Fairfax County Schools lawyers try to discredit former student’s ‘story,’ as victims’ advocate criticizes ‘boys club’ in the courtroom

By Asra Q. Nomani 
Fairfax County Times
9 min read

In Courtroom 1000 on the 10th floor of Alexandria’s U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, a small battalion of mostly male attorneys for Fairfax County Public Schools officials lined up on Monday against a 24-year-old former student as she sat, composed and professional.

On the left side of the windowless, wood-paneled courtroom. B.R., or “Kate” as she has been called in the courtroom, alleges that school officials didn’t help her when she was sexually harassed 12 years ago as a seventh grader at Rachel Carson Middle School. 

And, as the school district’s lawyers waged their battle to win in the court of law, another outside counsel for the school district, Michael York, sat in the gallery and quietly passed out business cards to spectators to help the school district win its case on another front: the court of public opinion. A former journalist turned lawyer, York’s presence was noteworthy, raising conflict-of-interest issues, because he is also president-elect of the Virginia Bar Association, a powerful organization that governs, regulates, and disciplines the state’s attorneys and evaluates judges, including for the Virginia seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, which hears appeals for decisions from the Alexandria federal court. York has chaired the Legal Ethics Committee and served on the Judicial Candidate Evaluation Committee. 

In response to a public records request from the Fairfax County Times, Fairfax County Public Schools shared a July 2019 letter of engagement and retainer agreement that John Foster, the school district’s general counsel, signed with York and another agreement the two men signed in December 2022. The agreement said York’s firm, Wehner & York, based in Reston, would “perform legal counseling, advice, and services, including counsel and representation regarding litigation and claims asserted against Client.” 

Fairfax County Times has learned that one of York’s assignments over the past year has been discrediting the young woman in the press. At trial’s start, York sat on the right side of the courtroom, a few rows behind the defendants, greeting the school district’s general counsel, Foster, with a hearty, “Hello, John!” as Foster arrived just a minute before the trial’s start time of 10 a.m. York and school district officials didn’t respond to requests for comment.

According to school district records, over the past four years, Fairfax County Public Schools has paid York’s firm, Wehner & York, a total of $184,413 from the Superintendent’s Office’s Operations budget. In 2020, it paid the firm $53,450; in 2021, $4,350; in 2022, $66,950; in 2023, $59,663. 

According to the contract he signed in 2019, Foster agreed to pay York’s firm $500 per hour, “billed in tenths of an hour.” By 2022, the hourly rate increased to $545, also billed in tenths of an hour.

Day one of the trial ran six-and-a-half hours, from 10 a.m. until 4:30 p.m., or about $3,542 for one day of work by just York. The trial is scheduled for 20 trial days or four weeks, with proceedings daily in Courtroom 1000 from about 10 a.m. until about 4 p.m., with one-hour lunch breaks at about 1 p.m. 

In the first hours of the trial, as lawyers quietly reviewed the jury pool, the trial’s judge, Rossie Alston Jr., bantered with them about high school football, basketball, golfing, and grilling barbecues on his favorite grill, made by the Traeger company. “Anyone else like to smoke…meat?” he asked, explaining that he worked side jobs teaching law at George Mason University and refereeing football in Virginia because “my beautiful wife likes nice things.” He noted he has two adult daughters and said, “They’re still in my pocket. All good.” 

Alston shared his disappointment with the athletic record of the “Washington Redskins or Commanders or whatever we call them,” the “AAA minor team, the Washington Nationals,” and the Red Wolves football team at his alma mater, Gar-Field Senior High School in Prince William County. He played a game guessing the mascot and school colors of the high school alma maters of the jury pool: “Riverside High School? Rams!” Former President Donald Trump nominated Alston to serve as a judge on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.

In the gallery, Alex Prout, a D.C. father and advocate for sexual assault victims, watched the proceedings, audibly horrified at moments. “It was a boys’ club in the courtroom,” he said later. 

“It was not a victim-centric, trauma-informed courtroom.” Even if well-intentioned to build rapport with the jury, the banter was “all part of the patriarchy – the manness – in the courtroom,” he said.

Prout, a former Deutsche Bank executive, is co-founder of a nonprofit based, I Have The Right To, launched after a boy was found guilty of raping his daughter, Chessy Prout, in a high-profile case at a boarding school in New Hampshire. “As the father of a survivor, my eyes have been opened to all of this. I was part of this patriarchy. Seeing it, I couldn’t be part of the patriarchy any longer.”

“The defense just used the typical playbook used by complicit institutions,” Prout said. “It’s used to describe rapes and sexual assaults as ‘incidents’ and ‘isolated incidents.’ They quietly try to undermine the credibility of their former student as crazy.”

Prout noted that, to his eye, the school board implemented a legal strategy dubbed “DARVO,” for “Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender,” to paint “Kate” and her family as aggressors, while school officials were heroes. In one peer-reviewed journal article, researchers noted, “DARVO (deny, attack, reverse victim and offender) is a response exhibited by perpetrators to deflect blame and responsibility. When using DARVO, perpetrators deny their involvement in wrongdoing, attack their victims’ credibility, and argue that they are the real victims.”

“Fairfax County Public Schools used DARVO to discredit the victim,” said Prout. “It was very evident today. This is an institution that says it’s there to care for students, but I looked at the faces of the nine defendants. There were just leering looks from them for the victim. These are people who have dedicated their lives to looking after children. It was shocking to me thinking of how much money was being spent with 14 lawyers for the school district. I saw 18 boxes of documents from their side. How much is Fairfax County spending of taxpayer money to combat a student who was sexually abused? Shame on Fairfax County.” 

In an opening statement, Andrew Brenner, a lawyer for the alleged victim at Boies Schiller Flexner, told jurors that school officials were “deliberately indifferent” to pleas for help from the alleged victim, in alleged violation of laws known as Title IX statutes, protecting students from sex discrimination in schools. He alleged school officials also violated her First Amendment rights by retaliating against her when she filed complaints of harassment.

For her opening statement, the lone female lead on the defense team, Sona Rewari, an attorney at Hunton Andrews Kurth, stood within arm’s reach of the defendant and tried to raise doubts about the former student, referring to her claims as “her story” and frequently referring to “B.R. and her mother” as allegedly badgering school officials. In cases of alleged misconduct by authorities, from the Uvalde Elementary School shooting in Texas to incidents in Loudoun County, allegedly overbearing parents – including mothers – are often portrayed as the problem, not actions by authorities. 

Before “Kate” started at Rachel Carson Middle School, Rewari alleged, “She had emotional problems.”

“It’d be natural to think this might really have happened,” she noted, but she cautioned: “B.R.’s story has changed dramatically.” 

She promised: “You will see evidence that casts significant doubt,” again, on the young woman’s “story.” “Her PTSD,” or post-traumatic stress disorder, “is disputed” by the school district, Rewari said.

In the gallery, Kandise Lucas, an advocate for children with disabilities and special education needs, said the school district failed to conduct a thorough investigation into the allegations by “Kate,” implement an appropriate safety plan, or enforce a “no contact” policy between the alleged assailants and “Kate.” “Fairfax County Public Schools had clear policy violations,” said Lucas, who drove from Richmond with her teen daughter to witness the trial. She is the founder of Divine Interventions, a special education advocacy organization.

Soon after, sitting on the witness stand on the right side of the courtroom stuffed with current and former school officials who are defendants in the case, the alleged victim’s mother, Mrs. R, was the first witness of the trial to speak and she testified that a classmate, David, spread an untrue rumor that her daughter had given him oral sex at his home after a visit to a pumpkin patch with his family in the fall of 2011. She said classmates later badgered her daughter as a “slut,” “whore” and “bitch” and targeted her for sexual assaults “under her shirt,” “under her skirt,” and by her locker, until finally, she was raped and withdrew from school, depressed, anxiety-ridden and devastated. 

At one point, she testified, she was shocked to hear a message from an eighth-grade classmate, known as C.K., that said: “I’m going to stick my big black dick in your ass. Call me, bitch.”

When she called her daughter’s guidance counselor, the counselor told her that her daughter “had been trying to see me, but they have us so busy doing administrative work, I have not gotten back to her.”

Later, her voice steady and firm, Mrs. R told the jury that her daughter told her not to sip from the straw she was using to drink a smoothie. “Don’t do it, mommy!” she recalled her daughter, shouting. “My mouth is so dirty.”

That’s when, she said, her daughter told her about boys forcing her to do oral sex on them. Despite her efforts to find help for her daughter, she said, the attacks continued, leading to alleged rape.

As the plaintiff’s attorney, Allison Anderson, asked Mrs. R questions, the judge frequently interrupted, even taking over the testimony with his own questions directed at the witness.

Listening, Prout, the D.C. dad who has become an advocate for victims, couldn’t believe his ears. “That was such mansplaining,” he said.

In the courtroom during breaks, the glad-handing by York, the outside attorney hired by the school district and the president-elect of the Virginia Bar Association, raised eyebrows with survivor advocates, already troubled by insensitivities by the school district over the years to the needs of alleged sexual assault victims. York is set to be inducted into his new post during the group’s annual meeting on May 31 in Virginia Beach, followed by a dance party with an all-male, eight-man band, King Soul. His induction has been widely promoted.

Outside the courtroom, at day’s end, Prout, the D.C. father and survivor advocate, interviewed with a local TV station and was stunned to hear this question: “What if B.R. is crazy?” 

He responded: “That’s the school district’s smear campaign at work.” The interview didn’t air.

As “Kate” left the courtroom, the outside counsel, York, nearby, Prout stood in the doorway so she wouldn’t have to cross paths with the trial’s many defendants and expressed his apologies to her for the dynamics of the trial’s first day.

“I’m sorry for what you’ve gone through,” he said. “But know you’ve won just by forcing the school district into the courtroom and holding school officials accountable.”