JOEL ROSE, HOST:
Don't tell anybody. That was the advice that Ali Prout received from her cellmate. Prout had told her that she had been raped by Gregory Rodriguez, a corrections officer at the Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla, California.
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ALI PROUT: She's like, you do what you have to do and be fake until you get out of here, and then you tell somebody.
ROSE: Prout followed that advice, and for months, she bore more abuse and quietly collected evidence until she was released in August of 2022. When she got out, that evidence she collected, along with her testimony, would help convict Rodriguez on more than 60 counts of sexual assault. He was sentenced to 224 years in prison. Prout's story, along with the abuse suffered by many other prisoners at the Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla, are the subject of a new investigative podcast, We Are Jane Doe, by NPR member station KQED and Snap Studios. And a warning - this story will contain details of violence and sexual assault. Host Madi Bolaños and producer Anna Sussman join me now. Welcome to you both.
MADI BOLAÑOS: Thanks for having us.
ANNA SUSSMAN: Thanks for having us.
ROSE: Anna, I want to start with you. Ali Prout's story is really central to the podcast. Tell us a little bit about her and why her story was so crucial to your investigation.
SUSSMAN: She was convicted of a nonviolent offense, and very soon after she arrived at the Central California Women's Facility, an officer named Gregory Rodriguez said something inappropriate to her about how beautiful her lips were and how attractive she was, and she felt very uncomfortable. And shortly after that, he proceeded to assault her, and it was during the very first assault, she said, that she decided to single-handedly kind of make this plan to fight back. She said she knew she couldn't yell and fight in the same way that someone in the free world might be able to.
She knew she had to kind of pretend to go along with things because the big fear she had, and that lots of women we spoke with had, is more time being added to their sentence. Most of the women who are there are there for much longer amounts of time than she was set to serve. And for that reason, she still had a lot of fight in her, and she hadn't been kind of broken down by the system. And she hadn't been dehumanized year after year in the way that many women that we've interviewed are. Gregory Rodriguez had assaulted many, many women, and many women had tried various ways to fight back. But none of them had been successful because they hadn't been released as quickly as she had.
ROSE: OK, so we know that her testimony ultimately played a major part in Rodriguez's arrest. What happened next?
SUSSMAN: After Ali came forward, we asked the prison to give us all the data that they could about reports, claims of sexual assault at the prison. And what we saw from that data was pretty amazing, a dramatic rise in women reporting sexual assault inside that prison after Rodriguez was arrested.
ROSE: So a dramatic rise, and following that increase in complaints comes this really horrific incident that figures prominently in this podcast. The day is August 2, 2024. Over 150 inmates are rounded up in the prison cafeteria. They are held there for hours while their cells are raided by the corrections staff, and then they are attacked with gaseous chemical agents, tied up, beaten. Here's how some of the women describe that incident in your podcast.
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UNIDENTIFIED INMATE #1: It was like a concentration camp, actually, if I'm allowed to say that.
UNIDENTIFIED INMATE #2: It was war (ph) zone, World War II zone.
UNIDENTIFIED INMATE #3: It was the most traumatizing experience I've ever dealt with in my life.
ROSE: The corrections staff had a name for this incident. They called it Operation Breakdown. You collected testimony and reviewed the security footage of this incident. After all of your reporting, Madi, what do you understand about how and why this happened?
BOLAÑOS: OK, so we interviewed this woman named Antoinette Yancey. She's incarcerated at the Central California Women's Facility. She's also on a counsel that mediates issues between staff and prisoners. She told us that a sergeant came up to her and essentially warned her that if this rise in sexual assault complaints didn't stop, that there would be consequences. She was also part of a lawsuit that involved 12 other women, and they were suing CDCR for injuries that they got during that August 2 incident. And in that lawsuit, they also alleged that this was retaliation for a rise in sexual assault complaints. Now, just last month, the DOJ came out with its own report. And it looked into August 2, and it also found that it was retaliation for sexual assault complaints.
ROSE: You know, I find it striking that the corrections staff must have known that this would all be caught on the security cameras, but this still went ahead. What do you make of that?
BOLAÑOS: What we learned in our reporting is that there is kind of this culture at the facility where there's almost this unchecked power. And so, yes, the officers know that they're being recorded, but they also don't face harsh consequences for their actions, and that seems to allow this to continue.
ROSE: What did the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation say when you brought these allegations to them?
BOLAÑOS: Well, they said that they take every allegation of sexual assault seriously, and they investigate them. And they also said that they have a zero-tolerance policy for retaliation.
SUSSMAN: We also know that after the August 2 attack, the incidents of women reporting claims of sexual assault went way down again.
ROSE: Many of the women that you spoke to are still in prison in Chowchilla. What have you heard from them? What is life like for them now after all of this has come to light?
BOLAÑOS: Most of the women that we spoke to say that they do not feel comfortable reporting sexual assaults, and if they were able to do it over, they would not go through that process because of the retaliation that they continue to face.
ROSE: If I'm hearing you right, it sounds like that the women you've spoken to who are still in the prison would do this differently. Say more about that.
SUSSMAN: We interviewed a large number of women in the prison. Nearly every single one of them told us that they had experienced sexual assault at some point in the prison. Most of them said, I never reported because I don't want to get myself in that kind of trouble. But the ones who said that they had reported said - I wished I had not - because they feel that they face ongoing retaliation in small and big ways in their daily lives in the prison because of what they reported.
ROSE: Wow. Where do things stand now? I mean, Gregory Rodriguez has been convicted, but has anything happened to the other officers who were implicated in all of this?
BOLAÑOS: No one else has been fired or convicted for sexual assault that we are aware of, but we do know that after this DOJ report came out, several officers have been walked off the yard and are being investigated for sexual assault.
ROSE: You know, the story of Chowchilla feels really extraordinary, but is it? Or is it just extraordinary that we know about what happened in this particular incident?
BOLAÑOS: You know, sexual abuse is a problem across prisons in this country. That's why in 2003 Congress passed the Prison Rape Elimination Act to eliminate rape in prison. But over the last 20 years, it continues to be a problem, and, you know, that's because there's these closed-door environments with unchecked power, and that really allows for this kind of abuse to flourish.
ROSE: You know, there's another major story about sexual assault that is capturing national headlines. And I'm talking, of course, about the allegations of gang rape at Cornell University. How do you think this story that you are telling fits into this larger conversation that the country is having at the moment?
SUSSMAN: There's a lot of parallels. There's a question of bystander complicity. There's the question of a lack of accountability. One thing that's interesting to think about is this concept of closed systems where sexual assault can really flourish, so like closed families, closed churches, for example, and closed prisons. So in this instance, I think something that's from the Cornell situation is that this is all happening kind of in a black box. It's - it was very difficult for us to get any information in or out. When they finally allowed us a visit, they said we were not allowed to speak with any of the women inside the prison. And as we toured the halls, women shouted out to us, they treat us terribly in here, they treat us like animals. And we were not allowed to speak with them. So I think the lack of transparency adds a layer of fear and a layer of concern.
ROSE: Madi Bolaños and Anna Sussman are the host and producer of the investigative podcast We Are Jane Doe by NPR member station KQED and Snap Studios. Thank you to you both.
BOLAÑOS: Thank you.
SUSSMAN: Thanks for having us. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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