The day before Zahara Green began her prison bid, a medical official with the Georgia Department of Corrections wrote just one comment on her health summary form: “Possible gender issues with housing.”
Green was 23, a convicted shoplifter, and a transgender woman about to be housed with men. Two months later, on a separate medical form, a doctor would note her gender identity disorder — then the widely accepted psychological diagnosis for transgender people — along with her bra size. She would be prescribed hormones to maintain the transition she said she had begun six years earlier. All this to say, by the time she entered general population at eastern Georgia’s Rogers State Prison in July 2012, Green’s identity as a woman was well-documented, despite the “Sex: M” stamped at the top of her papers.
Yet wardens at Rogers would claim they had no “personal knowledge” that Green “claimed to be transgender” until late August 2012. This discrepancy between her medical records and her treatment by officials had an immediate effect. On her first day at Rogers, she said, she was stripped naked and searched alongside gawking men in the “shakedown shack” — a humiliation that feels far away to Green now, after everything else that’s happened. When she was assigned a bed, inmates trotted past her as if she were on display. One of these men allegedly approached her that day with an offer of protection, only to soon after threaten her for sexual favors. Two months later, he allegedly raped her.
By Green's account, this assault was not an accident. Between her first day at Rogers and her alleged rape, Green had met with the warden in person, then allegedly wrote to the warden and deputy warden of security for help, then finally asked to be put in protective custody — only to find herself assigned to share her protective custody cell with the man she feared.
These events make up the bulk of a lawsuit Green filed earlier this year, which BuzzFeed News first reported on in September. This is not the first suit of its kind: Transgender inmates all over the country have long alleged systemic mistreatment. But the extent to which this particular prison neglected widely accepted procedures for housing transgender inmates, allegedly ignored Green's pleas for help, and then misplaced evidence after her alleged attack — all detailed here for the first time — reveal just how little circumstances have changed for transgender inmates today, 11 years after the passage of a federal anti-prison rape law that was supposed to help protect them.
Green believes the prison could have prevented her rape. But nine months after her release, she still wonders: Why, exactly, didn’t they?
Photograph by Matt Odom for BuzzFeed News
Before entering general population at Rogers State Prison, even while awaiting trial in jail, Green said she had always been segregated — either because of a lack of bed space, she was told, or because prison officials didn’t want to put her with men or with women.
At Rogers, a facility with nearly 1,500 beds, she felt like she had been left “out with the wolves.”
Darryl Ricard, the inmate who approached her on that first day, walked around “like he owned the place,” Green recalled. Ricard told her he was the highest-ranking gang member on the compound, affiliated with Chicago Vice Lords. Ricard also said he was looking for a friend, Green later told an investigator.
“Someone like you is going to need someone to protect you in a place like this,” she remembers Ricard saying.
“I was just like, OK, whatever,” she said. She said she didn’t fully grasp the meaning of Ricard’s approach until a gay inmate in her dorm told her that Ricard thought he was her husband.
Soon Ricard began demanding sexual favors, and when Green resisted, he “just went through the roof,” according to the interview and a written statement she later gave to the investigator. Ricard allegedly confronted Green with a shank and a belt with a lock on it, threw her against the wall of a bathroom, and told her that if she left, “it will be a blood bath,” she said.
Green wrote her mother, vaguely but forcefully telling her she was in trouble: “I have control of the situation for now but once I don’t, I might be seriously hurt or killed. I am very scared but I am playing my part,” she wrote.
Her mother called the prison — it’s only at this point that Brad Hooks and John Brown, the warden and deputy warden of security at Rogers, respectively, said they learned Green “claimed to be transgender.” Hooks had Green escorted to his office. But when he asked her what was going on, she didn’t tell him anything.
The warden seemed “mad” and “aggressive,” Green explained. Ricard’s gang also had secret cell phones, Green said, and Ricard allegedly told her he could send her photo out to other prisons if she talked and somehow got transferred.
Hooks sent Green back to general population.
Days later, Green said, she wrote to the warden. She still didn’t disclose the situation with Ricard, but she allegedly told Hooks that she believed the prison was dangerous for transgender and out gay inmates — she said cell door locks were not secure and allowed prisoners to move around units freely. Hooks later said in a court filing that he has “no specific recollection” of receiving such a letter.
Meanwhile, Ricard’s behavior allegedly escalated. He forced Green to perform oral sex four times over the next few weeks, she estimated. At one point he allegedly gave Green a cloth ring to wear. Green would later call this behavior “crazy psycho stuff,” telling an investigator that “one thing I made sure I did not do was confuse him into thinking that I had feelings for him.”
This same investigator later asked Ricard if his “relationship” with Green flourished “out of protection ... or did it flourish out of affection?" Ricard responded that he felt "emotional attachment" to Green. He said every night they had “some kind of intercourse” in his bed, where she would stay until 3:30 or 4 a.m. He said “officers have witnessed this.”
Photograph by Matt Odom for BuzzFeed News
Two years later, Green can’t quite finish retelling her story. She’s sitting in the poster-lined conference room of a social justice advocacy group called Project South, completely still — arms crossed over her cream button-up blouse, legs crossed over her black slacks, and shoes she doesn’t even really like.
The first thing people working on Green’s case will tell you is that she’s a little quiet and a little shy. But on this October afternoon, it isn’t timidness keeping Green’s eyes glued to the oversize wood table in front of her — to the dark spots where stray tears have stained her legal pad. As the events leading to her alleged rape come into focus, Green’s silence is crushing.
“The reason I get so emotional when I talk about that is because everyone always asks, ‘Why didn't you just flat-out tell them?’ What I want people to understand, though, is it's not that simple. It's not that easy when you’re going through what you’re going through. And you have this person threatening you and telling you—” she cuts herself off. “I’m sorry. You’re in fear, so you don’t know how to do it.”
Green’s first real attempt to escape Ricard came on Sept. 17, she said, when she allegedly wrote to Brown, the deputy warden of security, and finally named Ricard, disclosing the oral sex and what she later described as “exploitation of fear.” Brown, like the warden, has denied receiving this letter.
Later that week, Green saw another opportunity to escape Ricard without the possibility of retaliation. In her dorm, several inmates had told a group of out gay and transgender inmates that they needed to leave. So Green requested protective custody, citing fear for her life. What Green didn’t know was that Ricard had also put in a request, claiming he had been forced out with the gay inmates because he “stood up” for three of them, according to prison records obtained by BuzzFeed News.
Under Georgia Department of Corrections policies, an inmate can be placed in protective custody if staff determine it’s “necessary for the [inmate’s] own protection” or if the inmate requests it. If the latter, the inmate must submit his or her request in writing with a explanation. A classification committee interviews the inmate at a hearing, and the warden then reviews the request.
Green and Ricard entered protective custody early on Sept. 21, 2012. Walking to her new cell, Green said she felt like her dangerous relationship with Ricard was “finally over.” Then the guard dropped her off. Green said the door was closing behind her before she could process the situation.
Ricard was there, assigned to the bottom bunk.
“I could have said something while the door was shut, but ... [the guards] don’t have a key with them to just open it,” she said. “No, they have to get on their walkie-talkie to call someone to open the door, and you never know how long they're going to take. And that gives him the opportunity to do something to me.”
Ricard allegedly took that opportunity nearly 24 hours later, after Green finally told him she didn’t want to be around him anymore, she said. He threatened her with a razor blade, telling her, “I’m tired of you playing games with me,” and, “I got you in a room with me. This is the only time we gonna really be able to do something without nobody being around,” Green later told an investigator.
Ricard then allegedly raped her, orally first, then anally.
“I knew he was gonna do it, and I just thought that I’m gonna just lay here and just let him get done,” Green told the investigator. She decided she would write a note to the guards about Ricard forcing her to have sex and stick it through the door when he wasn’t paying attention; she would write it while pretending to read a magazine; she would act like everything was fine.
In his report on the incident, an officer said he found the note around 1 a.m. on Sept. 22.
When he realized what was happening, “Ricard jumped up and went berserk,” Green said. “He had the razor blade in his hand. And I’m sitting here like, ‘No no no no, I'm just trying to leave out of here.’”
For about two minutes, she said, while the officer called the sergeant, Green jumped from side to side, dodging Ricard and the blade. When the sergeant arrived, he ordered Ricard to drop the razor and put his hands through the door flap. Ricard initially refused, then surrendered while the sergeant called the captain, according to the sergeant’s report.
Green and Ricard were separated. Nine hours later, Green had a sexual assault examination. Seminal fluid was found in her rectum, though the sample did not yield identifiable sperm.
Ricard refused to give a statement that night. But a few days later, during his interview with the investigator, Ricard said he had the razor blade because he was “contemplating cutting myself.” He didn’t deny the intercourse with Green, but he initially said Green set him up “because she was angry with me,” then suggested she had wanted to be able to sue the state.
“She said that if I helped her get her surgery she would take care of me when she got out,” he said. “She even asked me to cut her in the forehead and I was like, ‘No!’”
Ricard said he thought Green was joking, because she was a “dominatrix, she-queen. She's into rough sex and shit like that.”
In November, BuzzFeed News asked the Georgia Department of Corrections for permission to interview Ricard. A spokeswoman said the department doesn’t “allow interviews with inmates that gives them a platform to discuss their case or crime.” Ricard did not reply to two letters asking for comment. The lawyer who defended Ricard in 2004 no longer practices in Georgia and declined to answer questions about Ricard.
In any kind of administrative segregation, the inmate’s cell must be checked — and the check must be documented — by guards every 30 minutes, according to Georgia Department of Corrections policies.
The prison has not turned over the checklists for the 24 hours Ricard and Green were in the cell together. In a deposition, Green’s lawyer, Mario Williams, asked why the checklists were missing.
“Well, I can’t confirm that they’re missing,” a prison official said. “All I can tell you, we checked here at Rogers and we didn’t find them.”
In a report on Green’s case, former longtime Federal Bureau of Prisons official Joe Gunja — brought on by Williams to be an expert witness — said the missing checklists “make no sense.”
And then there’s the double bunking — something only allowed in protective custody under two conditions, according to department policy: an emergency situation, or with a recommendation from the classification committee. The warden must approve that recommendation. In this case, Hooks would have recommended bunking a minimum-security nonviolent offender, Green, with a medium-security sexually violent offender, Ricard.
“It is my professional opinion the risk to [Green] was more than obvious,” Gunja wrote. That opinion is supported by a 2007 study out of California, which found that transgender inmates in male facilities are 13 times more likely to be sexually assaulted. Green’s attorney has also enlisted an author of this study, Valerie Jenness, as an expert witness.
“By the time Green entered Rogers State Prison, in July 2012, the serious risk of rape to transgender women locked up in detention facilities was widely recognized by and among the corrections community,” Jenness wrote in her report.
The Georgia Department of Corrections declined to comment for this story, citing the pending litigation. The prison’s responses to Green’s legal complaints don’t offer any insight into the assignment decision, though the defendants deny being deliberately indifferent or depriving Green of her rights.
In a July 2014 report, the Southern Center for Human Rights described the protective custody system at Georgia prisons as “inadequate, leaving vulnerable prisoners to fend for themselves.”
The report also cites ongoing problem with locks “left broken for years” at Georgia prisons. Green says she wrote to the warden about broken locks after their first meeting. Green’s attorney argues the insecure locks facilitated Ricard’s alleged assaults in the weeks leading up to the protective custody incident.
Joel Reid, an inmate housed with Green in the same dorm prior to the alleged attack, confirmed these conditions at Rogers in a recent declaration to the court.
“I witnessed inmates routinely walking around unauthorized at night to other inmates’ dorm rooms — after head count — due to the locks on our doors being unsecure (not locked) and thus permitting unauthorized roaming of inmates,” Reid said.
Photograph by Matt Odom for BuzzFeed News
