Sexual assault suit involving Myers Park High student rejected by federal appeals court
A 17-year old was a junior at one of Charlotte’s most affluent and prestigious high schools when, on a Tuesday morning in 2015, she told officials she was raped near campus. She later restated the allegation in a 2018 lawsuit.
When a federal jury in Charlotte said the girl wasn’t a victim of her school’s investigation — which determined the assault was consensual — she and her lawyer appealed the case to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
The two challenged U.S. District Judge Robert Conrad, Jr., and his decision to dismiss individuals named in the case.
In an unsigned, unpublished opinion, three judges on the appellate panel Monday upheld Conrad’s decision and that of the jury, which found that Myers Park High School and Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools did not discriminate against her or fail to properly investigate her claims.
The lawsuit played out inside the U.S. District Court for the Western District of North Carolina in January 2023, and it left the girl, referred to only as Jane Doe in court documents, without the $1 million her lawyer said could remedy the school and district’s investigative failures. That lawsuit originally named the City of Charlotte, Charlotte Mecklenburg Police Department and individuals from the school and school district, but Conrad dismissed them, leaving only the school district at the center of the legal saga.
Laura Dunn, Doe’s lawyer, declined to comment on the appellate court’s decision Tuesday afternoon.
In the lawsuit, Doe alleged that another Myers Park student kidnapped and assaulted her after forcing her to go off campus to the “bamboo forest” near Park Road Shopping Center. Myers Park High’s resource officer, Bradley Leak, saw the two leaving and told Doe he’d “call her mother.”
The student, Doe alleges, grabbed her wrist, pulled her away and told her “not to ‘make a scene,’” appellate judges recounted in their review.
She texted friends, then her mom, then her dad asking for help:
“Help me.”
“Guys, I’m being serious. I’m really scared.”
“Mom, I’m being kidnapped. Call somebody.”
She texted after the assault, too:
“I was attacked.”
“I feel so gross.”
“If I have aids ima kill myself.”
Her friends showed the text messages to Leak and assistant principal Anthony Perkins. They went looking for her, and they found her muddy with broken glasses and stained clothes.
“Help,” she mouthed to the two school officials while she walked next to the other student.
After hearing what happened, Leak asked Doe if she “wanted to go through with” filing a report and informed her that “making . . . false charges is a crime.”
Doe said she did.
The other student maintained everything was consensual. Leak first told a sergeant he thought Doe “felt uncomfortable . . . but . . . did it anyway.” He later said she reported that the student “forced her to have oral sex,” but the sergeant told Leak he didn’t “have a crime” to report.
Perkins told the school board about the investigation and noted that “evidence might suggest [it] was consensual.” Six days after the assault, on Nov. 9, 2015, the incident label was changed from “sexual offense to ‘mutual sexual contact.’”
“Ms. Doe suffered and continues to suffer injuries, including, without limitations, emotional distress, psychological trauma, and mortification,” according to the lawsuit. “The actions and inactions of defendants to discount Ms. Doe’s abduction and subsequent rape by a fellow student were driven by endemic and discriminatory sex-based stereotypes and gender biases held by officials at MPHS.”
The 2023 federal jury determined CMS was not “deliberately indifferent” — a criteria point courts use to determine Title IX violations.
Doe’s lawsuit was one of at least three sexual assault cases filed against CMS at the time.
Former Myers Park High student Jill Roe filed a lawsuit in December 2019 that was settled for $50,000 in the spring. Serena Evans, a former Myers Park High student and tennis player who says her report of being raped in a high school bathroom in 2016 wasn’t properly investigated, filed a lawsuit against the district in June 2022.
Rebecca Noel contributed to this report.