The Virginia governor, Glenn Youngkin, has pardoned a father who was arrested at a school board meeting in 2021 after his daughter was sexually assaulted in a school bathroom by another student.
The man’s arrest occurred after disrupting a Loudoun county school board meeting after the assault, providing a key moment in what was then a budding parents’ rights movement across schools nationwide.
The father, who is not being identified by the Guardian because it would identify the victimized teen, disrupted the meeting because he was upset at the handling of an investigation into his daughter’s assault at Stone Bridge high school.
The assault garnered nationwide headlines in part because the student wore a skirt into the bathroom where the attack occurred.
The girl’s father at one point suggested his daughter had been victimized by “radical gender policies”, with his attorneys charging that the attacker identified as gender fluid. Authorities have said that was not accurate and that the attacker was neither transgender or gender fluid.
Another reason why the case caused a national firestorm involved the attacker’s transfer to another school, where the teenager assaulted another girl. That student, who was 14 at the time, was ultimately convicted of two charges of sodomy.
He has since been ordered to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life, was sent to a psychiatric treatment facility and was put on probation until he is 18.
Loudon county’s education superintendent, Scott Ziegler, faced an investigation and was fired for his handling of the case, which unfolded in a Washington DC suburb with the US’s highest median household income.
Meanwhile, the victim’s father was convicted of disorderly conduct and obstruction of justice charges.
An appeals court later vacated the obstruction charge. On Sunday, Youngkin pardoned the father of the disorderly conduct conviction.
The governor called the father “a dedicated parent who’s faced unwarranted charges in his pursuit to protect his daughter”.
The governor, who is being touted as a 2024 Republican presidential candidate, also said the father’s “commitment to his child despite the immense obstacles is emblematic of the parental empowerment movement that started in Virginia”.
Youngkin told Fox News Sunday that he’d had the “privilege” of issuing the pardon.
“We righted a wrong,” he said. “He should’ve 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.”
The man, Youngkin added, “did what any father would do, what any parent would do, which is stand up for their child. This was a gross miscarriage of justice.”
