A woman incarcerated at New Jersey’s Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women (EMCF) alleges she was battered by a male transfer after she repeatedly refused his sexual advances. Speaking with Reduxx, inmate Shakira Reed described how she was assaulted by Jermaine Gibson, who identifies as transgender and uses the name Cyntara, after repeated instances of sexual harassment.
The horrific incident is said to have taken place on April 17, when Gibson was witnessed repeatedly punching Reed in the head. According to witnesses of the attack who spoke exclusively to Reduxx, blood was “everywhere.”
As a result of the injuries Reed sustained, she was removed from the correctional facility and taken to Hunterdon Medical Center, where she received medical care before being transferred to Edna Mahan’s on-site hospital unit. Reed stated that she was being treated for a broken nose and that she had two black eyes that remained swollen for weeks afterwards.
Reed explained that Gibson had been sexually harassing her for weeks leading up to the assault. In one instance, she says Gibson exposed himself to her as she walked past his cell. Reed said she immediately reported him to prison officials, but no action was taken.
“It got so bad, to the point where I didn’t want to come out of my room,” she said. “I faked sick so I wouldn’t have to go to work, so I wouldn’t have to walk past him, so I wouldn’t have to hear him make remarks about my body. I started wearing large clothing to cover my body because I was feeling so uncomfortable.”
Reed attributes the assault to her repeated refusal to accept Gibson’s advances.
“I was attacked because I didn’t want to have sex with him,” Reed told Reduxx. But disturbingly, Reed found herself penalized for defending herself against her assailant.
Both Gibson and Reed were punished for the altercation and were handed 90 days in “lockup,” a holding cell that is isolated from other inmates. Reed was sent to lockup immediately upon her release from the hospital facility.
Another female inmate who has repeatedly been placed within the same cell block unit as several of the male transfers spoke to Reduxx about the incident under the condition of anonymity. Pamela* expressed her incredulity and outrage at the circumstances involving the men being held at EMCF.
“I lived on the wing with both of them. Gibson continuously harassed Reed and would often speak in his man voice because he thought it was funny when he was asked not to because it had made the women uncomfortable,” she said.
“During the days leading up to the actual incident, he kept egging her on. When it actually took place, I could hear it. I didn’t see it, but it was so loud we heard them down the wing, and this took place in the rec room. We could hear Shakira yelling, ‘Stop hitting me!'”
Pamela added that she felt the wave of transgender male transfers to the women’s prison was “obscene” because most are still intact, and many have criminal convictions for violence against women.
“The recent events here are just unimaginable and honestly if I wasn’t living them I wouldn’t even believe them. People need to know what this has been like for us because no one has ever come to ask us how we feel about them being here. This is misogyny within misogyny.”
On December 19, 2016, Gibson was arrested in connection with the theft of a Suzuki motorcycle that was taken from a location at Columbus Park. He was later apprehended while found driving the stolen vehicle. After his arrest, he was charged over a November 26 robbery, for which he is currently serving a a mandatory minimum term of five years.
Officials say Gibson entered a deli on Bert Avenue and demanded cash from a female employee while threatening her with scissors. Fearing for her life, she handed over less than $100 from the register. The employee told police Gibson was wearing a woman’s wig, makeup and carrying a purse at the time of the crime.
Gibson is one of over two dozen men who have been transferred into the women’s correctional facility over the course of the past few years. A 2019 ACLU lawsuit against the New Jersey Department of Corrections resulted in a settlement which required the state to allow violent male inmates to self-identify into the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women.
The lawsuit was launched on behalf of a transgender male inmate who sought transfer but had been denied. That inmate was anonymized in court records, referred to only as “Sonia Doe.”
Reduxx recently learned that Doe is in fact a man who was investigated by the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force for the attempted illicit sale of ammunition and pipe bombs. Daniel Smith uses the name Danielle Demers and is a vocal participant in the “adult diaper” community, a fetish subculture which involves adults dressing up and roleplaying as children during sex.
According to previous testimonies provided to Reduxx from women incarcerated at Edna Mahan, among the first men to be transferred to the prison after the ACLU was victorious in their lawsuit was a sadistic murderer who had boasted about drinking his victim’s blood.
Perry Cerf was handed a 50-year sentence in 2003 for the brutal rape and murder of a sex-trafficked woman from Ecuador. Cerf, who now goes by “Michelle Hel-loki Angelina” and is recorded as female by the DOC, had been found wearing his victim’s clothes and utilizing her identification with his photo superimposed over hers.
Another male transfer to the facility made headlines last year after it was discovered that he had impregnated two women in the prison. According to sources at the prison, Demetrius ‘Demi’ Minor had been trying to have sex with the female inmates from the moment he was transferred in.
Multiple women have provided testimony to Reduxx over the past year detailing how they have experienced continuous sexual harassment by the male transfers to EMCF. Most recently, inmate Kokila Hiatt penned an article clarifying her reasons for speaking out against the gender identity policy, despite the dangers involved.
Hiatt emphasized that women in prison are frequently victims of sexual abuse. According to a 2016 report from the Vera Institute of Justice, 86% of incarcerated women have a history of abuse; 77% have a history of intimate partner violence; this, in turn, contributes to high rates of post-traumatic stress disorder, leading women’s rights advocates to describe this phenomenon as a “sexual abuse-to-prison pipeline.”
Speaking with Reduxx about the attack on Reed, Hiatt elaborated on what she felt was a “backwards situation” enabled by the acceptance of men’s demands.
“The whole ‘gender’ issue makes it as though we’ve forgotten what we already know. We’re having to re-learn that men and women are different and male bodies can be a risk to females,” she said.
“We only got in this backwards situation because men’s concerns were treated as legitimate and women’s concerns were ignored. Women aren’t fighting to be housed in male facilities. Virtually all civil suits filed about ‘gender identity discrimination’ are men wanting access to women’s services. They feel entitled and society allows it.”
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