The women who fought back when their jailers assaulted them
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Aliksandria Prout had only been at the Central California Women’s Facility for a few days when a male officer stopped her at a checkpoint. “You have beautiful lips and beautiful eyes,” he said. That was just the beginning. On this episode of The Sunday Story, we feature the first episode of a new three-part series from KQED’s Snap Judgment called “We Are Jane Doe.” It follows thirteen women and their fight for justice against the jailers who sexually assaulted them.
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I'm Aisha Roscoe and this is the Sunday Story from Up First. #IMJainDo is surging on social media in response to allegations of a gang rape at Cornell University. The campaign is seeing women naming their abusers and calling for accountability across the country. Over at Snap Judgment, a podcast from KQED, reporters Maddie Belanyos and Anna Sussman have been doing an investigation into sexual abuse at a women's prison in California. In their new three-part series, We Are Jane Doe, 13 women break the silence about the assaults they experienced at the hands of the prison guards. A warning that this story contains strong language and descriptions of violence against women and sexual assault. Okay, here's episode one of We Are Jane Doe. Okay, okay, I'm going to introduce you to yes. I'm Alexandria Prout and I'm Jane Doe No. 1 and I think referring to myself as Jane Doe No. 1 was part of the privacy with such a high-profile case. This is the first time Alexandria, who goes by Ali, has told her story publicly. I felt like I had no choice but to speak up, I knew I wasn't the only victim, I knew there was other victims, and I just felt like if I didn't speak up, this was going to continue. And by me speaking up, I was going to make a difference for other women. Ali grew up in California, in the suburbs, outside of the state capital Sacramento. She was a first-born daughter in an immigrant family, so she was responsible and high-achieving. Yeah, I had self-esteem, and I'm educated, I was a varsity cheerleader, I was homecoming queen, like I'm a good mom. After high school, she trained to work as a medical technician. She had three kids, but things with her ex went really bad, and in late 2021, she says she was in the midst of an ugly custody battle, when the police showed up at her door. I'm holding my six-week-old daughter, they say, Miss Prout, we have two felony no-bail warrants for you, we need to take you into custody. So my mom's there, I remember just kissing and smelling my daughter, handing my daughter to my mom, and they cuffed me and took me into custody. She was charged with felony stalking and violation of a restraining order for sending threats over text in the heat of that custody battle. Her crime isn't what our story is about, so we're not going to spend a lot of time on it, but what you need to know is that... It was a nonviolent offense, I was sentenced to three years in prison. What do you remember about the process of going to prison? I remember the drive, we finally get there, we get off of us, they unshackle us, they make you get naked, and they put these big moo-moo's on you, like these huge moo-moo's gowns, and then they check you... They make you go through a body scanner, and then they give you your oranges, and then they give you these black and white platform looking shoes. They give you everything you're going to need for yourself, and you sit there for hours, and then finally you line up against the wall, and they march you out on the yard. The Central California Women's Prison, near Chowchilla, California, is this massive, sprawling complex of housing units connected with interlocking hallways, checkpoint gates, and lifeless, brown yards, surrounded by miles of barbed wire. About 2,000 people are locked inside, making it one of the largest women's prisons on earth. Ali was taken to A-yard, which is for prisoners who've just arrived. I just remember, we were freezing, we were hungry, I think I dropped 20 pounds on A-yard. There were narrow metal bunk beds, a toilet, and a shower, with up to 8 women assigned to a cell. I remember all we had in that cell was a Bible, and so we would take turns reading the Bible out loud to one another. She hadn't been there long when she first came across an officer named Gregory Rodriguez. Just a note, we reached out to Gregory Rodriguez for this story, but he did not get back to us. I was walking to a medical docket, and he was the officer at the post that had to verify your docket. A docket is like a hall pass, it's like this piece of paper that you need in order to move around the prison. And I had an N95 mask on because it was during the time of COVID, and so he asked me, "Can you please remove your N95 mask so I can identify you?" So I did, I removed my mask, I lowered it, and he said, "You have beautiful lips and beautiful eyes, you're so beautiful." And started making sexually objective comments towards me. She's used to getting looks from men, and her Russian Ukrainian grandmother would warn her to kind of watch out. You know, my grandmother always told me, "You may have it harder in life because you're a very pretty girl, and that has its blessings and downfalls at the same time." In prison, she did not want to track that kind of attention. Fast forward three days later, I was in my cell. I was sitting on my bed and they called me over the loudspeaker, and they said, "Proud you have a docket," which is a pass. They told me I had an attorney visit, and so I thought, "Okay, great, maybe I'm getting out of here because my crime just doesn't fit to be here. Maybe there's a technical error, something good's going to happen." And as soon as I got to the main yard gate, I had seen that it was the same officer that had made this actually explicit comments, and like my heart just sank. I was like, "Okay, this isn't going to be good." She was still so new to the prison, and she kind of felt uneasy. Officer Rodriguez had then escorted me into the BPH room, which is a board of prison hearings room, and he walked me in there.
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