To summarize, the male student cross dresses without identifying as a woman and regularly uses the woman’s restroom. (According to some reports, he also uses neopronouns). In May of 2021, the rapist met with with a girl with whom he had previously had a consensual relationship. This time the girl said that she didn’t want to have sex, but he raped her regardless.

During the rape, a staff member entered the bathroom. The rapist made the girl standup and stay silent. The staff member saw that two people were in the stall (against school policy) but neither inquired into what they were doing or reported them to the school.

After the girl goes home and tells her father what happened, he confronts the principal and demands that they take action. State law required that the principal alert the police and inform the students and parents of the school that a sexual assault occurred. Breaking the law, the school board instead transferred the rapist to another high school in the district and stonewalled the father’s attempts at justice.

Here’s where this goes from a local crime story to national news.

At the same time all this was going on, the Loudin County school board was preparing to implement one of the most liberal transgender policies in the country. During the June school board meeting, a community member asked the board whether there had been any reported cases of assault or inappropriate behavior by a student using the wrong bathroom, to which the superintendent responded “no”.

The raped girl’s father, who was in the audience, erupted at this point. He was yelling at the board, calling them liars, and refused to sit down when the board told him he was out of order. He was then arrested for disorderly conduct. The video of him getting arrested (though not the context around it) went viral, and played a major role in AG Merrick Garland’s public letter stating that the DOJ was investigating parents who disrupted school board meetings.

Days later, the conservative news site The Daily Wire published a detailed investigative journalism report cataloging everything in this saga, the laws broken by the school board, and that the transferred rapist shortly after being moved raped another student. The fallout from this is considered a major reason why republican Glenn Youngkin won the governor’s race weeks later.