Justice Department report reprints Loudoun lawsuit alleging school officials downplayed 2021 Stone Bridge assault

A Justice Department report released this week reprints in full a federal lawsuit against the Loudoun County School Board and five former Loudoun County Public Schools officials. The lawsuit alleges that the officials responded with "deliberate indifference" to the 2021 sexual assault of a ninth-grade student in a girls' restroom at Stone Bridge High School.

The complaint, Jane Doe v. The Loudoun County School Board, was filed Oct. 24, 2025, in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia in Alexandria. It appears as Appendix E to the department's "2026 Report to Expose the Weaponization of Government Against Parents in Schools." The report is dated Oct. 5 and mainly examines former Attorney General Merrick Garland's 2021 memo on threats against school officials. The lawsuit's allegations have not been proven in court, and the report does not include a response from the defendants.

The named defendants are the School Board; former Superintendent Scott Ziegler; Mark Smith, then LCPS chief of staff and Title IX coordinator; Timothy Flynn, then principal of Stone Bridge; Calvin Adams, then a vice principal; and Cynthia McCarthy, then a school counselor.

Each individual is sued in his or her personal capacity. The complaint brings two counts, one under Title IX and one under the Equal Protection Clause, and asks for compensatory and punitive damages and a jury trial.

According to the complaint, the plaintiff was a 15-year-old student with disabilities documented in an individualized education program. On May 28, 2021, she was sexually assaulted in a girls' restroom stall by a male student wearing female attire. The complaint alleges that a school employee who entered the restroom during the assault saw two pairs of feet under the stall door but took no action "pursuant to policies or practices at Stone Bridge." The student was later convicted of sexual battery and forcible sodomy.

The complaint lays out the response that day as follows. The student reported the assault, and the school nurse recorded it. A staff member then told her mother by phone only that she had been "beat up." Flynn told the superintendent's office the student "alleges that another student attempted to rape her," wording the complaint calls an effort to downplay what happened. At 3:30 p.m., the district's chief operating officer emailed Ziegler and senior staff: "The incident at SBHS is related to policy 8040." The complaint describes Policy 8040 as a proposal to let students who identify as female use girls' restrooms, locker rooms and sports teams. That evening, Flynn sent families a message that the complaint says Ziegler edited and approved. It told them "there was no threat to the safety of the student body" and did not mention the assault. Ziegler emailed School Board members the same day about the assault allegation and about a "disruption" caused by the student's father.

The complaint says the assailant returned to Stone Bridge the next school day and was later moved to Broad Run High School because of a court order, not school discipline. It alleges that he sexually assaulted another student at Broad Run on Oct. 6, 2021, and that Ziegler did not tell the board it was the same student.

The complaint also centers on a June 22, 2021 School Board meeting. There, it says, Ziegler stated, "To my knowledge, we don't have any record of assaults occurring in our restrooms," and that "the predator transgender student or person simply does not exist." The complaint calls the statement a lie meant to protect the Policy 8040 proposal.

The complaint alleges further failures. LCPS did not open a Title IX investigation until Oct. 19, 2021, and did not finish it until April 26, 2022. The complaint says the district's normal timeline is 60 days. It says the district did not make a timely report to the Virginia Department of Education. In the next school year, the complaint says, the student was threatened and then beaten in a hallway in September 2021 while another student filmed it.

The DOJ report ties the lawsuit to its main subject. It identifies the plaintiff's father as Scott Smith, who was arrested at the June 22, 2021 meeting and later pardoned by then-Gov. Glenn Youngkin. The report says Smith was among the parents the National School Boards Association described as potential domestic terrorists in its Sept. 29, 2021 letter, which led to the Garland memo. That letter mentioned the Loudoun meeting arrest but did not name Smith.

The department has also taken a position in separate Loudoun litigation. At a June 2026 roundtable, then-Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said DOJ "moved to intervene" in a separate lawsuit against the Loudoun County School Board. In that case, parents allege their sons were suspended after objecting to sharing a locker room with a "self-identifying transgender" student.

The report does not describe the status of the Doe case.

Email the Loudoun County School Board:
April Chandler, april.chandler@lcps.org,
Anne Donohue, anne.donohue@lcps.org,
Deana Griffiths, deana.griffiths@lcps.org,
Ross Svenson, ross.stevenson@lcps.org,
Kari LaBell, kari.labell@lcps.org,
Jon Pepper, jonathon.pepper@lcps.org,
Lauren Shernoff, lauren.shernoff@lcps.org,
Sumera Rashid, sumera.rashid@lcps.org,
Amy Riccardi, amy.riccardi@lcps.org,

Loudoun County is a county in Northern Virginia. Its county seat is Leesburg.