Day 6: “Kate” on the stand for a second day, recalls details of alleged assaults, attempts to see school counselor

Editor’s Note: We recognize the sensitive nature of the material discussed in our series, covering the trial of B.R. v. Fairfax County School Board et al., regarding allegations of sexual assault, rape, and a coverup by school officials. Such topics can evoke strong emotions for readers. We have taken care to cover this trial with care and sensitivity while providing accurate and informative reporting. We encourage anyone affected by the content to seek support from professional resources.

Inside Courtroom 1000 of the federal courthouse in Alexandria, for day six of a trial over an alleged rape coverup by school officials, a young woman, “Kate,” transported about 50 people from the vaulted courtroom where she sat on the witness stand to a small corner park, 28.4 miles away at the corner of Middleton Farm Lane and Cherry Branch Lane in a quiet neighborhood in Herndon, in western Fairfax County. 

On Monday, the corner was blooming with daffodils and cherry blossoms, robins singing on the branches of an evergreen tree, a couple walking a tall poodle, and gardeners tossing mulch on well-manicured lawns.

Twelve years ago, “Kate” said, it was a very different scene for her, with alleged sexual assaults and rapes by an eighth grader, C.K., whom the Fairfax County Times is calling “Chris,” met by an allegedly willful indifference by school district officials. When she sought help from school officials, including an assistant principal, Sybil Terry, who was in the courtroom for the trial, she disclosed to the court for the first time she overheard the assistant principal later telling the alleged assailant, “How many times can I keep bailing you out of these situations?”

Former students have told the Fairfax County Times that they nicknamed the assistant principal “Scary Terry, the Dress Code Fairy” because she notoriously disproportionately punished girls for alleged dress code violations while letting boys off the hook for alleged misbehaviors in a culture of “boys will be boys.” Last Friday, one former classmate, J.S., or “Monica,” a young Virginia mother now eight months pregnant, described the school environment as “toxic.”

On a late Friday afternoon in October 2011, “Kate” testified on Monday, voice trembling but clear, she was cutting through the corner park on the same block as her home when she ran into a classmate and friend, J.O., whom the Fairfax County Times will call “Janet,” and her friend’s boyfriend, “Chris.” The park had benches and a trash can, she said. The address of the park was established using information disclosed in court. Neighbors told the Fairfax County Times that the park was much more overgrown 12 years ago. 

After pleasantries, including selfies, “Kate” recalled, she turned to go home when “Janet” suddenly pushed her to the ground from behind, pouncing on her, sitting on her hips, and pinning her arms down while laughing at her with her boyfriend, standing overhead. 

“I said, ‘Stop!’” she told the judge and eight jurors firmly, her words punctuated with tears and gasps of air. “I made it very clear I did not find it funny.” She said right about then, from the ground, she saw her father drive by with her brother in the front seat with a bag of food on his lap. They didn’t stop.

Then, she said, “Janet” pulled the young girl’s shirt and sports bra up and photographed her breasts, still laughing with her boyfriend, “Chris.” The phone camera put aside, “Kate” testified, “Janet” then pulled down the young seventh grader’s pants and inserted a finger into “Kate’s” vagina, while “Chris” pulled down his sweatpants and pushed his penis into “Kate’s” mouth.

During the alleged attack, her house keys fell out of her pocket, and “Chris” later dropped them inside his underwear after the alleged attack was done and threatened to post her photos on Facebook if she didn’t retrieve the keys from his pants. She refused, she said. 

Rushing home, she ran to her bathroom, unable to tell her parents what had happened. “I took a shower.” 

That was just the beginning, “Kate” said, of a horror made worse over the next weeks and months when her school counselor ignored effort after effort by the young girl to make an appointment. Already, the Sunday before, “Kate” testified, another eighth grader, David, whose real full name is being used in court documents, had exposed his penis to her at his home after a visit to a pumpkin patch at a local spot, Bradley Farm, rumors quickly spreading at school that she was a “slut,” “whore” and “bitch,” and that she had given David a “blow job.”

“I didn’t even know what a blow job meant,” said “Kate.” With a dad whose father had immigrated from Italy and a mother who had immigrated from India, “Kate” was part of a wide swath of immigrant families that attended Rachel Carson Middle School. Many of them were drawn to the school, as her family had been, with its strong reputation for academic advancement in science, technology, engineering, and math, subjects that “Kate” said she enjoyed. 

Established in 1989 and named for Rachel Carson, a prominent 20th-century environmentalist and author, the school district promotes Carson. It notes she “embraced the sense of wonder,” quoting a saying of hers: "If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement, and mystery of the world we live in." 

For years, the school has been “majority-minority” with almost one in two students, or about 47%, Asian, mostly with roots in India, like “Kate,” and another 18% Black and Hispanic. More than half of the school, or 57%, are enrolled in the district’s Advanced Academic Program for accelerated learners.

According to the testimony of “Kate” and two classmates, “Monica” and “Clark,” who spoke last week, it was a very different and hostile experience from that ideal for girls at the school in 2011 and 2012, getting little agency and not being believed when they and their friends reported bullying and sexual harassment. Further complicating matters, many Rachel Carson Middle School students come from immigrant families, where parents are unfamiliar with navigating the laws and policies, especially for thorny topics difficult for any parent of alleged sexual harassment and bullying. 

Born in South Florida, “Kate” said that after the pumpkin patch date gone wrong, she immediately tried to get an appointment with her counselor, Brenda Humphrey. She asked her teachers—math teacher Megan Carr, science teacher Francis Tarrant, and history teacher Monique Patwary-Faruque—for referrals to see Humphrey, even stopping her counselor in the hallway to beg for an appointment.

“I told her, ‘It was really important. It was an emergency,’” the young woman recalled. “She said, ‘I’m sorry,’ she didn’t get to see me. She would ‘get back to me.’”

“Kate” got an appointment with a counselor, Joanne Fraundorfer, and she said the counselor advised her to turn the other cheek on the bullying, telling her, “I should not engage in it. I should not feed into the rumors; don’t instigate the rumors.” 

She recalled that Fraundorfer told her, “Keep your head down.” 

“She also told me, ‘It does happen in middle school.’ I’m just adapting to middle school. Kids are not nice.” 

Her lawyer asked, “She told you strategies you needed to change?”

“Yes, basically.”

She noted, “I felt very dismissed.”

In the first row of the gallery, on the left side designated for the “plaintiff,” near the jury, Megan Curley, 27, a financial planner living in the D.C. area and a friend of “Kate,” leaned back in the pew, taking a deep breath and wiping away tears, her friend on the witness stand in her line of sight.

During a break, Curley said, “She was 12 years old. The school system failed her.”

“Kate” said she met with Fraundorfer “five or six times” over the weeks. In testimony last week, Fraudorfer said she could recall only one meeting with “Kate.”

By mid-November, “Kate” said the sexual assaults intensified with near-daily rapes and sexual attacks by “Chris” when she got off the school bus near her house, including cutting and threats with a knife. She said he allegedly used clothespins to pin sensitive parts of her skin to hurt her.

“He would use them on my body, on my breasts, on my vagina. He hit me. He kicked me. He repeatedly struck my head,” she said. In the lockers, “Chris” and David would touch her breasts and body, out of sight of teachers, she said. Last week, an eighth grader, “Clark,” testified that boys would engage in sexual harassment in the halls, called “scooping,” to fondle girls’ breasts.

“Kate” didn’t spell out more details on Monday, as her lawyer heard her choking up and moved to another area of questioning. She kept the details a secret from her mother, Mrs. R, but then her mother heard an explicit voicemail message that “Chris” allegedly left on her daughter’s voicemail, threatening to put his “dick” in her anus. 

“Kate” and her parents went to school on Nov. 21, 2011, where “Kate” finally got an audience with Humphrey. Kate recalled Humphrey telling the family, “I didn’t realize things had gotten so bad. I know that [“Kate”] has been trying to see me the last few weeks. I have not been able to see her.”

Kate recalled her mother whispering the voicemail details into the counselor’s ear, not wanting her daughter to hear the profanity.

The family moved to Terry's second-floor office, where another assistant principal, Phil Hudson, joined. “Kate,” wrote yet another statement about the alleged sexual harassment she faced at school. 

Inside, Terry told the family, “Kate” recalled: “It seemed like a boy-girl thing. She said, ‘This happens to boys and girls at this age.’”

 “Oh my gosh,” whispered Julie Perry, a Fairfax County Public Schools teacher. “This is a systemic problem around our county schools of sweeping problems under the rug.”

“Kate” told Terry that “Chris” had demanded she give him $50. At the next meeting, Terry pulled $50 out of her drawer, she said, and handed the money to the mother, saying, “Before I use the $50 for my holiday shopping, I want to give it to you.” 

She said she had met “Chris’s” mother at her home and spoke to her. At the meeting, “Kate” recalled, “My mom called it sexual harassment. Miss Terry told my mom if she used the word ‘sexual harassment,’ then there was nothing that she could do, but if we used the word ‘bullying,’ there was a policy” that Terry could implement. 

In fact, laws called Title IX require that schools that receive federal funding protect students from sexual harassment. “I didn’t feel believed,” “Kate” said. “I even said, ‘I would take a lie detector test.’”

A certified medical life planner said earlier in the day he estimated that “Kate” would live another 57 years until about the age of 81 and that it would cost her $6.5 million in medical costs to continue therapy, medication, and other treatments for the post-traumatic stress disorder, severe anxiety, severe depression, and eating disorder resulting from the alleged attacks and school district indifference.

Finally, amid more threats, “Kate” said that her mother finally pulled her from school, afraid for her life. At a meeting, she recalled, an assistant superintendent, Fabio Zuluaga, got on bended knee and promised to investigate the issue for her, saying, “I’m going to look into this.” He assured her he would talk to the principal. 

“Nothing was being done,” she said. 

She finally admitted the rapes to her mother one day, and they went together for the sexual assault examination. Her mother lay across her body so she wouldn’t have to see what the nurse examiner was doing below her waist. “My mom was saying, ‘Everything is going to be okay.’ It was very bright,” she said, her words interrupted by sobs. “I just wanted it to end. It was just so terrible. I felt myself poked and prodded.”

Her lawyer folded a binder in front of her with the exam details and put it away. 

Even with interruptions from Sona Rewari, an attorney for the school board, saying, “Objection,” the young woman, “Kate,” completed her second day of testimony, gearing up for expected hostile questioning designed to cast doubt on her credibility on Tuesday. In the courtroom, local attorney Michael York, hired to discredit “Kate,” took notes in the front row of the gallery behind the defendants, handing a legal pad to Rewari at day’s end, and the last person from the defense team to leave the courtroom behind Rewari, pulling a wheeled crate of files. 

“Kate” had already left the courtroom with support from friends, like Curley, the financial planner.  “You were so brave,” Curley said, embracing the young woman. 

Back at the intersection of Middleton Farm Lane and Cherry Branch Lane, a wild bunny hopped through the corner park where a young girl’s life hit a life-altering crossroads. After keeping her “head down” for 12 years, “Kate” finally spoke publicly for the first time about what had allegedly happened in that park. In a corner of the park, an old, weathered tombstone stood, marked with the family name “Bradley” and the words “At Rest.”

Asra Q. Nomani is a former Wall Street Journal reporter and a Fairfax County Times contributor. She can be reached at asra@asranomani.com and @AsraNomani on social media to share tips, feedback, and story ideas. The B.R. v. Fairfax County School Board et al. starts daily at about 9 a.m. The trial is expected to continue for three more weeks in Courtroom 1000 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, at 401 Courthouse Square in Alexandria. The trial typically runs through 4 p.m. or 5 p.m., with lunch breaks around 1 p.m. Laptops, phones, and smartwatches aren’t allowed in the courthouse.