OAKLAND — A group of people who spent time incarcerated at FCI Dublin have sued the now infamous all women federal prison, alleging that the ongoing sexual abuse scandal there came as a result of prison officials missing or flat-out ignoring warning signs for decades.
The suit filed Wednesday alleges that sexual assault has long been a rampant problem at FCI Dublin — secretly known by the nickname "Rape Club" — but that those responsible were able to avoid serious consequences until recently. It lists the California Coalition for Women Prisoners, a nonprofit that advocates for education over incarceration, and eight alleged sexual assault victims as the plaintiffs.
"People call FCI Dublin a rape club," Anaris Montes, an attorney representing the group filing the lawsuit, said during a press conference outside a federal courthouse in Oakland on Wednesday. "This litigation shows that the FCI Dublin officers are running a trafficking system within those walls. Individual prisoners have had to endure rape, groping, voyeurism, forced stripping, sexually explicit comments on an everyday basis and so much more."
The lawsuit accuses the Bureau of Prisons of failing to do enough to prevent sexual abuse at the prison, despite serious incidents going back to the 1990s. And it notes that when authorities finally started investigating the crimes, it was the FBI and Department of Justice, not the Bureau of Prisons, that led the probe.
"Survivors frequently face immediate retaliation, including placement in solitary confinement, repeated and unjustified strip and cell searches, and transfer to other facilities away from their families and support systems," the suit says, later adding, "this dangerous state of affairs has continued, unabated, across multiple decades and multiple administrations."
FCI Dublin has been the subject of not just criminal investigations but Congressional calls for reform and civil rights investigations since 2021, when the first former corrections officer there was charged with sexual abuse of an incarcerated woman. Since then, seven more prison employees, including a prison chaplain, the onetime warden and other supervisors, have been charged or convicted of sexual abuse.
"I'm united with the people who are inside and suffering," said Maria Flores, who was incarcerated at the prison from 2019-2022. "Now that I'm on the outside, I can help by lending my voice."
Flores said her time the prison separated her from her young daughters "but what was most difficult was seeing the abuse that we suffered."
"Personally I was abused, and I saw how my friends were abused by guards. I know it's the job of officers to protect us, but I saw officers abusing them, grabbing them, groping them," she said.
Yvonne Palmore, another former inmate at the facility, said she endured not only sexual abuse but verbal, emotional and psychological abuse, as well. She said that whenever she threatened to tell others in power what was happening, she was sent put in solitary confinement.
"This is very meaningful," she said. "When you're in prison paying your debt to society, you shouldn't be subject to rape or to being groped, and you shouldn't threatened with solitary when you stand up to the people who are doing this to you."
The suit alleges that in the 2010s, several guards were fired for "sexually abusing inmates, including one who videotaped himself having sex with inmates and stored those tapes in a prison locker," but none were arrested. It also notes that in 1998, the Bureau of Prisons settled a lawsuit that alleged FCI Dublin guards kept "incarcerated women in a men's solitary confinement unit and allowed them to be raped by the men being held there."
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