Officials at Appomattox County Public Schools concealed Sage Blair’s gender transition from her parents and hid the fact that she was being bullied over dressing like a boy, according to the lawsuit filed in federal court on Tuesday by Michelle Blair. The events and secrecy led to Sage running away from her rural Virginia home, only to be captured by a sex trafficker and taken to Baltimore, Maryland, where she was held in a locked room and raped by multiple men, the lawsuit said.

But the girl’s saga didn’t end there. When the FBI recovered her, a Baltimore public defender named Aneesa Khan — a target of the lawsuit — worked to keep the girl in Maryland until her parents accepted her gender transition. The mother had not refused to accept her child’s transition because she did not even know about it, but Khan threw away the letters that Michelle Blair was sending her and led the girl to believe that she had been abandoned by her parents, the lawsuit said.

The 14 year old rape victim was put in a Baltimore group home with teenage boys and “told by Khan that her parents no longer wanted her, and that Khan was going to arrange for [her] to live with a family in Maryland who would affirm her as a boy,” the lawsuit states.

[I wouldn’t mind serving on that jury. — Ed]