Public Safety

School system attorney: Attack by broomstick-wielding football players charged with rape didn’t constitute sexual assault

By Dan Morse and Donna St. George
Today at 6:00 a.m. EDT

Lawyers for a Maryland school system argued this summer that a violent locker room attack by football players wielding a broomstick and charged with rape did not constitute a sexual assault.

“This is a male-on-male incident. There is no indication that this was motivated by sexual desire,” an attorney for Montgomery County’s public schools told U.S. District Judge Peter Messitte. “They weren’t yelling sexual slurs about maybe homosexuality or things like that.”

The assertion was made during a July hearing over the school system’s motion to dismiss legal claims filed by families of victims of the 2018 assaults at Damascus High School. The families allege that school officials should not have allowed the Damascus locker room to go unsupervised because they were aware of earlier sex assaults among boys’ sports teams at Damascus and nearby high schools, and because one of the attackers had demonstrated a propensity for sexual harassment and violence.

The lawsuit rests heavily on Title IX, a broad education law that in part is designed to protect students against severe sexual harassment. Designating the attacks as nonsexual, according to the school system attorney’s arguments in federal court, would move the case away from Title IX and dismiss a key claim made by the victims’ families. The attorney, Sean O’Hara, noted that in the families’ own legal claims, the motivation for the attacks “was to scare, intimidate, and control.”

His reasoning was rejected by the court. ... “I don’t buy that argument at all,” Messitte said from the bench. “As a matter of law, I’m not prepared to say that this is not sexual.”

{snip}

The afternoon of Oct 31, 2018, as junior varsity players were getting ready for the season’s last day of practice, the lights in the freshman locker room suddenly went dark. The single entrance was guarded, and four players set upon their teammates, according to prosecutors’ statements. The assailants pulled down the pants of one boy and pushed the broom handle several times through his underwear and into him while he screamed, prosecutors said. Two other boys were pinned and jabbed in their buttocks with the handle, and teammates knocked the fourth victim to the ground and stomped on him as he fought off the broom.

{okay, that's enough}

By Dan Morse
Dan Morse covers courts and crime in Montgomery County. He arrived at the paper in 2005, after reporting stops at the Wall Street Journal, Baltimore Sun and Montgomery (Ala.) Advertiser, where he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. He is the author of "The Yoga Store Murder." Twitter https://twitter.com/morsedan

By Donna St. George
Donna St. George writes about education for The Washington Post, where she has been a reporter since 1998. She previously worked at the Philadelphia Inquirer and the New York Times. Twitter https://twitter.com/donnastgeorge