Protesters are demanding that transgender women be removed from New Jersey’s only all-female prison — where 10 transgender women, including one who says she has a “taste for blood,” are held out of a total of 356 prisoners.
#GetMenOut activists held a protest at the state Capitol in Trenton on Friday, reading letters from four biologically female inmates at the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility, where one transgender inmate impregnated two women last year.
The women described from behind bars their fears at being housed with biological men who identify as women.
“I was repeatedly raped as a child until I was in my teens,” wrote Dawn Jackson, 51, who stabbed her adoptive stepfather in 1999 after what she said were years of sexual abuse.
Jackson was featured on Kim Kardashian’s “The Justice Project” on the Oxygen network last year.
“Being subjected to live amongst (trans women) who remain equipped with their manhood is extremely overwhelming and difficult for me.
“Am I living amongst any rapists? (Trans women) do not belong in closed/confined in prison settings meant to house women/females born feminine.”
Activists Jennifer Thomas, 53, and Brittany Ortiz, 35, of Justice Speaks: Free Speech for Women read the letters and spoke on behalf of female inmates.
Forcing women prisoners to be housed with male prisoners is a human rights violation, according to Article 14 of the Geneva Convention, Thomas and Ortiz told The Post.
In one testimony, inmate Kokila Hiatt wrote about what she said was the reality of what happens when biological men who say they identify as women arrive at the prison.
“Many of them are sex offenders,” Hiatt wrote in her letter. “When the males arrive they cease hormone injections and continue living their lives as men.
“In other words, they drop the act and start doing what it is they came here for.
“They engage in sexual relationships with women, manipulate them into purchasing their commissary and have no qualms about bullying anyone who disagrees with them.
“I personally have been threatened with violence and multiple false allegations for speaking up.”
Among the trans women inmates housed at Edna Mahan are Michelle Hel-Loki Angelina, 39, who was born male, as Perry Cerf.
Cerf was sentenced to 50 years in prison for the vampiric rape and murder of an Ecuadorian prostitute in 2002.
“The truth about my case?” the murderer told the Daily News in a 2002 jailhouse interview.
“Yeah, I killed her. I punched and kicked her to death, crushing her skull in the process.”
He added: “Since I have a most unusual taste for blood, I drank and licked and lapped up my fill … Let it be known: I am Lucifer’s maiden servant, sent to earth born of sin, to bring suffering and pain, darkness and evil.”
Before he began identifying as a woman and was transferred to Edna Mahan, Cerf was placed in solitary for assaulting other inmates.
He told his prison psychologist in 2005 that he wanted to kill associate administrator Michelle Ricci by beating her up, breaking her neck and choking her, New Jersey court records show.
In 2022, a transgender woman named Demi Minor, who was convicted of stabbing her foster father 27 times, impregnated two female inmates at Edna Mahan.
One woman chose to terminate the pregnancy but the other, Latonia Bellamy, a convicted double murderer, gave birth to their child.
Demi Minor, as a troubled foster kid — then called Demetrius — had a record for burglaries and at least one carjacking at gunpoint before brutally stabbing foster father Theotis “Ted” Butts 27 times in 2011 at age 16.
“It was the worst murder scene I have ever seen,” Brad Wertheimer, one of Minor’s defense lawyers in 2011, told The Post last year.
“There was blood everywhere. The community was outraged.
“The [foster] dad was considered a great guy, an angel.”
Demi has become a transgender woman activist fighting to be returned to Edna Mahan.
After administrators discovered the pregnancies, she was sent to a juvenile lockup last year where she was for a time the only person identifying as female.
And until recently, a convicted murderer named Dejshontaye Would, now 25, was housed at Edna Mahan.
Would was living under his birth name, Daryl Graves, and was high on drugs when he fatally stabbed his aunt, Patricia Graves, 47 times and beat her over the head with a frying pan in July 2018.
Sometime after his 2019 incarceration, Would began identifying as a woman, although The Post could not locate a female name. Would was listed as an inmate at Edna Mahan in July 2022.
Current New Jersey Department of Correction records indicate Would is being held at the Northern State Prison in Newark, which is for male offenders.
However, Would is listed as “female” in DOC inmate records.
“This just shows how insane the whole system has become,” Ortiz told The Post.
“These male inmates change their gender and their names and so it makes it difficult to even locate them online.”
Thomas said, “Women are the largest growing population in American prisons. Most are women of color, 86% are victims of sexual violence, and few are violent offenders.
“It is painfully obvious that caging this exceptionally vulnerable group of women with men is an abhorrent human rights violation.
“The solution to male violence in male prisons is not male violence in women’s prisons. This needs to stop. Get men out!”
Harmeet K. Dhillon, CEO of the conservative Center for American Liberty, has estimated there are 900 biological males housed in women’s prisons around the country.
The women inmates’ letters from Edna Mahan, however, were mostly cordial and civil in outlining how they feel about living in close quarters with trans women.
“Confining men in a women’s prison creates another power dynamic and disparity in treatment,” a female inmate who wants to be identified only as M wrote.
“They are given privilege. I am not disregarding their humanity or choices, however in the carceral situation there should be a degree of separation in regards to housing at a minimum.”
“Even the Olympics and sports organizations are now recognizing anatomical differences that remain despite hormonal treatment…,” she added.
“The vetting process has been deficient in acknowledging the wolves in sheep clothing and once it is discovered until there is an incident that screams and demonstrates a failure to protect.”
After being removed from the prison last year, Minor’s legal team has tried to fight for her transfer back there.
Minor had initially been able to move there under a controversial state policy enabling inmates to be housed according to their preferred gender identity.
Last October, however, in part because of The Post’s story on Minor, the New Jersey Department of Corrections changed the policy so that now prisoners are given something called a “rebuttable presumption” to be housed according to their gender identity.
That means that sometimes prison officials can override their preference, an NJDOC spokesman told The Post on Thursday.
The policy details specific factors the agency may use to justify placing trans prisoners in facilities that do not match what they say is their gender identity, which now include “reproductive considerations.”
In a phone interview with the Appeal news site in January, Minor called what has happened to her discriminatory and accused officials of retaliating against her for broader security failures at the prison.
“In any prison setting, any correctional officer will tell you that inmates are engaged in relationships,” Minor told the outlet.
“They’re trying to make it seem like transgender people are predators, like I was running around raping people.
“And that’s what touched me because I’m actually a victim of [past] sexual abuse.”
Her legal representatives declined comment when called by The Post.
Edna Mahan has a controversial record when it comes to abusing women’s human rights.
A 2020 Department of Justice report found “Edna Mahan violates the constitutional rights of prisoners in its care, resulting in serious harm and the substantial risk of serious harm.
“Specifically, Edna Mahan fails to protect women prisoners from harm due to sexual abuse by staff.”
