Content Warning: This article contains graphic descriptions of child sexual abuse. Reader discretion is appreciated.
A violent male pedophile has been moved to a women’s prison in Washington after beginning to identify as transgender.
Jolene Charisma Starr, born Joel Thomas Nichols, is the latest male transfer to the Washington Corrections Center for Women (WCCW), which currently has approximately one dozen male inmates being housed in the facility. According to a source within the facility, the transfer was completed within the last few months.
Starr, 57, was convicted in 1995 of two horrific attacks on young girls.
The first assault took place in August of 1993 and targeted an 11-year-old girl. According to an appeals record, Starr had carefully pre-meditated the attack, which the court stated took a “high degree of sophistication and pre-planning.”
Posing as a telephone repairman, Starr gained access to the girl’s home when her parents were away. The child trusted him and let him inside their apartment, at which point he quickly cornered his victim. The girl first tried to run from him, but he quickly overpowered her and forced her to the floor.
According to the grisly account, Starr had brought with him a pair of panties he wanted the child to wear for him. She complied out of fear after he threatened her, at which point Starr began to live out his sick fantasy. He procured a knife and cut the underwear off of the child before first attempting to penetrate her vaginally. After the girl expressed pain, he turned her over and raped her anally.
Starr ordered the girl to take a shower after the assault, ostensibly in an effort to destroy the evidence of his crime, but after she was done in the bathroom, he raped her both vaginally and anally once again.
After forcing the child to take another shower after the second round of assaults, Starr threatened the girl not to tell anyone and took the cut panties, along with a condom he had worn during the assault, with him as he left.
The next year, in August of 1994, Starr attempted to kidnap a 9-year-old girl from Yost Park in Edmonds, but the attack was only stopped by the heroic efforts of three brave little girls who had been in the park.
After grabbing the 9-year-old, her screams attracted the attention of two sisters, aged 10 and 12, and their cousin, aged 10. The girls raced to the other child’s aid, and grabbed ahold of her as Starr attempted to drag her out of the park. All the while, the predator was claiming to be the girl’s father, but the children didn’t believe him.
The girls successfully wrangled the victim away from Starr, who fled when they claimed the 9-year-old’s mother was in the park. The heroines then surrounded the victim with their bicycles, and ensured she made it to safety.
Thanks to the descriptions of the three witnesses, police managed to track down Starr and matched his blood type against the blood found under the fingernails of the 9-year-old victim from when she had scratched him in her struggle.
Starr was handed an “exceptional” 360-month sentence, amounting to 30 years behind bars on counts of first-degree child rape, first-degree child molestation, and first-degree kidnapping. He unsuccessfully attempted to appeal the sentence in 1998.
It is unclear when Starr began to identify as transgender as all previous court records refer to him by his male name and by masculine pronouns. Gender identity is not mentioned a single time in any of the few documents available.
According to a source within the state’s only women’s prison, even the trans-identified male inmates at WCCW are expressing concerns about Starr.
“Even the trans ones are saying he’s dangerous and they know him from men’s units,” the source explains, calling Starr a “really violent sex offender” and “the worst one yet” to be transferred to the facility.
“It’s going to be like Scotland. They [male inmates] will all catch on how easy it is and move to WCCW,” the source said. “His crime was the most sexually violent I’ve seen of the transfers. He clearly is deviant and has a malevolence towards women.”
According to the source at WCCW, there are almost one dozen male inmates currently housed at the prison that he is aware of.
“Of the 11 on my list of trans inmates at WCCW, 9 have crimes against women and children. That’s 81 percent,” he said, providing Reduxx with a list of names belonging to male inmates verified to be at the facility.
Washington’s prison gender self-identification policies have been under fire since 2021, when a whistleblower came forward to reveal that 150 male inmates were being assessed for transfer to the women’s estate.
Since then, a number of violent male offenders have been moved. Among them, notorious serial killer Donna Perry, who was convicted of murdering 3 women in a 4-month timeframe in 1990, but claims to have murdered many more.
Other male transfers include Brett David Sonia, who was convicted in 2005 and 2006 on dozens of charges related to the sexual exploitation of a young girl, and Nathan Goninan, who is currently serving a 10-year sentence for the brutal murder of 17-year-old Jessica Franklin.
Following a series of whistleblowers speaking to media in 2021, a federal judge moved to limit the information on trans-identified inmates available to the public.
The order prohibited the Washington Department of Corrections from releasing records sought by media outlets and several public requesters regarding any complaints made against transgender inmates at the Washington Corrections Center for Women following reports that sexual violence was breaking out at the facility.
The following year, the state introduced a bill to limit the disclosure of information that would identify inmates as transgender. The bill was testified against by Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF) and Keep Prisons Single Sex, who both had concerns about the impact it would have on the public’s ability to know how many males were being kept in the female estate.
Despite the multitude of objections from both women’s rights organizations and members of the public, the bill was signed into law in March of 2022.
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