As a personal injury firm, our work encompasses more than just car crashes. Our firm also handles civil cases involving rape and sexual assault.
Our Client
In October of 2018, I met a young girl who had recently graduated high school. While she was a student, she had been repeatedly assaulted by her teacher. Her teacher had used the pretense of a fake club as a way to assault her. Thanks to our criminal justice system, her abuser was in jail and later convicted, he remains in jail to this day.
However, one aspect of her story that stuck with me was the question of where the administrators were in all of this and how this had happened under their watch. After some investigation, it was revealed that the school officials failed to follow their own rules around clubs and after school activities. This oversight is what allowed this predator to assault our client. After speaking with the girl, I promised to take her case on and fellow attorney Chris Stokes and I have been working on it for the last 3.5 years.
The Defense
Cobb County Schools are relentlessly defending this case. They continue to place blame on our client, who was a minor at the time. They also assert that their administrators and teachers did not necessarily need to follow the rules and policies in place. To support our claims, Rafi Law Firm has interviewed multiple members of the school district, from bookkeepers, to principals, to the Cobb County School Superintendent. Even still, no one connected with the County or the school has offered any sympathy or an apology to my client for what she has been through.
Betrayal
Even from the very beginning, our client always had the goal of preventing any other students from going through what she did. She wanted to make changes and bring awareness to stop this from ever happening to another student. One way to do this was by bringing attention to the matter. With that in mind, my client and I were interviewed in a podcast named Betrayal.
Betrayal tells the story of the teacher who abused our client, as told from the perspective of his wife at the time. The podcast details how her seemingly perfect marriage was suddenly shattered and how the fallout from his heinous actions have affected everyone around him. In episode three, my client bravely tells her story and speaks directly to her abuser’s then-wife. In episode four, I detail the aspects of the civil case.