A transgender inmate in Illinois has filed a lawsuit against President Donald Trump, among others, after allegedly being raped in prison. Autumn Cordellioné, born Jonathan Richardson, is claiming that Trump’s “transphobic” rhetoric is responsible for the attack.
Richardson is currently serving 55 years in prison for the brutal 2001 murder of his 11-month-old stepdaughter. As previously reported by Reduxx, Richardson murdered the child while she was in his care while her mother was at work. He was visited by friends the night of the killing who observed he was “acting strangely” and refused to invite them in the house as he normally would.
Despite claiming the little girl was sleeping, Richardson had loud music playing in the home, and his guests noted that he appeared to have a fresh, bleeding tattoo of the child’s name carved into his arm.
Later that night, after his friends left, Richardson went to his neighbor and asked him to call 911, claiming the child was unresponsive. When emergency personnel arrived, they were briefly able to resuscitate the girl, but she died shortly after being rushed to the hospital.
Richardson was interviewed by police, who noted he was “calm and unemotional” during questioning, and his story about what happened to the baby changed dramatically over the course of the two interviews conducted.
At first, Richardson claimed he found the baby unresponsive after doing some household chores. But in the next interview, Richardson said the child was being “fussier than usual” and he attempted to throw her up in the air repeatedly in an effort to calm her down. He said her “head bopped forward and back up in a rough type of a manner,” and that the child continued to cry so he proceeded to shake her aggressively in an effort to calm her down.
During a failed appeals hearing, detectives from the case recounted how Richardson “physically showed” how he had manhandled the girl, getting up out of his chair and demonstrating the action in a rough manner. An autopsy subsequently found that the baby had died of asphyxiation by manual strangulation.
Richardson was booked awaiting a court hearing, and would later tell a prison official “all I know is I killed the little fucking bitch.” He was found guilty of her murder the next year, and sentenced to 55 years in prison, and began identifying as transgender in 2020.
In August of 2023, the American Civil Liberties Union announced they were representing Richardson in a lawsuit demanding that the state of Illinois pay for his desired “gender affirming” cosmetic surgeries. The suit was challenging a recently adopted Illinois state bill which prohibited the spending of state funds on “gender affirming” surgeries for inmates.
“The total ban on gender-affirming surgery violates [his] right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment,” the civil rights group argued in their complaint.
In September of last year, the ACLU won the suit, with federal Judge Richard Young demanding that the Illinois Department of Corrections arrange his taxpayer-funded orchiectomy and a penile inversion as soon as possible, a decision he held up in March this year, even after a clinical psychologist concluded that Richardson was not suffering from gender dysphoria but instead had “attention seeking” personality disorders.
But Richardson’s crusade against the state has not stopped, and Reduxx has now obtained a new lawsuit filed by Richardson in the Southern District of Indiana targeting President Donald Trump and multiple individiauls affiliated with the Indiana Department of Corrections.
In the suit, filed on April 1, Richardson argues that his civil rights have been violated since he was transferred from New Castle Correctional Facility (NCN) to Westville Correctional Facility (WCA), which he describes as being insufficient to his needs. Richardson claims that WCA is “a facility with no security cameras, with no doors on the cells, understaffed, and populated with mostly gang-affiliated prisoners who traffic with correctional staff in the form of drugs, sex and money.”
Richardson alleges that the Department of Correction’s Director of Classification “knowingly” moved him to Westville from New Castle in order to make him a target for abuse, noting the fact that he was a prominent transgender prisoner in the media.
In a number of bizarre recollected quotes, Richardson details that he was allegedly assaulted and raped multiple times over a four day period by 12 gang-affiliated offenders after his transfer. Richardson also alleges that during one rape, the offenders claimed they had been motivated by Trump’s “transphobia.”
“We saw your shit on Fox and Trump was talking about you fagass, dicksucking trannies, he said your [sic] messing up our kids in school with your sex change shit… Trumps [sic] president now and we won’t even get in trouble for fucking you trannies up, we’re patriots and even if you tell on us, Trump will pardon us and probably give us a medal,” Richardson quotes one of the offenders as telling him.
In the complaint, Richardson also quoted his unit team manager and case manager, who are also named defendants in the case, who spoke in a very similar manner to the inmates.
“I’ve seen your case on the news, and I personally don’t think us tax payers should have to pay for your surgery,” said the case manager. “God doesn’t approve of transgenders and gays, so what do you expect to happen, when you dress like a woman and have tits in a male facility?”
Richardson continues by claiming his case manager similarly invoked Trump in a transphobic rant towards him.
“Your [sic] that trans that won a lawsuit, and now us hard working taxpayers have to foot the bill, well there are only two sexes, male and female, and God made you a man, Trump’s putting a stop to all that fag shit,” stated his case manager. “I can’t help you, you reap what you sow,” she allegedly continued.
The actions of the above were “motivated and propagated due to their religious and political views and hatred,” argued Richardson, who suggests they have both violated tort law with their “gross negligence” and disregarded his safety, along with violating his 14th Amendment rights, as they discriminated against him due to his transgender status.
Richardson claimed that because President Trump “has on numerous occasions both as president and as former president spoken about his extremist rhetoric and transphobic hate speech,” he has “emboldened the Defendants and the assailants that brutally assaulted and raped plaintiff, not once, but multiple times, to act on their hate and prejudices, constituting the cause in action and his liability in this case. Therefore, President Trump was negligent due to his alleged knowledge that others may act on his words,” Richardson continued.
The inmate is looking for compensatory damage from the named defendants to the tune of $3.5 million, with punitive damages to be awarded by a jury. This is not the first complaint that Richardson has launched on the grounds of alleged human rights violations.
Last year, he converted to non-denominational Islam and was allegedly denied access to a hijab, and filed a complaint against the prison’s chaplain, Tony Gray, as a result.
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