It Finally Happened: Man Allegedly Posed as Trans to Enter Women’s Prison

A New York woman has filed a lawsuit alleging she was sexually assaulted at Rikers Island by a man who bragged he wasn’t trans but had posed as trans to enter the women’s part of the prison.

by Evan Urquhart

According to New York’s NBC affiliate, as well as other outlets, a cisgender woman is suing New York City over conditions at Rikers Island. Unlike many previous lawsuits detailing abuse, neglect, and mismanagement at Rikers, this complaint stands out because of allegations that “Rose Doe” was sexually assaulted by a man pretending to be trans in order to gain access to the women’s dormitories of the notorious facility. The lawsuit has been covered by the New York Post, the Daily Mail, and the Daily Caller, whose story included an uploaded copy of the court filing.

Rikers Island, considered one of the worst jails in the country, is known for its abysmal conditions and repeated scandals. In just the past few months, national news outlets have reported that inmates weren’t evacuated for nearly half an hour during a fire, that Rikers has been used to warehouse people with mental illness indefinitely, that hundreds of lawsuits have been filed alleging sexual abuse at the facility, and that repeated attempts by the courts to force the city to improve conditions have failed, leading one judge to consider placing Rikers into receivership.

Seen against that backdrop of known, continuing, widespread abuses, Roe’s allegation that corrections officers encouraged a cisgender man with multiple rape complaints against him to pretend to be transgender to gain access to women inmates, possibly for the purposes of coercing them into sex work, seems at least somewhat plausible. A lot of really messed up stuff goes on at Rikers!

While the suit includes salacious details suggesting that the perpetrator of the sexual assault had bragged openly that he was not transgender and was only in the women’s dormitories for “pussy,” perhaps the most serious allegation is that Doe filed a complaint alerting authorities at Rikers that the other inmate had targeted her with sexually abusive comments, harassment, and groped her non-consensually, but the complaint was not acted on and the unit was not adequately supervised, allowing the other inmate to attempt to rape her in her bed after the complaint was filed.

screenshot from NBC New York

The New York Post’s story on the case identified Doe’s attorney as Nicholas Liakas, a partner in Liakas Law, whose website outlines police brutality and abuse by corrections officials as an area of specialty along with construction accidents, personal injury cases, and similar. They do not appear to have any obvious connection to conservative culture war litigation. In some of his statements to the NYPost, Liakas seems to have downplayed the case’s culture war angle, instead focusing on the actions of corrections officers.

Trans women who are incarcerated in America are most often housed in men’s prisons. Studies have found trans women are 10 times more likely to be victims of sexual assault than other prisoners.