by Greg Piper
With leading Democrats lining up behind Vice President Kamala Harris for the party’s presidential nomination and their telegenic party attack dog California Gov. Gavin Newsom seen as a potential second banana, Republicans are likely to warn voters what they can expect if the woke Californians reach the White House.
That includes taxpayer funding for prison inmates who identify as the opposite sex to get so-called gender-affirmation surgery, for which Harris took credit as California attorney general, and a law signed by Newsom (SB 132) that grants inmates placement based on their self-declared gender identity, setting off a wave of transfer requests to women’s prisons.
Female inmates are returning to court with new allegations of how the law, which makes no distinction based on genitalia, has directly harmed them since it took effect three and a half years ago, with a Republican super-lawyer joining their gender-critical feminist legal team.
The Women’s Liberation Front and Harmeet Dhillon, recently known for delivering a Sikh Ardas prayer at the Republican National Convention, refiled a lawsuit Friday against the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation that a federal judge tossed in May on grounds neither party raised – that CDCR has not “unequivocally waived immunity” to federal lawsuits.
WoLF said the refiling addresses the court’s procedural questions. It challenges the constitutionality of the penal code sections added by SB 132, saying they cannot be “applied or enforced in any manner without violating” their clients’ constitutional rights, and sues the CDCR secretary and wardens of the two women’s prisons.
“CDCR is committed to providing a safe, humane, respectful and rehabilitative environment for all incarcerated people,” information officer Mary Xjimenez wrote in an email to Just the News, declining to comment on litigation.
“At all our facilities, CDCR thoroughly investigates all allegations of sexual abuse, sexual misconduct, and sexual harassment pursuant to our zero-tolerance policy and as mandated by the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA),” she wrote, describing SB 132 as allowing “transgender, non-binary and intersex people to request to be housed and searched in a manner consistent with their gender identity.”
A consulting firm hired by CDCR to evaluate the law’s implementation told the department in a report last year that it has disfavored female inmates in practice and inherently denies them the privileges granted to male inmates who identify as women.
CDCR itself expected the law to prompt an increase in Prison Rape Elimination Act sexual assault allegations “because it will result in the integration of different populations that have not previously been housed together,” according to its three-year budget request to comply with SB 132, filed soon after the law took effect, according to new evidence cited by the plaintiffs.
California’s Office of the Inspector General also warned the law cannot reject a proposed transfer “solely on the prospective transferee’s history of raping women,” and a Justice Department “sexual victimization report” released this month found that “trans-identifying biological males” committed 18% of assaults on female inmates in 2019-2020, the suit says.
Ahead of a difficult election, the litigation threatens to deepen the Democratic divide on gender identity recently highlighted by Georgia Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff handing President Biden his first defeat in a judicial nomination, citing nominee Sarah Netburn’s recommended transfer of a male child rapist who identifies as a woman to a New York women’s prison.
Two new inmates joined the four original plaintiffs in the amended complaint, which “details years of abuse and trauma in California women’s prisons” that violate the inmates’ First, Eighth and Fourteenth Amendment rights, according to a WoLF statement on the refiling.
Channel Johnson alleges her “trans-identifying biological male inmate, Jonathan Robertson … threatened to rape and murder her” after she refused to lie about their previous consensual sexual relationship, for which Robertson was disciplined.
When Johnson and her family reported Robertson’s similarly threatening letters to her family members, “including her minor younger brother and nephew,” CDCR retaliated by moving Johnson to the California Institution for Women rather than punish Robertson, the suit says.
The female was “put in solitary confinement and banished from the prison with which she had become familiar” while “Robertson, whose background includes having raped a woman in another female prison, stayed put” and threatened her again when Johnson was transferred back to CCWF last year. (The suit says she’s now at CIW again.)
Robertson allegedly raped an inmate in a “port-a-potty” and threatened to rape others at CCWF in 2022, shortly before San Francisco voters recalled District Attorney Chesa Boudin for his perceived soft-on-crime policies and indifference to the city’s growing squalor.
The second new plaintiff, Cathleen Quinn, alleges CDCR retaliated against her for reporting that male inmate Michael Contreras “peep[ed]” at her “while she was using the bathroom and naked from the waist down,” first putting her in solitary confinement, then revoking her “suitability” for parole through a “rules report violation.”
Quinn appealed the RVR and was found not guilty 11 months later, but CCWF’s parole board “created new pretextual reasons to continue to block her parole eligibility for an additional five years” based on “institutional misconduct” that did not stop her initial eligibility for parole, the suit says. The parole commissioner allegedly told Quinn she “should have been quiet.”
Original plaintiff Tomiekia Johnson also witnessed and reported Quinn’s peeping and is “aware of Contreras stalking and attempting to rape another female inmate, Jennifer Barbero,” but CCWF again did not discipline Contreras because Barbero fought off the attack, the suit says.
Johnson has “consistently met or even exceeded the criteria for re-sentencing or commutation” but continues to be denied parole for what she’s told are “political reasons,” with CCWF even citing her participation in the lawsuit as proof of her transphobia, the suit says.
“Contreras is a large man who dresses and grooms masculinely and is not interested in making any effort to present as a woman,” typical of the newly self-identified transgender inmates seeking women’s prison transfers, according to the complaint. “Often, there is no evidence they are in the process of ‘transitioning'” — socially, hormonally or surgically.
CCWF acknowledged that plaintiff Krystal Gonzalez had been assaulted by a “transgender woman with a penis,” whom she reported for thrusting his genitalia against her backside, but ignored her grievance, the suit says.
Gonzalez has seen transgender inmates “posing” in a feminine manner “when meeting with prison counselors but reverting to their masculine habits upon returning to their housing units.”
WoLF Legal Director Lauren Bone told Just the News that Robertson wasn’t using a preferred name in the CDCR’s system, which lists Robertson as housed at a substance abuse treatment facility and prison.
Robertson goes by Syiiah Skylit in media coverage and a class-action lawsuit on behalf of transgender inmates, whose timing suggests it prompted CDCR to approve Robertson’s transfer to CCWF in 2021.
California public radio station KQED claimed California was not following the law under its “year-long investigation” published last fall, which sympathetically portrayed Skylit and other male inmates in women’s prisons and tried to discredit WoLF and female inmates.
Bone told Just the News that Contreras goes by Eva Reeves in CDCR’s system, which shows the inmate is housed at CCWF but gives no indication that Reeves is male. A person identified as “Eva Reeves,” purporting to be housed in a California prison, joined an inmate blogging platform run by a consulting firm this spring.
Unlike Robertson, Contreras does not appear to be a cause celebre in mainstream media or gender identity activism, even under “Eva Reeves.” The inmate is identified by both names in the Independent Women’s Forum 2024 video series “Cruel and Unusual,” which was promoted by talk show host Megyn Kelly, as well as Christian Post reporting from 2023.
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Greg Piper is a reporter for Just the News.Â
