New York TimesMichelle Goldberg was an editor who wrote offensively about the assault of a young girl in school’s girls’ toilet. A fellow student committed the attack on a girl wearing a skirt at Loudoun County High School. The story was kept quiet at first, perhaps to avoid being criticized by trans-extremists.
Liberal Goldberg spun hard to minimize the story’s damage to conservative targets like school boards and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe, who is currently locked in a tight race with Republican Glenn Youngkin: “The Right’s Big Lie About a Sexual Assault in Virginia.”
“Big Lie” is a reference to Adolf Hitler’s idea of a lie so enormous that it’s perversely easier to believe than a small lie. Why Goldberg thinks the concept applies to an anguished father’s story about a sexual assault on his daughter is an open question.
It’s a tale about how right-wingers turned the sexual assault of teenagers into a cultural war fantasy. It’s about how a distorted tale on a conservative website became grist for a nationwide moral panic.
Scott Smith, a middle-aged plumber, was taken from Loudoun County’s School Board meeting on June 22. His lips were bleeding, and his hands were tied behind his back. According to the local newspaper Loudon 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….
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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.
….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.
Goldberg worked desperately (as have others in the media, like Jon Ward’s hostile piece on Yahoo! News) to neutralize the story.
Outrage over the assaults has loomed over the Virginia gubernatorial race, where the Republican candidate, Glenn Youngkin, has sought to harness parental anger toward school boards accused of putting left-wing dogma above student welfare….
Goldberg set up what she thought were a series of devastating reveals.
But this week, during a juvenile court hearing, a fuller picture of Smith’s daughter’s ordeal emerged. She suffered something atrocious. It had nothing at all to do, however, with trans bathroom policies. Instead, like many women and girls, she was a victim of relationship violence.
A boy in a skirt entered a girl’s bathroom…but it has nothing to do with “trans bathroom policies”?
Smith’s daughter testified that she’d previously had two consensual sexual encounters with her attacker in the school bathroom. On the day of her assault, they’d agreed to meet up again….
The boy was indeed wearing a skirt, but that skirt didn’t authorize him to use the girls’ bathroom….
Evidently the school districts bathroom policies weren’t approved until months after the assaultIt was.
The Loudoun County school board’s shameful silence; the possibility the assault was hushed up to avoid the wrath of trans activists; the gross irresponsibility of allowing boys free access to girl’s safe spaces in the first place….all these points Goldberg studiously ignored in the name of chipping away at a story that may prove devastating to the election hopes of Terry McAuliffe.
Goldberg ended as she began, conveniently (for Democrats in Virginia) dismissing the sordid story as a “useful lie.”
An incredibly useful lie is better than a sad, complicated truth.
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