Former Oregon Prison Guard Sergeant Sentenced for Sexually Abusing Imprisoned Women
As PLN has extensively reported, the Coffee Creek Correctional Facility (CCCF), Oregon’s only women’s prison, has been a decades long hotbed of staff sexual abuse. Oregon Department of Corrections (DOC) administrators have long known about the problem, which has been detailed in reports by independent groups, but have done little to address it. [See: PLN, Jan. 2022, p.46; and Feb. 2023, p.1]. Now, one former CCCF guard, Sgt. Levi Gray, has pleaded guilty to two felony counts of first-degree custodial sexual misconduct and was sentenced to 20 months imprisonment on May 9, 2025. The sentence was the maximum possible under Oregon’s sentencing guidelines.
The victim, identified as “J.B.” in court documents, also filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against Gray and several DOC officials whom she claims were aware of the sexual abuse, alleging they violated her Eighth Amendment rights. See: J.B. v. Gray, USDC (D.Ore.), Case No. 3:2023-cv-01962. At least two other women, identified in court documents as “M.F.” and “Jane Doe,” have also filed federal civil rights lawsuits alleging sexual abuse by Gray while incarcerated at CCCF.
In her lawsuit, J.B alleged the sexual abuse “occurred over the course of two months, sometimes more than twice per day for 40 minutes or more” after Gray moved her into the only cell in the Special Housing Unit lacking a camera. “The abuse included throwing her against a wall and groping her while she was handcuffed, choking her while kissing her, grabbing her through the cuff port and pulling her, pinching her, grabbing her breasts so hard that it was painful, shoving her into the cell then yanking her back with the leash on her handcuffs, and requiring her to perform oral sex,” J.B.’s attorney Lynn Walsh wrote in an amended complaint filed days after Gray pleaded guilty in the criminal case.
In 2022, the Oregon Justice Resource Center (OJRC) issued a report entitled ODOC: Agency in Crisis. It declared that “a culture of abuse of power, coercion, and sexual violence” existed within the DOC and contributed to its “systemic dysfunction.” It accused the DOC of ignoring “a cascade of evidence” so it could “put forward a misleading narrative,” profoundly sanitize facts, or wrongly shift blame away from itself.
Another OJRC Women’s Justice Project report entitled Death by a Thousand Cuts cited sources, including PLN, proving the culture of sexual abuse Oregon women prisoners were facing had been publicly known at least as early as 2010. In 2022, the Oregon Legislature allocated $500,000 for a Gender-Informed Practices Assessment (GIPA) at CCCF. The findings of the two independent groups that conducted the assessment echoed those of the OJRC reports.
“The GIPA report was a sobering read,” said Oregon Governor Tina Kotek (D).
Sobering indeed. The GIPA report found that allegations of sexual misconduct “are leading to punitive and retaliatory responses,” including “mistreatment from staff, being placed in segregation, transferred from minimum to medium [security], and taken off jobs.” Unsurprisingly, it is “perceived as punishment,” creating a “dangerous situation where [prisoners] do not feel safe to report” and some of the women sought to remedy their situations by breaking rules to force a transfer from a job that exposed them to predatory behavior or resorting to self-harm.
This serious and dangerous situation needs to be addressed with more than the simple platitudes that have thus far been offered.
Sources: OPB, KMHD
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