The state Department of Corrections is facing a lawsuit from a formerly incarcerated women who alleges she was raped by another incarcerated person who is transgender. (Photo by Darrin Klimek/Getty Images)
A formerly incarcerated woman is suing over New Jersey’s transgender policy in prisons, claiming she was sexually assaulted by a transgender inmate who shouldn’t have been moved to the state’s only women’s prison.
In the complaint, Lauren Mitchell said she was sexually assaulted on three separate occasions at the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women while she and her alleged attacker were working prison jobs outside of their cells. She repeatedly asked prison officials to reassign her to a job away from Demi Minor, the person she says assaulted her, but they did not comply, according to the lawsuit filed last month in state Superior Court in Hunterdon County.
It’s unclear if Mitchell reported the alleged assaults. Her attorney did not respond to the New Jersey Monitor’s requests for comment, but the lawsuit notes that a witness reported at least one assault.
“By failing to properly investigate the earlier assaults, defendants sent a signal to (Minor) that this behavior would be tolerated and sent a signal to the plaintiff, Lauren Mitchell, that she was on her own, incarcerated with a dangerous man,” the suit states.
The New Jersey Monitor generally does not identify victims of sexual assaults. Mitchell’s lawsuit was filed under her own name, and there is no record of her asking a judge to allow her to file it using a pseudonym.
The lawsuit shines a spotlight on the correctional system’s controversial transgender policy, which was first enacted in 2021 as part of a court-ordered settlement resulting from a transgender inmate’s civil rights lawsuit. Under that policy, the state Department of Corrections agreed to house incarcerated people based on their gender identity.
Before long, the number of people applying to transfer to Edna Mahan skyrocketed, and that jump in transfers helped fuel a spike in assaults there, said Bonnie Kerness, who heads the American Friends Service Committee’s prison watch program and serves on Edna Mahan’s board of trustees.
Prior to the settlement, there were maybe 15 requests for transfers to Edna Mahan, versus 250 after, Kerness said.
“It’s one thing to say you have to allow transgender women to transfer to the women’s facility. It’s another to have a specific process that makes sense, which they did not have. Many of us were pushing for a logical process. It was very messy, in the beginning,” she said.
The policy’s shortcomings soon became public knowledge after Minor, who had transferred to Edna Mahan in 2020 from a men’s prison, made headlines for impregnating two women at a prison already notorious for its history of brutality and sexual abuse. Edna Mahan, located near Clinton, remains under federal oversight after a 2021 settlement agreement.
In October 2022, the Department of Corrections reversed course, amending its policy to heighten scrutiny of housing requests.
Now, an advisory council oversees determinations on transgender and non-binary housing and programming, making case-by-case decisions based on six factors besides gender identity — the person’s vulnerability to sexual victimization in the current or potential facility, safety in facilities, criminal history including likelihood to perpetuate sexual abuse or other violence, medical and mental health needs, and reproductive concerns.
Department officials also created a “vulnerable persons unit” where they could house transgender people with security concerns that made them a bad fit at either Edna Mahan or the men’s prisons. That unit, located at the Garden State Youth Correctional Facility in Burlington County, also houses other people deemed vulnerable for various reasons.
The newer transgender policy has largely eliminated the problems that arose from the initial policy, at least at Edna Mahan, Kerness said.
“There is a calmness there,” she said.
Minor, who was imprisoned as a male at age 16 in 2011, was transferred to the vulnerable persons unit shortly after impregnating the two women at Edna Mahan and is now incarcerated at East Jersey State Prison, a men’s facility in Rahway.
In her lawsuit, Mitchell argued the state should have taken into greater consideration whether Minor was dangerous when deciding to approve the move. In particular, the lawsuit states, the panel should have considered Minor’s convictions — for manslaughter for fatally stabbing Minor’s foster father in 2011 and an unrelated armed carjacking that same year — and a history of aggression in foster homes as reasons to deny the request to move to Edna Mahan.
Dan Sperrazza, a spokesman for the corrections department, declined to comment on the litigation. But he said the transgender policy “aims to balance the safety and security interests of everyone in the department’s custody.”
There are 42 transgender individuals currently housed at Edna Mahan, and 108 transgender people housed across all nine adult state prisons statewide, Sperrazza said. Roughly 24,000 people are incarcerated in prisons and jails located in New Jersey.
NJ Advance Media has reported the relationships between Minor and the impregnated women were consensual, but Mitchell says in her suit that any behavior between her and Minor was not consensual nor solicited.
Mitchell accuses the Department of Corrections and prison officials of negligence, reckless indifference, cruel and unusual punishment, and negligent duty of supervision.
She also says the prison violated the Law Against Discrimination and equal protections afforded under the state Constitution by placing her with someone of the “biologically opposite sex,” treating her differently than other females in the prison and subjecting her to a dangerous situation in an unsupervised environment.
When reached on an app to message incarcerated people, Minor did not comment on the lawsuit or its allegations.
Mitchell was a teacher in Jersey City before she got arrested for sexually assaulting a 15-year-old student and went to state prison on a five-year sentence in 2019. She was released in October 2023. She had her teacher’s license suspended and was ordered to register as a sex offender under Megan’s Law.
Dana DiFilippo contributed to this report.
SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
Local News
