Cheerleader Kicked off Squad for Refusing to Cheer “Put It In” for Her Rapist1

by Keith Daniels

A Texas high school cheerleader has lost her appeal on a lawsuit against her former school that went all the way to the Supreme Court. The legal action stemmed from the school district’s reaction to her rape, which was perpetrated by Rakheem Bolton, a star basketball player from her school, at a party she attended in 2008, when she was 16.

Hillarie admitted she got drunk and went into game room with four boys.

Cries of “Stop!” soon were heard.
Other attendees broke down the door and found that Bolton and another Silsbee student had fled out a window. They returned shortly to get the clothes Bolton had left strewn around the room.
“All you (expletive deleted) better be locked and loaded,” Bolton yelled. “None of you better sleep tonight!”

In 2010, Bolton eventually pled guilty to a misdemeanor assault charge in exchange for a $2,500 fine and a two-year suspended sentence.

Before that, this being small-town Texas and the issues involved being high school sports and women’s rights, you can guess how sensitively school authorities handled the situation:

At a February 2009 basketball game in Huntsville, Texas, H.S. joined in leading cheers for the Silsbee team, which included Bolton. But when Bolton went to the foul line to shoot a free throw, H.S. folded her arms and was silent.

H.S. said the district superintendent, his assistant and the school principal told her she had to cheer for Bolton or go home. She refused and was dismissed from the squad.

The cheer she refused to perform couldn’t have been better designed to humiliate her:

“Two, four, six, eight, ten!
“Go Rakheem. Put it in!”

No one believed the victim’s allegations:

“Nobody was sympathetic to me except close friends,” Hillaire told me last fall. “Everybody was saying I lied about what happened.”

Her family sued the Silsbee school system for denying her constitutional freedom of expression and lost. They appealed, and the motion went all the way to the Supreme Court, which declined to review it on Monday. A federal appeals court had earlier ruled that:

…the cheerleader was speaking for the school, not herself, and had no right to remain silent when called on to cheer the athlete by name.

Again, she had “no right” not to cheer for her admitted attacker to “put it in”.

To make matters worse, the cheerleader’s family must pay over $45,000 to cover the school district’s legal costs.