29 female inmates allege sexual abuse in suit
Twenty-nine women in state prison say they were sexually abused, some for many years, by a guard who was eventually fired but was never criminally prosecuted.
The women have filed a lawsuit against the state and 100 unnamed coworkers of Israel Trevino at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla who allegedly helped him commit the assaults and conceal them before he was fired for sexual misconduct in 2018. Trevino died in May 2021.
Trevino and his coworkers used their authority to “coerce (the women) to submit to sexual assaults and to refrain from revealing or disclosing the sexual assaults and abuse … for fear of reprisals, longer sentences” and other types of retaliation, lawyers for the 29 women said in a suit filed last week in Sacramento County Superior Court. It seeks unspecified damages.
“Incarcerated people are dependent upon correctional staff for everything — their safety, privileges, quality of life, contact with the outside world, and even their eventual liberty,” Adam Slater, a lawyer for the women, said in a statement. “Risking everything, these brave women have stepped forward to share their harrowing experiences.”
The state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, which runs the prisons, declined to comment on the lawsuit. Spokesperson Terri Hary said in a statement that the department “investigates all allegations of sexual abuse, staff sexual misconduct, and sexual harassment pursuant to its zero-tolerance policy.”
Courts have found numerous instances of unprovoked assaults against inmates of state and federal prisons in California. At the Federal Correctional Institution for female inmates in Dublin, former Warden Ray Garcia and five staff members have been found guilty of sexually
attacking prisoners, a sixth awaits trial, and a group of inmates filed a class-action suit in August accusing officials, including U.S. Bureau of Prisons Director Colette Peters, of fostering a climate of abuse.
In state prisons, violence against inmates with physical or mental disabilities has led to rulings by a federal judge, from 1996 onward, requiring officials to strengthen their standards, install cameras and punish wrongdoers.
In one incident cited in a federal appeals court ruling this year, when an inmate at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego asked a guard not to cuff his hands behind his back because he used a cane and a walker, the guard slammed him to the ground and knocked him unconscious.
The Chowchilla lawsuit says Trevino assaulted most of the 29 women for years between 2010 and 2015, and some as early as 2000, groping their genitals, ordering two to perform oral sex and raping one woman.
Other guards, and prison officials, allowed Trevino to be alone with female prisoners in their living quarters and behind closed doors in violation of prison rules, the suit said.
Filing criminal charges against Trevino would have been a decision for the Madera County district attorney or the state attorney general, who were not named as defendants in the suit. But any such prosecution would have required information from the women, who were allegedly intimidated into silence, or from officials at the prison.