Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin has pardoned a father who was arrested at a school board meeting in 2021 after his daughter was sexually assaulted in a school bathroom by a transgender student.
Scott Smith made international headlines in 2021 after he was dragged out of a school board meeting in Loudoun, Virginia, following an angry outburst at the board. Smith had been attempting to protest a gender inclusivity policy adopted by the board which would allow students to use the washrooms they identified with.
According to pro-woman outlet Reduxx, Smith’s outburst came shortly after a skirt-wearing 15-year-old boy had entered a women’s washroom at Stone Bridge High School and sexually assaulted his young daughter.
In an apparent attempt to ensure its bathroom policies passed, Loudoun County Public Schools attempted to scrub knowledge of the assaults. According to New York Post, just before Smith’s angry outburst at the meeting, the district’s superintendent, Scott Ziegler, insisted there hadn’t been “any record of assaults occurring in [the school’s] restrooms.”
Ziegler added: “The predator transgender student or person simply does not exist.”
In addition, a woman wearing a rainbow shirt attending the meeting similarly accused Smith of lying on his daughter’s behalf. Jackie Schworm threatened to ruin Smith’s plumbing business for claiming a transgender student committed the assault. After calling the Schworm “a b*tch,” Smith was forcibly removed from the premises by police.
One month after Smith’s arrest, the trans-identified male student in the case was charged with “two counts of forcible sodomy, one count of anal sodomy, and one count of forcible fellatio.”
Disturbingly, while Smith had initially been told the boy was on house confinement following his arrest, he later learned the perpetrator had quietly been transferred to another school in the district. Months later, the teen would be charged with battery and abduction after forcing another girl into an empty classroom against her will and touching her inappropriately.
The boy was later found guilty of all charges and sent to a youth detention center. He has reportedly been placed on the sex offender registry.
Despite having correctly identified his daughter’s rapist, Smith was found guilty of disorderly conduct in relation to his outburst at the June school board meeting. The father was sentenced to 10 days in jail, which was “suspended for one year and contingent on good behavior.”
Now, nearly two years after the debacle that made international headlines, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin has announced that Smith will be pardoned. Youngkin stated he believes Smith never should have been arrested in the first place.
“I spoke with Mr. Smith on Friday, and I had the privilege of telling Mr. Smith that I will pardon him, and we did that on Friday,” explained Youngkin yesterday. “We righted a wrong. He should’ve never been prosecuted here. This was a dad standing up for his daughter.”
Youngkin, who prides himself on being a champion for paternal rights in education, added: “His daughter had been sexually assaulted in the bathroom of a school, and no one was doing anything about it … Mr. Smith did what any father would do, what any parent would do, which is stand up for their child,” Youngkin concluded that the ordeal had been a “gross miscarriage of justice.”
Youngkin is one of many Republican governors currently advocating for parents to have a say in their child’s education and is cracking down on schools that refuse to inform parents when their child expresses gender confusion, Fox News reports.
