A father who erupted in anger at a Virginia school board meeting after his daughter was sexually assaulted in the bathroom by a boy in a skirt has told of his relief at being pardoned by the governor for disorderly conduct.
Scott Smith went viral in June 2021 when he was wrestled to the floor by police and dragged out of the meeting over transgender issues.
His daughter had been attacked in the girls’ bathroom, and when he raised the issue, chaos ensued. He was subsequently given a 10-day suspended sentence for disorderly conduct.
On Monday, Smith told Fox News that he had been angered not by the school board, but by a ‘radical’ woman at the meeting.
Smith said he called the woman an expletive, and she threatened to ‘ruin’ him via social media. That, he has now revealed, is what sparked the scuffle that saw him arrested and charged by a George Soros-backed DA – who was later removed from the case.
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin pardoned Smith last week for his crimes in the incident.
‘I never spoke to the school board. That whole story is really kind of askew,’ he told Fox.
‘I was sitting in my little area and a radical protestor came, and I heard this shouting behind me and I turned around, and it was my wife and her, I didn’t even know my wife was there. She came in behind me.
‘So I stepped in, tried to explain to this lady what was going on. She looked at me dead in the face and said: “That’s not true, that’s not what happened. You are lying.”‘
Police intervened to separate the two, and Smith was eventually handcuffed and dragged out.
Smith condemned the local district attorney Buta Biberaj for pressing charges against him in the first place, calling her ‘one of the most evil people I’ve ever met.’
Biberaj objected to the pardon of Smith, saying it was a ‘political stunt’ and ‘unprecedented, inappropriate intervention into an active legal case.’
Biberaj also accused Youngkin of making himself ‘judge and jury’ over herself, and other officials in the case.
Smith told Fox that she needed to be voted out of office.
‘Unfortunately, I had to deal with her face to face with the prosecution of the sexual predator of my daughter,’ said Smith.
‘We need to vote her out.’
The Stone Bright High School student who attacked his daughter went on to attack another girl at a different school.
The case became emblematic of the culture wars of 2021, and the exceedingly tense school board meetings that resulted.
Youngkin, the Republican governor, said on Sunday that Smith should not have been charged.
‘We righted a wrong,’ said Youngkin. ‘He should have never been prosecuted here. This was a dad standing up for his daughter.
‘His daughter had been sexually assaulted in the bathroom of a school, and no one was doing anything about it.
‘This was a gross miscarriage of justice.’
Youngkin said the school had ‘covered it up’ and told Fox that parents must have the final say over their children’s education.
‘Mr Smith did what any father would do, what any parent would do, which is stand up for their child,’ Youngkin told Fox News Sunday.
‘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.’
In the May 2021 attack, Smith’s daughter was pinned down to the floor and assaulted by the boy inside a restroom stall, with a teacher later testifying that she saw two pairs of feet but did not interfere.
The boy was still at large three hours after the assault, during which time Principal Tim Flynn tried to get a no-trespass letter against Scott, who had arrived at the school.
The male student, who was wearing a skirt on the day of the attack, was allowed into the bathroom because he told staff he identified as female.
The school’s policy allowed him to use the girls’ bathroom.
The suspect was only arrested two months later, but still went on to sexually assault another girl at a different school, Broad Run High School, on October 6. The teen was later found guilty in a juvenile court.
From sexual assault to sentencing: Timeline of teen boy in skirt
