The former top executive at The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation has settled a $25 million lawsuit that a former William & Mary student filed against him over a 2023 car accident near campus.
In the 2025 lawsuit, Rosemary Raynal accused Clifford B. “Cliff” Fleet III, who at the time was the foundation’s president and CEO, of negligently crashing into her as she crossed the street, causing lasting injuries.
The settlement came only days before a jury trial was scheduled to begin in Richmond Circuit Court.
A clerk at the Richmond courthouse told the Daily Press and The Virginian-Pilot that a person involved in the case called to say the matter had been settled and the four-day trial should be removed from the docket.
It was not immediately clear if the settlement agreement — and any dollar amount to be paid out — will become part of the public record.
“All I can tell you is that we have resolved our differences and the case has been settled,” Raynal’s mother, Anne Brooke Raynal, from North Carolina, said Friday.
Asked if the family is satisfied with the agreement, she declined to elaborate. “I’m sorry that I can’t be more helpful,” she said.
Rosemary Raynal’s lead attorney, Tom Comerford of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, did not return a phone message Friday. Neither did Fleet’s attorney, Jon A. Nichols of the Richmond law firm of Harman Claytor Corrigan & Wellman.
Fleet and Rosemary Raynal also could not immediately be reached.
Raynal — then a 21-year-old biology and chemistry student at William & Mary — was walking in a crosswalk on Richmond Road at 8:12 a.m. on Oct. 26, 2023.
She was more than halfway across the two-lane roadway when she was struck by Fleet’s 2023 Audi Q8 SUV that was traveling eastbound.
There are several crosswalks, with flashing yellow lights, that can be activated by walkers in the area, according to prior reporting from The Virginia Gazette.
Just before the crash, the lawsuit asserted, Fleet “passed a conspicuous sign warning him of the presence of a crosswalk and instructing him to stop for pedestrians.”
The complaint said Fleet knew that W&M students often cross the street in that area, but “failed to reduce his speed” or take any other evasive actions to avoid Raynal.
He struck the student “with great force, propelling her through the air and onto the pavement,” the complaint said.
Raynal was flown to a hospital in Norfolk, “where she underwent severe traumatic brain injury protocol,” the complaint said. She also suffered a skull fracture and several other breaks.
She was in intensive care for nearly a week, The Gazette reported. Then she was transferred to a traumatic brain injury unit at WakeMed Hospital, near her hometown of Raleigh, North Carolina.
When the Virginia State Police interviewed Fleet at the scene of the 2023 accident, he told investigators that glare from the sun blinded him from seeing Raynal crossing Richmond Road.
In a news release on the day of the crash, the state police said neither speed nor alcohol appeared to be factors.
At a 2024 court hearing on Fleet’s reckless driving charge, Williamsburg-James City County Commonwealth’s Attorney Nate Green estimated Fleet was driving 2 mph over the speed limit — 27 mph in a 25 mph zone.
Green said there were no signs Fleet was distracted or impaired, and other drivers corroborated that the glare made it difficult to see the road. Fleet pleaded guilty to the reduced charge of improper driving and paid $571 in costs.
Fleet, who became the foundation’s top executive in early 2020, announced in April that he was stepping aside from the foundation for “personal reasons” effective immediately. He was also working as an adjunct professor at W&M’s business school at the time.
Before the 2023 crash, Raynal served as president of William & Mary’s science fiction and fantasy club, worked in a research lab and volunteered weekly at Riverside Doctors’ Hospital.
She withdrew from William & Mary after the accident, returning to school nearly a year later, for the fall semester in 2024.
The complaint said Raynal continued to suffer from amnesia, short-term memory loss, “worsened verbal fluency,” as well as headaches and diminished taste and smell.
She graduated from W&M in May of this year, said her mother, Anne Brooke Raynal. That was a year behind her original projected graduation date when she began as a freshman.
She’s planning to begin pharmacy school this fall at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, her mother said. This summer, she’s working as a pharmacy tech at WakeMed Raleigh, the same hospital that treated her after the crash.
“She’s still receiving some therapies, but she has really made a remarkable recovery given her injuries,” her mother said.
Peter Dujardin, 757-897-2062, pdujardin@dailypress.com