May 12, 2011

A YOUNG Texas woman has been ordered to pay $45,000 after losing a legal challenge against the high school that expelled her from the cheerleading team because she refused to cheer for a basketball player who had raped her.

The woman, known as HS, was 16 when she was raped by Rakheem Bolton, a fellow student at Silsbee High School in east Texas. Bolton, along with another student, attacked HS during a house party, and her screams for help drew a crowd that banged on the door. When partygoers finally burst into the room, the attackers had fled, and HS lay sobbing underneath the pool table on which she was assaulted.

Authorities collected a rape kit, but HS and her family were told that the evidence wouldn't be examined for over a year because of a case backlog. An initial grand jury failed to indict Bolton--he was allowed to continue to attend school and play on its basketball team.

HS told school officials that she was uncomfortable attending school with Bolton, but she says she received only dismissive replies suggesting she avoid her attackers. HS says that she received humiliating taunts from her peers when she walked into the school cafeteria--but authorities merely advised her to stay out of the cafeteria.

Silsbee High School

Four months after the assault, at an away basketball game, Bolton was taking a free throw, and the Silsbee cheerleading squad began to cheer. HS stood silently with her arms folded while Bolton took his free throw. "I didn't want to have to say his name, and I didn't want to cheer for him," she says. "I just didn't want to encourage anything he was doing."

Superintendent Richard Bain said he could see something wasn't right--so he kicked HS out of the gym and informed her she had no choice but to cheer for her rapist. When she refused to do so, he expelled her from the cheerleading team.

According to school officials, HS surrendered her right to speak and act for herself when she became a cheerleader--and she was acting and speaking on behalf of her school. Apparently, the school was not bothered by being "represented" by Bolton when he played basketball for them.

HS didn't passively accept her expulsion from the team. She sued the school for denying her First Amendment rights to free expression.

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But her legal challenge lost--and now Silsbee High School is insisting HS pay for its legal fees. So an East Texas teenager has been ordered to pay $45,000--almost three years' income if she were to work full time, 52 weeks a year, at Texas' minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.

HS has continued to fight. But her appeal of the financial penalty has been dismissed repeatedly by state and federal courts, and the U.S. Supreme Court last week refused to hear her case.

For his part, Bolton eventually pled guilty to a misdemeanor charge of assault after charges of rape were dropped. Bolton has commented that he feels the fine he had to pay of $2,500, combined with a suspended sentence and parole, was "fair." He explained to a local radio station, "I have no hard feelings toward the girl...It was a misunderstanding."

But there's no misunderstanding the message that HS received from one end of the legal system to the other: Young women who survive sexual assault have no right to speak out.

HS remains determined to press her case. As she told ABC news reporters in 2010, "If everything works out the way that we're hoping...then it makes a point that it's not all right," she said. "And if we keep fighting for that, maybe other people will, too."

HS's example should give courage to survivors of rape and sexual assault who fear reporting an attack or standing up to an attacker--the vast majority of whom are known to the women they attack.

But as long as she is denied justice in court, everyone opposed to sexual violence and sexist victim-blaming should pick up her call to keep up the fight.