The family of a male student at Ardrey Kell High School has filed a lawsuit against a female student, her family, and community activists who claimed the teen in March attacked her in a hate crime because she is Muslim.
The lawsuit names both students, but WFAE is not naming them because they are minors.
The male student's family also accuses the girl of assault and battery, claiming she started the March 7 fight by striking the boy first.
It also accuses the girl, members of her family, and her supporters of causing emotional distress, libel, slander and defamation due to their public comments on the incident — which drove headlines after the girl’s family publicly pushed multiple times for the boy to be charged with a hate crime.
Law enforcement agencies have said there was no evidence to support a hate crime charge, though the girl’s family has criticized that decision, noting that investigators did not interview her.
In addition to the girl’s family, the suit names Jibril Hough, Annette Albright and Brian Kasher as defendants in the case. All three appeared at press conferences and made public statements about the incident.
Competing narratives
In a series of press conferences and media interviews earlier this year, the girl, her family and her supporters claimed that the boy had told the girl to “go back to her country” and had a history of bullying her because of her religion. They claimed the boy started the fight, striking her first and continuing to hit her in an attack that left her so badly wounded she needed facial reconstruction surgery.
But the boy’s family claims in the lawsuit that those statements were false. As a result, they said, their home was vandalized and they’ve received more than 25 threatening phone calls and messages. They say they received death threats that necessitated a daily security detail on their home from the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department. The family also says they’ve received therapy and have experienced emotional trauma as a result of the incident.
The boy’s family claims that on March 7, the girl began harassing him during math class as he was seated having another conversation. The lawsuit says he told her, “it’s not that serious,” and for her to go back to her seat, but that she “continued to harass and berate” the boy “without justification.” The lawsuit claims the girl had behaved similarly before — and earlier this year, the family said the girl had previously bullied their son.
The girl then heard the boy call her a “b****” and allegedly berated him, daring him to use the word again. When the boy used the word again, the girl then punched him in the face, the lawsuit alleges. The lawsuit claims the boy struck back only to defend himself.
The family is seeking compensatory and punitive damages. The lawsuit notes that other students in the class corroborated the boy’s story. CMS has declined to release security footage of the incident.
In a phone call with WFAE, Hough said he stands by the girl’s version of the story.
“I only spoke upon, you know, what was told to me,” Hough said. “And I had no reason to believe that she was not telling me the truth. And I stand by her, and I'll defend her. Things are sometimes hard to prove — oftentimes hard to prove — what he said, what she said. But she is a good young girl, and I stand by my defense of her.”
Hough maintained that the girl has permanent injuries from the incident. He said that while he wished no ill will upon the boy or his family, he believed the lawsuit was “making the aggressor the victim.”
The lawsuit comes as news surfaced Tuesday that Ardrey Kell principal Jamie Brooks was suspended with pay on May 2. CMS has not given a reason for the suspension, and it’s unclear if it’s related to the altercation. Hough and other supporters of the girl have called for Brooks to be permanently removed.
