A law firm with ties to Virginia’s Democrat gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe is fighting in court against Virginia students who said they have been sexually assaulted at school.
According to The Daily Wire, “In one case, the Hunton Andrews Kurth law firm, where McAuliffe served as a senior adviser from 2019 until recently, is battling a young woman who says that she was repeatedly raped on her Fairfax County middle school campus as a 12-year old and that she was slashed with a knife, burned with a lighter, anally penetrated, and gang raped.”
The report also notes how “the McAuliffe-linked law firm is seeking to have the case thrown out because it was filed under a pseudonym, even though there is no dispute that the school system knows who she is” and that although a judge rejected Hunton’s argument, “the firm would not relent, filing an appeal on behalf of its client, the Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS).”
While both Hunton and the McAuliffe campaign did not respond to The Daily Wire’s request for comment on whether the firm still employs the former governor, “McAuliffe reported income apparently linked to the firm in 2021, after announcing his run for governor of Virginia on December 8, 2020.”
The report later details a separate case in which a female student alleged that after FCPS administrators were notified of an unwanted sexual incident on a band trip, a school security officer told her “there was no point in seeking criminal charges, and the school gave an award to her alleged abuser.”
In defense of FCPS, Hunton told the court that the school system had “lost documentation showing its investigation of the allegations — in part because it was not using a sexual harassment allegation database that it had promised to use pursuant to a federal settlement in the other girl’s case.”
Moreover, the defense of FCPS was also joined by the National School Boards Association (NSBA), which filed its own amicus brief over the matter. Along with the school district and Hunton, the organization is reportedly “banking on an aggressive and novel interpretation of Title IX … that would be more favorable to school administrators and less favorable to victims.” Although the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals shot down such irrational logic, Hunton has indicated its intent to take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The NSBA has come under fire recently for asking the Biden administration to weaponize domestic terrorism laws to target parents opposed to anti-science mask mandates for children and the infiltration of racist curriculum in schools. One parent who was arrested at a Loudoun County school board meeting said the district covered up the rape of his daughter in a school bathroom by a boy wearing a skirt.
“Now, we ask that the federal government investigate, intercept, and prevent the current threats and acts of violence against our public school officials through existing statutes, executive authority, interagency and intergovernmental task forces, and other extraordinary measures to ensure the safety of our children and educators, to protect interstate commerce, and to preserve public school infrastructure and campuses,” the now-retracted letter reads. “As these acts of malice, violence, and threats against public school officials have increased, the classification of these heinous actions could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.”
More than 20 state school board associations have withdrawn their memberships from NSBA as a result, with Missouri and Ohio among the most recent.
