The Texas cheerleader who was raped by a star high school athlete and subsequently kicked off her squad after refusing to cheer for her rapist, has lost her Supreme Court appeal, Jezebel is reporting. A lower court ruled “that the cheerleader was speaking for the school, not herself, and had no right to remain silent when called on to cheer the athlete by name.” The Court declined to hear her case and had no further comment.
The girl, known simply as H.S., was raped at an October 2008 party in her hometown of Silsbee, Texas. The accused? Rakheem Bolton, a star of the Silsbee High football team. Bolton was arrested but not charged at the time, and when H.S. joined the ranks of her school cheer squad in 2009, whom did she find on the team, but Bolton. In a move that would be understandable for anyone with an ounce of empathy for the girl—and this certainly should have encompassed school administrators—she refused to cheer for Bolton. (The spectacularly tactless cheer went “Two, four, six, eight, ten, come on, Rakheem, put it in,” FYI). Though she continued to support the team as a whole, she opted to sit on the sidelines when Bolton stepped to the free throw line. “As a team, I cheered for them as a whole. When he stepped up to the free-throw line, it didn’t feel right for me to have to cheer for him after what he did to me…After that game I decided I started this, I’m going to get my point across now,” she said. “So I didn’t cheer for him at the playoff game either.” And in a ringing act of team support and camaraderie, she was booted from the squad.
In September of 2010 Bolton pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor assault charge. Ms. notes that though he was charged with sexual assault of a child, he plead to a lesser assault charge and ultimately received only a suspended one year prison sentence and two years of probation.
In an interview with H.S.’s father, he details his daughter’s struggle to cope with the assault, including recurring nightmares and attempts to reclaim normalcy by continuing to attend school “because she didn’t want to show her suffering.” “I look at my kid and say ‘Wow, she’s my 15-year-old kid, and she’s my hero.’ She’s so strong and determined, beat down but fighting back. She could have given up and quit fighting, but she didn’t do that.”
He notes that his daughter’s insistence on standing up for herself (what he refers to as her “greatest strength”) became a weakness when it led many in their tiny community of 8,000 to believe she had not actually been assaulted and to throw their support behind Bolton, the star athlete, instead.
H.S. and her family sued the school district and local administrators for inhibiting her right to free speech, and the suit was promptly dismissed as “frivolous,” with the family ordered to reimburse the school’s costs, nearing $45,000. A New Orleans Circuit Court upheld the ruling, saying, in a truly memorable bit of douchebag phrasing, that a cheerleader acts as a “mouthpiece” for the school, and therefore should obviously be forced to cheer for her rapist if she wants to remain on the squad. Never mind the psychological distress such an action would have, or the impediment of a safe, comfortable, educational environment (which should reasonably extend to school-sponsored athletics) for the girl.
“Not cheering for Bolton “constituted substantial interference with the work of the school because, as a cheerleader, [she] was at the basketball game for the purpose of cheering, a position she undertook voluntarily,” the Court decision read. Meaning, the “work of the school” is athletics, H.S. is not a girl but a robot, and Bolton is not a rapist with anger management problems, but, as his attorney so winningly put it, an athlete in danger of losing his scholarship offers who would be “devastated” by a conviction.
“I don’t want to say the victim isn’t devastated,” Stella Morrison, the attorney said, “but yes, it’s devastating to Rakheem’s family.” Hmm. Perhaps that’s something that should be considered before you lock a girl in a room, sexually assault her, flee, and threaten to shoot the homeowners who won’t return your clothes because they’re evidence.
Shame on Bolton, the administrators, and the courts for the way this was handled. When are we going to start putting a higher premium on protecting sexual assault survivors then we do on ensuring another winning season?
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Michelle Koufopoulos
Michelle Koufopoulos is a writer, editor, book lover and tea enthusiast. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College and spent a year studying at Oxford University, being indoctrinated into British culture while working on her novel set in Paris in the 1920s. She writes regularly ...
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