For years, women detained at a now-shuttered federal prison outside Oakland, California, have said they were the victims of sexual assault and abuse, so much that the facility earned the nickname "rape club."

But recent legal breakthroughs have begun to bring some closure to hundreds of those women and a degree of accountability for the Federal Bureau of Prisons, which critics say failed to address rampant sexual assault at its facilities.

On Dec. 6, the day after the BOP announced that it would permanently shut down Federal Correctional Institution, Dublin, amid what it called "significant challenges," women incarcerated there reached a settlement, brokered by Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer LLP, under which the agency agreed to address claims of sexual abuse.

The consent decree was the culmination of a class action alleging years of systemic sexual abuse at the hands of prison staff, retaliation and medical neglect that led to eight prosecutions. Some of these prosecutions ended with high-profile convictions, including those in 2022 of the facility's former warden and chaplain, who were both sentenced to prison for sexually assaulting women prisoners.

The settlement, which a federal judge has preliminarily approved and could receive a final sign-off next month, will subject the BOP to two years of court oversight. The agency will be legally required to take actions to prevent sexual abuse and retaliation, ensure access to care, and limit the use of solitary confinement and other punitive measures at more than a dozen prisons across the country where the women have been moved since FCI Dublin was closed down.

A little over a week after the consent decree was announced, the BOP agreed to pay $116 million as part of a monetary settlement — the largest in the agency's history — to end dozens of individual lawsuits accusing prison staffs of sexual assault, retaliation and denial of medical care. Dozens of other pending lawsuits could end with payouts to plaintiffs in future rounds of settlements, attorneys say.

"We need justice," Griselda Muniz, 36, one of the eight named plaintiffs in the class action, told Law360. "We go into a prison to be rehabilitated, not to be put to trauma, not to be sexually abused, not to be put down, not to be treated inhumanely."

A team of Arnold & Porter attorneys, which included a partner and five associates, worked with the San Francisco-based boutique law firm Rosen Bien Galvan & Grunfeld LLP and two nonprofits, Rights Behind Bars and California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice, to provide pro bono representation to about 500 women who were part of the class.

Arnold & Porter partner Stephen Cha-Kim said that the class action was aimed at bringing about change, rather than monetary compensation.

"This kind of litigation is really important and impactful. And I'm just very grateful for all the effort that our team put into this, along with our partners," Cha-Kim told Law360. "It's the kind of thing that makes you proud of being a lawyer."

Arnold & Porter also represents 20 individual plaintiffs in civil rights suits seeking damages over abuses at FCI Dublin.

Natalie Steiert, one of the five Arnold & Porter associates representing the class members, said it was a "rewarding" case to work on.

"We've had a lot of interaction with our class members and gotten to know them on an individual level," she said. "Our class members have learned through their experiences, and that they've been sharing what they've learned with other incarcerated women and encouraging them to report their abuse as well, which is really powerful."

A "Rape Club" That Failed to Change

At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Muniz, a former medical assistant, found herself incarcerated at FCI Dublin after receiving an eight-year sentence for distributing methamphetamines.

In the class action filed on Aug. 16, 2023, in federal court in Oakland, Muniz alleged that she quickly got a taste of the prison's reputation as a hotbed for sexual abuse when a correctional officer named Nakie Nunley began asking her repeatedly for sex, promising to send money to her children in exchange, and routinely subjected her to unwanted sexual touches, including once when he rubbed his penis against her backside and attempted to kiss her neck. Nunley was eventually sentenced to six years in prison for sexual abuse at the facility.

She alleged another officer, Darrell Smith, who stands indicted on 15 felony charges of sexual abuse, took her towel while she was taking a shower and told her she would have to walk naked to him to get it back. Muniz claimed she also saw Smith make incarcerated women perform sexual acts in exchange for basic privileges like sending letters out, at a time when in-person visits were suspended due to the pandemic and inmates could communicate with family members only through mail or by phone.

"They would tell us that if we wanted candy bars or anything like that, we would have to do some sexual activities with our roommates or with ourselves for them to see," Muniz said of the officers.

After she talked to an FBI officer, Muniz said she was placed in a solitary confinement cell for four and a half months on a false write-up. Her confidential legal mail was opened, and her room was repeatedly searched, acts that point to retaliation for her speaking up about her assailants, the complaint said.

Muniz was not alone.

Several other women came forward with accusations of sexual assault, including brutal acts of rape. A plaintiff who was identified only as J.L. in the complaint accused an officer named Andrew Jones, who was sentenced to eight years in prison for sexual abuse, of cornering her inside the prison's food service warehouse and raping her in 2021, "pushing into her so hard that her head repeatedly hit the concrete wall in front of them."

"What people went through at Dublin, and honestly, what people continue to go through in BOP custody, is nothing less than horrendous," Kara J. Janssen, a senior counsel at Rosen Bien Galvan & Grunfeld LLP who represented Muniz, told Law360. She added that she hopes the combination of the consent decree and the monetary settlements will bring accountability in the federal prison system

"It's not the end, but it's the beginning, I think, of hopefully some real reform," she said.
The sexual abuse endured while in prison has turned many of the women incarcerated there into advocates.

Darlene Baker, 60, a former attorney from Washington state who was sentenced to prison for wire fraud, said that about a month and a half after entering FCI Dublin, she was sexually assaulted by a medical officer in the back of a medical room, in what she described as a violent attack.

When she tried to report the assault to two different people, she said she was threatened with solitary confinement. So she began working with the office of then-U.S. Rep. Jackie Speier, routinely feeding her office information about conditions inside the prison, including accounts of sexual assault. And when she got out in February 2023, she became involved with the nonprofit California Coalition for Women Prisoners, using her skills as a lawyer to convince women to come forward and to write statements about their experiences at the prison that were used to start the class action.

"There's a lot of women who have gone through sexual traumas at the hands of officers and staff, and they're still there," said Baker, who is also one of the individual plaintiffs who won a monetary settlement from the BOP.

Muniz, who was released on July 25 after five years behind bars and now works at Jiffy Lube, said that prison has made her more humble, but that the abuse she suffered has left her with lasting trauma. She is also the beneficiary of a monetary settlement as part of the large payout.

"I can't have a man near me," she said. "I can't even hug my kids. Sometimes I can't even hug my father."

From Preliminary Injunction to Consent Decree

Cha-Kim said the turning point in the case came in March, when U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers certified the class and issued an injunction ordering that an outside agency be tapped to perform a complete audit of BOP's policies concerning staff sexual abuse, reporting and retaliation, and that any changes recommended by the auditor be implemented. The court also subjected FCI Dublin to quarterly visits by the outside auditor, and ordered a temporary end to solitary confinement unless it could be ensured that it wouldn't be used as retaliation.

The injunction came after both a tense evidentiary hearing at which a number of the survivors and current incarcerated individuals testified, and an unannounced personal visit by the judge herself.

In the order, Judge Gonzalez Rogers called FCI Dublin "a dysfunctional mess" and called out the BOP for acting "sluggishly with intentional disregard of the inmates' constitutional rights despite being fully apprised of the situation for years."

"The situation can no longer be tolerated. The facility is in dire need of immediate change," she wrote.

"Because of its inability to promptly investigate the allegations that remain, and the ongoing retaliation against incarcerated persons who report misconduct, BOP has lost the ability to manage with integrity and trust," the judge said.

A month later, the judge appointed Wendy Still, the chief probation officer of Alameda County, as special master to monitor the BOP's compliance with the injunction.

The BOP informed the court a week later that it would shut down FCI Dublin and began moving hundreds of women from the facility to other correctional institutions across the country.

Cha-Kim said that inmates were given little to no advance notice about the move, and that although the agency said it had planned the closure for some time, the timing was suspicious.

"They did that because they didn't want to have the special master," he said. "They scattered them across different facilities across the country in inhumane conditions. We're talking about people subjected to overnight bus rides with no access to bathrooms, no sanitary supplies, and complete brutal treatment by the staff."

Muniz, who was transferred to a federal prison in Tallahassee, Florida, remembers well how her journey went down: She was placed in a van with no windows, together with a dozen other inmates, for a ride from Dublin to Las Vegas. On the way there, the van got so hot that several of the women started feeling sick and vomiting, but the officers wouldn't do anything to help.

"They didn't care," she said. "I was in my own throw-up for about eight hours."

Muniz soon discovered that her new life at FCI Tallahassee, some 1,500 miles away from her four children in Colorado, was still difficult. Prison staffers viewed her and other former FCI Dublin inmates with distrust because of their connection with the litigation involving the notorious California prison.

"It was like we had a target on us," she said. "Jobs that I would ask for — I couldn't get those jobs because I was from Dublin, and they were scared, according to them."

Once all women had been transferred out of FCI Dublin, the BOP asked the court to dismiss the class action as moot.

Judge Gonzalez Rogers, however, extended the period of time the preliminary injunction would be in effect, saying "the fact that the BOP may have closed FCI Dublin does not relieve them of their obligations," then denied the bureau's motion to dismiss.

As the litigation continued through the fall and attorneys for the class prepared to depose BOP officials, including the agency's director, Colette Peters, the parties reached an agreement.

The deal was the culmination of dozens of hours of negotiations across seven settlement conferences beginning in August that were mediated by U.S. Magistrate Judge Joseph C. Spero. Two of the sessions included representatives from the California Coalition for Women Prisoners and almost all the named plaintiffs. In addition to the settlement conferences, there were dozens of hours of private negotiations between the parties.

Donald Murphy, a spokesperson for the BOP, declined to comment on the allegations in the class action, but said in an email to Law360 that once the consent decree is officially approved, the bureau will follow it.

Judge Gonzalez Rogers could put her signature on a final order following a Feb. 25 hearing in Oakland.

"The impact of this case could be that BOP and the Department of Justice realized that they can't play games with the constitutional rights of incarcerated people, wherever they might be," Cha-Kim said. "This doesn't fix problems in BOP, magically. It puts a framework in place for us to continue to advocate for our clients, to make sure that they're treated in line with the Constitution."

--Editing by Robert Rudinger. Graphics by Ben Jay.

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