The Tennessee attorney general ordered a court to unseal last month a second confidential settlement paid on behalf of Hamilton County Schools in the 2015 Ooltewah rape case.
Hamilton County school board members finally learned in January of the $60,000 settlement of one of the 2015 Ooltewah High School rape victims, “Richard Roe”, after years of pressure from state Sen. Todd Gardenhire, R-Chattanooga, Tennessee Open Records Counsel Lee Pope and the involvement of the attorney general.
Richard Roe was one of two then-minors who said older Ooltewah High School classmates attacked them and sexually assaulted them with pool cues during a December 2015 trip to Gatlinburg, Tennessee, for a basketball tournament. He and another victim, “John Doe,” filed civil lawsuits against the district in Chattanooga’s U.S. District Court in 2016, and both settled before trial.
But their settlements were sealed, leaving school board members and the public in the dark about the actual amount.
Shortly after Doe’s case settled in the fall of 2018, Gardenhire blasted the school district and its insurer, the Tennessee Risk Management Trust, for not disclosing the amounts.