MNPS Sex Abuse Accusers Don't Have To Divulge Sexual History

NASHVILLE, TN -- Teenage girls suing Metro Nashville Public Schools in a slew of sexual abuse cases will not have to divulge their sexual histories to defense attorneys, a federal judge ruled Tuesday.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Alistair Newbern, who is handling pre-trial matters in five cases in which students allege MNPS fostered an environment of sexual harassment and failed to stop it, barred Metro's Department of Law from asking the accusers about their sexual pasts during pre-trial depositions.

Earlier this year, the defense attorneys notified the court they planned to ask one 16-year-old girl about her sex life.

"That kind of allegation puts Metro in the position where it will need to ask personal questions to see how (she) has developed sexually to this point in her life," Metro argued in an earlier filing.

But Newbern said that sexual harassment "is no less traumatic to a person who has had extensive experience with sex."

In May, a Metro attorney asked the same girl's mother if she herself had ever had an abortion in addition to questions about the girl's menstrual cycle and use of birth control.

Except for two involving the same set of alleged attackers, the lawsuits are likely to be tried separately, but all allege various types of sexual abuse and harassment at Metro Schools dating back to 2015. Four of them deal with so-called "exposing," in which unwanted sexual encounters were recorded and distributed to other students.

Pre-submitted questions indicated that Metro attorneys wanted to determine if the sexual activity was, in fact, unwelcome, suggesting that it were consensual, the arguments of "exposing" would be moot. Newbern found the argument wanting.

"Even if a plaintiff welcomed sexual contact, the conclusion that she also welcomed the videoing and broadcasting of that contact without her knowledge or consent is absurd," she wrote.

Newbern further barred Metro from accessing financial records of the girls' parents, saying there's no reasonable "argument that children who experience poverty are hardened to sexual harassment and less deserving of redress when they experience it."

Newbern did rule Metro attorney's may access the girls' social media accounts, but only the posts that are publicly available, and that the girls can be evaluated by psychologists, though the psychologists may not ask the girls about their sex lives.

Three of suits involve incidents at Maplewood High School - the aforementioned two "exposing" cases plus an allegation that administrators failed to protect a then-freshman girl from teacher Janai Smothers, 25, who was arrested in November at the Fresno, Calif., high school where she was then teaching, charged with sexual battery by an authority figure in Nashville. The other two suits are exposing cases from Hunters Lane High School.

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