LOUDOUN COUNTY, VA — Wayde Byard, the now-suspended spokesman of Loudoun County Public Schools, was found not guilty of perjury Thursday in a case related to the coverup of a bathroom rape.
The jury of eight men and four women deliberated for 90 minutes before reaching its verdict. Byard was accused of lying to a grand jury that he didn’t learn of the May 28, 2021, sexual assault of a ninth-grade girl until months later.
“You are free to go sir,” Chief Judge Douglas Fleming said after the verdict was read.
Byard thanked him, hugged his wife, and said he was “probably gonna go party.” The decision is the latest development in a story broken by The Daily Wire that shone a spotlight on public schools’ embrace of radical gender theory and helped now-Governor Glenn Youngkin ride a wave of parental anger to an upset victory. A troubled cross-dressing student was later convicted of raping a classmate in a girls’ restroom, the victim’s father was arrested for protesting at a school board meeting, and multiple officials were later shown to have participated in a coverup of the incident.
Byard, his boss Communications Director Joan Sahlgren, and now-indicted Superintendent Scott Ziegler drafted a statement that went out to parents that day that explained police presence at the school by saying the situation was simply an “angry parent”—without mentioning that the parent was angry because his daughter had just been raped—and stating that there was “no threat to the student body” even as a rapist was at large.
Principal Timothy Flynn testified that he told Byard clearly that day that a girl reported a rape and her father showed up at school angry about it, adding “This is bad.” The defense said Flynn’s memory was not reliable because he wrongly said that a videoconference in which he told Superintendent Scott Ziegler and Deputy Superintendent Ashley Ellis about incidents was at 7:30 p.m. instead of 3:30 p.m.
“He might not have been 100% accurate,” defense attorney Jennifer Laffer said of his grand jury testimony. “He gave it his best shot.”
Prosecutors said Flynn was openly telling those other officials and it would make no sense that the one person he did not tell was Byard, whose job dealt with managing the school system’s reputation. “Mr. Byard wants us to believe that he never asks why the parent who caused a disturbance was upset. It defies common sense.”
Laffer suggested that all those officials may have thought it was just voluntary sex in a school, but prosecutor Jason Paw said the fact that they were meeting at such a high level in itself shows they know that the situation was more severe than a disruptive dad or voluntary sex. “Why would the top two individuals in LCPS draft an email about an angry parent, a disruptive parent?” he said. “Why have this all-hands meeting if it was simply a female claims she had consensual sex at school? These are important people. You’d say uh, I’m busy. Rape is different. Alarms go off,” he said.
Paw said that Sahlghren knew of the rape by the end of the day and Byard was the point person for relaying information to her. She testified to the grand jury that she believed Byard told her, but at trial, said she wasn’t sure.
He said Byard “accidentally commit[ed] the truth” when he told the jury that he learned in June, when Scott Smith was arrested at a school board meeting where Ziegler lied about the rape, that he was the father of the rape victim, even though he said he didn’t know there was a rape until October.
Laffer said Ziegler lying helped Byard’s case. “His boss then said we have no reports of sexual assault in bathrooms. He’s entitled to believe his boss.”
Scott Smith, the father of the rape victim, told The Daily Wire after the verdict that Byard’s message was the start of a coverup. “We feel that the coverup started immediately that day on May 28 and continues on to this day. It seems no one can tell the truth or remember what happened,” he said.
Loudoun’s top officials could recall almost nothing when called to the witness stand during the trial, a fact noted by lawyers for both sides in closing arguments.
Prosecutors said they expect that LCPS would give Byard his job back upon acquittal, which would put Sahlgren and others in an awkward position if they testified against him.
Theo Stamos, the top prosecutor and a former elected Democrat prosecutor, said that Byard did not merely misspeak. “The defendant is a paid communicator … His stock in trade is words … He knows everything that’s going on, he’s been in the school system for longer than any of these people. He asks questions and knows where the bodies are buried.”