Wombwell didn’t pursue an investigation. “Nothing happened,” recalled Wombwell, now 22.
“Up until this point, when I thought about the fact that they threatened to suspend me if I did an investigation, I always sort of thought it was a threat to stop me from speaking out,” Wombwell said. “And so to see them actually suspending a student—I can’t help but see myself in her and wonder what would have happened to me if I had decided to go through with an investigation.”Wombwell is one of multiple women to say that they tried to report sexual assault to officials at Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, only to meet with indifference or even aggression.
The other woman who has sued over sexual assault allegations at Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools is known in court documents only as “Jane Doe.” According to her ongoing lawsuit, Doe was a junior in 2015 when a male student pulled her into the woods near campus and sexually assaulted her.When Doe emerged from the woods, “Doe appeared both distressed and disheveled. Her hair was in disarray, she had mud on her clothing, her glasses were broken, and there was semen on her shirt,” an amended version of the lawsuit’s complaint alleges. But even after Doe allegedly told a local school resource officer that she’d been sexually assaulted, two of the defendants in the lawsuit did not take “a statement from Ms. Doe or otherwise meaningfully investigate her complaint.”“I blamed myself for a long time,” Wombwell told VICE News. “I think a lot of that was because of the way that the school handled it.”
The school resource officer also allegedly “warned Ms. Doe that if she was not telling the truth about the sexual assault she could be charged with a crime.”
In July, school board members were set to meet with survivors and experts to address the burgeoning crisis over sexual assault at Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools. But after Wombwell asked to attend, the meeting was cancelled entirely. In an email obtained by VICE News, a board member said that they “should not meet with individuals that have potential or past claims against the district.” (By that point, Wombwell had already settled her lawsuit against the district.)Despite their efforts, Wombwell and her fellow advocates say they’ve seen little change.
“Honestly, I’m just disgusted that they let a football player who has sexual assault allegations against him play with an ankle monitor,” one suspended player told the Charlotte Observer. “But because I speak out for feeling unsafe, I get punished and not allowed to play in a game.”“For these things to still be happening, even under this amount of public pressure, it's really disheartening.”
Still, in the wake of the reports, district Superintendent Earnest Winston assembled a task force to review the district’s policies around Title IX, the landmark civil rights law that protects against sex-based discrimination. When Aidan Finnell, a 16-year-old student at Myers Park, joined the group, she was initially optimistic. But Finnell said that, now, she’s not confident that its suggestions will be implemented.“There was a really big emphasis on how things needed to be kept hush-hush and secret,” she said of the task force. “It just turned more into students saying the same things over and over again, in a room full of adults, and being told that most of what we were saying wasn’t possible or that we’d said it before.”One adult at the task force meetings also suggested that news reports of sexual misconduct at the district could not be trusted, Finnell said. “The superintendent anticipates a report from his Title IX task force in the next few weeks,” a Charlotte-Mecklenburg spokesperson told VICE News in an email. “He will review the report and plans to enact reforms as appropriate.”Since the news about Hawthorne broke, the school’s principal and assistant principal have been suspended, with pay; officials did not give a reason for the suspensions. But that’s also what happened to the principal who ran Myers Park High School at the time of Wombwell, Evans, and Doe’s allegations—before he was moved to another job with Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools.He makes the same six-figure salary.“We’re literally talking to a brick wall,” Evans said. “It’s not just a Charlotte thing. It’s not just a CMS thing. It is a national issue.”A current student at a Charlotte-Mecklenburg school said that at a recent meeting with school officials, administrators warned them that posting on social media about sexual assault allegations in the district could imperil the student’s ability to go to college.