SPORTS: Fauquier boys soccer, girls soccer winning big; Kettle Run boys tennis report. PAGES 13, 14 May 15, 2024
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Twilight Polo at center of sexual harassment case The Great Meadow event renamed as misconduct charges fly By Hunter Savery Staff Writer
Charges of sexual misconduct against a polo icon who worked in Fauquier County have sparked a criminal investigation and forced changes to a popular local polo event. The charges come from a lawsuit filed by a 19-year-old woman who claims champion polo player John Gobin coerced her into sex when she was his 16-year-old employee. Reporting by the Washington Post has since revealed a total of six women who claim Gobin sexually harassed them.
STAFF/FAUQUIER TIMES
Polo players play at Great Meadow, a premier venue for polo and other equestrian sports, in The Plains.
Vint Hill data centers V IN
Red: OVH data center Blue: CyrusOne project (planned) Yellow: Vint Hill Corners project (planned)
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The Fauquier County Board of Supervisors won’t be able to tighten restrictions on all new, large-scale data center projects in Vint Hill because some were already in the works before the board moved to change the area’s zoning rules. In March, county supervisors adopted a new set of rules aimed at reining in large new data centers in Vint Hill. The new rules require all new data centers larger than 50,000 square feet to go through a rigorous special permitting process. Two such facilities escaped from the rules, however, and were grandfathered in because their plans were filed before the change was approved.
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See POLO, page 6
Fauquier supervisors exempt 3rd data center from new Vint Hill zoning rules Piedmont Journalism Foundation
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But Gobin fired back with a lawsuit filed in April in Fauquier County Circuit Court against the 19-yearold woman, claiming the charges in her lawsuit are false and that her intention is to harm his business The lawsuit also names a former business partner, alleging she conspired with the young woman to steal his business. Part of the business dispute involved Great Meadow, the Fauquier County field events center where Gobin once managed Twilight Polo. Great Meadow Foundation, which operates the events center, has rebranded its evening polo as “Sunset Polo.” Gobin’s former business partner, Whitney Ross, is listed as the event’s pointof-contact on its website.
Three data center projects already in the works at Vint Hill will escape new zoning rules aimed at limiting their size. The OVH data center is expanding, and two not-yet-built data centers are planned.
Last Thursday, the supervisors added one more exempt data center project to the list: Vint Hill Corners, which is proposed for 46 acres at the corner of Brookside Parkway and Kennedy Road. The action settled a dispute between the county officials — some of whom were skeptical of the project — and the Vint Hill Corners owners who thought their project should have been exempt from the new rules in the first place. The two data center projects that were initially allowed to escape the special permit restrictions were the Cyrus One project — aN 875,000-square-foot complex comprised of four, 56-foot-tall buildings planned for the corner of Vint Hill Road and Vint Hill Parkway — and an expansion of the OVH Cloud center that sits further south on the parkway. Cyrus One submitted site plans to the county on April 26. See VINT HILL, page 6
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