{"id":10512,"date":"2021-01-19T21:13:24","date_gmt":"2021-01-19T21:13:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.radiofree.org\/?p=152056"},"modified":"2021-01-19T21:13:24","modified_gmt":"2021-01-19T21:13:24","slug":"federal-prison-took-nine-months-to-investigate-reality-winners-abuse-claim","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/01\/19\/federal-prison-took-nine-months-to-investigate-reality-winners-abuse-claim\/","title":{"rendered":"Federal Prison Took Nine Months to Investigate Reality Winner\u2019s Abuse Claim"},"content":{"rendered":"
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On New Year\u2019s Eve<\/u>, Billie Winner-Davis, the mother of National Security Agency whistleblower Reality Winner, received a panicked call from the Fort Worth, Texas, prison where her daughter is serving a more than five-year sentence. Winner revealed to her mother that she had filed a sexual assault complaint in March under the Prison Rape Elimination Act, or PREA. The months-old claim, though, had become newly urgent. In December, Winner told her mother, through tears, that the guard she accused of wrongdoing announced to her unit that Winner had filed a report and warned: \u201cIf you lie on me, I go for blood.\u201d<\/p>\n

Other incarcerated women gathered around Winner and told her that they would keep her safe, her mother said, relating Winner\u2019s account. The young Air Force veteran, Winner-Davis said, felt \u201cperfectly safe\u201d around the other detainees and feared that the prison would put her in solitary confinement as a would-be protective measure.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Winner-Davis pulled every lever she could to sound the alarm. She wrote to the prison\u2019s administration, to Texas\u2019s two senators, to her congressional representative, and to the White House. She shared<\/a> details of the incident with her tens of thousands of social media followers.<\/p>\n

Then, in early January, the prison did something it had not done in the more than nine months since Winner filed her PREA complaint: send an investigator to interview her about the incident and, remarkably, a physician to examine her for signs of sexual assault.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cThe protocol is designed and is almost entirely always done within 24, 48 hours of the report. This is just totally outrageous.\u201d<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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When a baffled Winner explained to the doctor that her complaint had been filed nearly a year before, he took her vitals and wrote down an account of what had happened, according to Alison Grinter, the Dallas-based attorney running Winner\u2019s clemency bid<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs soon as their attention was brought around to this, they went through the protocol,\u201d Grinter said. \u201cBut of course, the protocol is designed and is almost entirely always done within 24, 48 hours of the report. This is just totally outrageous.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Bureau of Prisons, in a statement, told The Intercept it has a \u201czero tolerance\u201d policy for sexual abuse and that all allegations are \u201cthoroughly investigated.\u201d But experts said the protections laid out under PREA may still come up short for the range of ways that incarcerated people experience sexual threats.<\/p>\n

People incarcerated in federal prisons file hundreds of PREA reports each year, but administrators frequently<\/a> decide that the allegations aren\u2019t true or can\u2019t be substantiated. A 2019 PREA audit<\/a> of Federal Medical Center Carswell, the prison where Winner is being held, said that \u201cretaliation monitoring\u201d at the facility was not always undertaken \u201cin a timely manner,\u201d as noted<\/a> by journalist Kevin Gosztola at Shadowproof, who first reported Winner\u2019s allegations. The shortcomings in the reporting system can leave vulnerable incarcerated people to doubt what protection, if any, they can count on and, like Winner, cause them to second-guess their own experience.<\/p>\n

The alleged retaliatory<\/u> verbal threat capped off a dark year for Winner, her penultimate one behind bars.<\/p>\n

Winner is currently serving the longest prison sentence of its kind under the Espionage Act, a World War I-era law used in recent years to send journalists\u2019 sources to prison, even as comparable defendants have simply gotten probation for \u201cmishandling classified information.\u201d<\/p>\n

The government itself acknowledges that Winner\u2019s intent was to send the document she leaked to journalists and therefore warn the American public, rather than use it for personal gain. The NSA report detailed phishing attacks by Russian military intelligence on local U.S. election officials and was published in a June 2017 article by The Intercept. (The Intercept\u2019s parent company, First Look Media, contributed to Winner\u2019s legal fund through the Press Freedom Defense Fund.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In 2020, she suffered a series of legal defeats<\/a> as she attempted to secure compassionate release during the Covid-19 pandemic \u2014 something that would not only have brought peace of mind to her and her family but was also in line with pandemic policy guidance<\/a> to prisons from then-Attorney General William Barr. In the months while she waited for courts to respond, Winner became infected<\/a> with Covid-19 during a mass outbreak in her prison, which would eventually see six incarcerated people die with the virus.<\/p>\n

Throughout the pandemic, the prison\u2019s lockdown crippled Winner\u2019s ability to manage the eating disorder<\/a> she was diagnosed with during the time when she spent 12-hour days translating the intercepted communications of terror suspects in the drone program. At her sentencing, Winner told a judge that bulimia is \u201cthe most pressing internal challenge in my day-to-day survival.\u201d<\/p>\n

The March incident<\/u> that prompted Winner to file a PREA report occurred around 3 a.m., during an overnight cell check that guards perform to make sure incarcerated people are in their beds, according to Grinter, who got an account directly from Winner. If guards cannot see a person, they may make a vocal command to get their attention; Winner told her attorneys that a guard reached into her bed and rubbed her arm.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s unclear what action, if any, prison administrators took after Winner filed her complaint. Federal Medical Center Carswell did not respond to emailed questions or a voicemail from The Intercept, and the Bureau of Prisons\u2019 public affairs office said it cannot comment on individual claims made by an incarcerated person.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThis investigator just pretty much minimized everything and, during the interview process, was basically trying to persuade Reality that nothing happened.\u201d<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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Winner told her mother and Grinter that nothing happened after she filed her PREA report. Winner-Davis believes only her public outcry led the prison to send an investigator and doctor to meet Winner in January. Winner-Davis said her daughter said that the investigator, during the interview, led Winner to doubt her own gut feeling that she had been violated.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis investigator just pretty much minimized everything and, during the interview process, was basically trying to persuade Reality that nothing happened,\u201d Winner-Davis said, recounting her daughter\u2019s observations. \u201cWhen she walked out, she got really angry because she\u2019s like: \u2018No, dang it, this happened. And I\u2019ve been victimized.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Julie Abbate, national advocacy director of Just Detention International, a group dedicated to ending sexual abuse in detention, said it is possible that the prison officials decided an incident like the one described by Winner does not fall under PREA. But that doesn\u2019t mean an incarcerated woman didn\u2019t find it sexually threatening, according to Abbate. If a woman is asleep in her bed late at night and then is abruptly awoken by a hand on her skin, she will likely experience that in a way that is overshadowed by her awareness of women\u2019s sexual vulnerability, she said.<\/p>\n

In response to a description of the incident that Winner gave her attorneys, Abbate said: \u201cAbsolutely, without question, I don\u2019t doubt for a second that if she says she was sexually threatened. If she says she felt sexually threatened, then she felt sexually threatened.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cShe\u2019s still very concerned about facing retaliation.\u201d<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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Prison safety protocols may call for checking up on incarcerated people overnight, both to ensure that there are no escapes and that no one has had a medical emergency, Abbate said, but it should be done in a way that takes women\u2019s real fears over their vulnerability into account.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat this means is that the BOP\u201d \u2014 Bureau of Prisons \u2014 \u201cis failing its women prisoners if they\u2019re not dealing with them in a gender-responsive manner,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Since Winner relayed the alleged verbal threat to her mother and attorneys, a staffing change at the prison has allayed her immediate concerns, according to Winner-Davis, though her daughter remains worried that a reversal would put her back in danger.<\/p>\n

Her supporters are drumming up attention and advocacy with an eye on the incoming Biden administration, with a military families advocacy group launching a letter-writing campaign to seek clemency<\/a> or a pardon for the young veteran as a growing and diverse array<\/a> of political actors back her cause.<\/p>\n

But while she continues to be incarcerated, the verbal threat looms large for Winner.<\/p>\n

Grinter said, \u201cShe\u2019s still very concerned about facing retaliation.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n

This post was originally published on Radio Free<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On New Year\u2019s Eve, Billie Winner-Davis, the mother of National Security Agency whistleblower Reality Winner, received a panicked call from the Fort Worth, Texas, prison where her daughter\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":408,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[118,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10512"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/408"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10512"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10512\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10513,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10512\/revisions\/10513"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10512"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10512"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10512"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}