begun.

Let's end with a point-form summation of where things stand on the piece:

• The school board incident involving Scott Smith was unfairly reported on given what happened. Even in the most uncharitable interpretation of the story, his daughter was in fact raped and the superintendent lying about there being no known incidents and the provocative comments of the left-wing activists there in dismissing her experience understandably enraged him. Considering how emblematic this incident was taken to be of these school board meetings in general, and the fact that the FBI was asked to look into these things as "domestic terrorism" (with this being one prominent example), some serious soul-searching is in order for the media and federal law enforcement.
• The degree to which there was a coverup of the incident, or dragging of feet in addressing the assailant, is up to debate, but there is reason to think there was a problem. The assailant did go on to sexually assault another person, and his mother's testimony implies as much.
• Scott Smith's blow-up in the principal's office may or may not have been accurately presented, but if not, it doesn't cancel out the previous point.
• The "Anti-Racist Parents" group looks as bad as originally presented, which is typical of these things. The abuse of power by the prosecutor (a participant in this group) and the vindictive and vigilante-style behavior of the people in the group is plain to see. It's clear that the one progressive parent, Jackie Schworm, lied to the Daily Wire about her role in it. Progressive hypocrisy on the key value of theirs of opposition to incarceration is also clearly laid bare.
• Although it's naturally a matter of perspective, I think the piece effectively demonstrates what a nightmare life can become for regular people in typical places (the Daily Wire argues that Loudoun County is a very typical, middle-of-the-road community) when progressive politics takes over: school boards imposing questionable progressive policies against widespread vociferous public opposition, abusive prosecutors working to literally jail the parents of rape victims out of political bias, and the media misrepresenting the story.

In conclusion, this remains a very significant story.