A detainee subjected to months of physical and sexual abuse inside the Douglas County jail became pregnant after she was repeatedly assaulted by a former jailer, she said in a lawsuit.
The woman, identified only as Jane Doe, said she “suffered unimaginable humiliation, harassment, sexual abuse and torture, at the hands of several corrections officers” during her time behind bars last year.
The federal complaint also alleges a pattern of indifference on the part of jail leadership that left the woman feeling she had no choice but to comply with the now-fired guard’s unwanted sexual advances, she said.
The lawsuit names as defendants Douglas County Sheriff Tim Pounds and several officers, including former officer Jayavierre Shaidray Johnson.
Johnson was fired in December after an internal investigation by the sheriff’s office into his “inappropriate conduct” with an inmate, the agency said at the time. He faces four counts of improper sexual assault by a correctional employee.
The others named in the lawsuit are still employed by the sheriff’s office, state records show. Reached for comment Tuesday, a department spokesperson said he could not comment on pending litigation.
Credit: Christina Matacotta
Credit: Christina Matacotta
Johnson’s attorney called the accusations “completely false,” though he said the two did have a monthslong relationship after the woman’s release from jail.
“They never did anything in the jail,” attorney Chris Palazzola said Wednesday. “When she got out, she pursued him vigorously and relentlessly.”
Sexual assaults within jails and correctional facilities have long been an issue. In 2003, Congress passed an act aimed at tracking and deterring the sexual assaults of detainees.
Those allegations are supposed to be investigated in accordance with the federal Prisoner Rape Elimination Act. Still, such instances are relatively common in Georgia and beyond.
Data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics shows there were more than 1,400 substantiated instances of staff-on-inmate sexual victimization in 2019 and 2020, according to the most recent report available from the agency. That included 984 instances of sexual misconduct and 424 instances of sexual harassment.
Additionally, a study by the Council on Criminal Justice found that in 2011-12, 2.3% of women in prison and 1.4% of women held in local jails reported being sexually victimized by staff.
Johnson isn’t the first Douglas County corrections officer to be fired and accused of having sexual contact with an inmate. In 2022, a female guard was arrested after authorities said another detainee wrote a letter alerting them to her alleged conduct.
The woman suing the sheriff’s office over the Johnson incident said she was jailed in March 2024 after being arrested on an aggravated stalking charge that was later dismissed.
The woman said her ordeal began when she was placed on suicide watch and housed in the jail’s medical unit. There, she said she was subjected to months of abuse and sexual harassment by male corrections officers who she said regularly forced her to strip naked or stood in the doorway of her cell while she changed or used the bathroom.
When she raised objections to the treatment, the woman said the guards taunted and cursed at her, according to the lawsuit.
She also alleges one of the guards slammed her into a cement bed when she refused to hand over a blanket she had been using to cover herself.
The lawsuit said she was left in her cell “crying, naked and with blood dripping out of the back of her head,” and that her requests for medical care were refused for a week.
The woman said she reported her treatment to jail staff and later to Pounds directly after her mother called the jail to complain. Both the sheriff and the supervising lieutenant said they would take steps to intervene, but nothing was done, according to the complaint.
The civil rights lawsuit accuses Pounds of knowingly failing to document or report his employees’ use of force and the woman’s injuries.
Fearing additional charges and the possibility of even more jail time, the woman said she began complying with the guards’ demands.
Johnson, whose job included assisting inmates with their commissary accounts and other financial matters, was nice to the woman at first, she alleged in the complaint.
She said he would occasionally intervene when other officers yelled at her, describing his treatment as “a breath of fresh air.”
After earning her trust, however, the jailer allegedly began flirting with the woman and demanding sexual favors, according to the suit. She said he instructed her to cover up surveillance cameras with wet toilet paper before forcing her to engage in sex acts.
As a jailer, Johnson was in a position of power, the lawsuit said, and she “played along because she feared what would happen if she did not.”
She was eventually transferred to the Fulton County jail on an unrelated charge and learned she was pregnant, according to the lawsuit.
The woman said she later suffered a miscarriage at the Rice Street facility, and that Johnson continued to contact her even while she was in custody at the other jail. Those calls were recorded on Fulton’s jail line, according to the woman’s attorney, Zakiya Watson-Caffe.
The lawsuit adds to a litany of complaints of poor treatment and conditions inside metro Atlanta jails.
A U.S. Department of Justice investigation last year found that Fulton County is violating the civil rights of detainees by allowing what the department called “abhorrent, unconstitutional” conditions, particularly at the Rice Street facility.
The DOJ and Fulton County have since reached a legal agreement, known as a consent decree, aimed at resolving the unsafe conditions.
Watson-Caffe called her client’s experience “horrifying” and said she fears other women inmates could find themselves in similar situations.
“What makes this more egregious is she spoke directly to the sheriff and others, and no one believed her,” Watson-Caffe said. “To be honest, my client is less concerned about compensation and more concerned about changes at the facility.”
— Data specialist Jennifer Peebles contributed to this article.
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