A 15-year-old girl said she was gang raped at school. They suspended her, lawsuit says

A developmentally disabled 15-year-old girl was on her way to get help from her teacher on an essay when a group of boys cornered her in the hallway, according to a federal lawsuit.

The seven male students surrounded the “painfully shy” girl at Teacher Preparatory High School in Brooklyn and tried to get her to leave school grounds with them. She refused during the Feb. 5, 2016, encounter, but eventually one of the boys grabbed her and brought her into a stairwell nearby, according to the lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in October.

That’s where two of the boys forced her to perform oral sex on them around 11:30 a.m., the lawsuit says, with the others acting as “lookouts.”

“She did not socialize much at school and did not have very many friends,” the lawsuit says. “She did not date, was not sexual, and hadn’t so much as kissed anyone before the incident in question.”

Though the boys then tried to lure her to have sex off school grounds, according to the lawsuit, the victim was able to escape into the girls’ bathroom.

The abuse didn’t stop there, though, the lawsuit says. Just days later, one of the boys accosted the victim in the cafeteria and warned that he was planning another forced sexual encounter.

At that point, the girl knew what to do: Go to school officials, the lawsuit says.

But the victim wasn’t offered support, social services or medical care by the school after she spoke to the guidance counselor, the complaint says.

“That’s not to imply that school administrators flat-out ignored this student’s gang-rape. School administrators did take action: they suspended [her],” according to the lawsuit.

The reason for the suspension? Performing sexual activity in school, the lawsuit says. The girl had an “unblemished” disciplinary record before the alleged rape.

“My client is a 15-year-old girl of color on public assistance with a severe developmental disorder who was gang raped at her Brooklyn school and then suspended for it,” the girl’s attorney, Carrie Goldberg, told the New York Daily News.

According to the lawsuit, the suspension came about because — weeks after the alleged rape — the school’s assistant principal revised a report on the incident, and “put words into [the victim’s] mouth so as to convey the impression that [she] had been a willing participant in her own sexual assault.”

The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages from New York City, and alleges that the suppression of sexual assault allegations in the city’s schools is a pattern.

One of the boys who raped the victim was charged with sexual abuse, sexual misconduct, forcible touching, endangering the welfare of a child and harassment in connection with the alleged attack, the lawsuit says.

Those charges came about after the victim’s mother took the girl to the New York City Police Department’s Special Victims Unit in Brooklyn, where the victim told police she same story she had relayed to school administrators, according to the lawsuit.

“These girls are not believed and instead of being helped after a horrifying tragedy, they’re punished,” Goldberg told the newspaper. “If there are heroes in this world, she and her mom are heroes.”

The girl now attends a different school, the Daily News reports.

As a result of the alleged rape, the victim now experiences anxiety, sleeping trouble, hair loss, anger issues and rashes, the lawsuit says.

This story was originally published January 16, 2018 at 6:57 PM with the headline "A 15-year-old girl said she was gang raped at school. They suspended her, lawsuit says."