By: Andrea Mew and Caroline Downey

Last month, a woman incarcerated at Washington Corrections Center for Women (WCCW) was ambushed in the most brutal way imaginable. Faith Booher-Smith, a 28-year-old woman, said she was in the day room on August 7 when Christopher Williams––a 6’4” man identifying as a transgender woman and a convicted child molester––came up behind her and began beating her without warning.

“I saw Christopher Williams. He had me by my hair and threw me on the ground and was punching me and kicking me repeatedly,” she told IW Features. 

Shortly before the attack, Booher-Smith said she and Williams had gotten into a verbal exchange––their first spoken interaction ever––at dinner. She explained that she had objected to him sitting with her, not because of his transgender identity, but because he is a sex offender. Booher-Smith then left the dining room to prepare an alternative meal in the day room, when Williams stormed into the room and attacked her from behind.

Booher-Smith said she tried to fight back, but Williams’ strength was unmatched: “I was terrified. I was completely, utterly terrified.”

The attack unfolded in full view of approximately 40 witnesses, another source told IW Features. Incredibly, an officer stood just 10 feet away, Booher-Smith recalled, and “did nothing” while she was being brutalized. Instead, it was other women incarcerated at WCCW who rushed forward, pulled Williams off of Booher-Smith, and formed a barrier around the victim.

This was not Williams’ first act of violence inside a women’s prison. He has a documented record of stalking, harassment, and sexual assault against female inmates, Booher-Smith explained. According to a report from earlier this year, one of his former cellmates reported being molested in her sleep. Williams was even briefly removed from WCCW in the wake of a lawsuit accusing him of sexual assault––only to be inexplicably transferred back this summer. 

This happened in spite of the fact that prison officials are allegedly supposed to screen men identifying as transgender women who hope to transfer, and take each potential transfer on a case-by-case basis. There are criteria the prison must follow, Booher-Smith explained, and most of them are based on safety and violence.

“The fact that he’s managed to stay here, I want to hold WCCW accountable,” Booher-Smith said. “If you put an animal in a cage like that with us, he’s going to attack. It’s like releasing a lion into a field of deer.”

Booher-Smith believes the facility’s failures went beyond allowing Williams to live alongside the women. When the beating began, for example, multiple officers allegedly struggled to even enter the unit because the booth officer failed to unlock doors. And the staffer who was carrying OC spray––a strong pepper spray regularly used by guards to break up fights between inmates––allegedly stood back and never deployed it.

“The fact that it wasn’t done to protect me was really shocking,” Booher-Smith said.

To make matters worse, instead of being treated as the victim, Faith herself was handcuffed after the fight and escorted out in front of Williams, who was cuffed right behind her. The psychological trauma, Booher-Smith said, still lingers.

“I have really bad anxiety. I really struggled to be in the day room,” she explained. 

In addition to the emotional toll, Booher-Smith reported ongoing concussion symptoms––dizziness, confusion, and sudden vomiting––that most prison medical staff allegedly have brushed off. She added that, while the prison official leading the investigation into the beating came to see her, apologized, and took additional pictures of the bruises and bumps on her head, the process to file formal charges against Williams has dragged on.

This isn’t the first time IW Features has documented the fallout of Washington’s reckless policies allowing trans-identified males into women’s prisons. A Muslim inmate at WCCW shared how these policies violate her religious freedom, and a jail nurse in Seattle described how the gutting of women’s safety led her to quit. 

And just last year, Independent Women fellow and IW Features contributor Caroline Downey documented in National Review how a trans-identified male prisoner incarcerated for double murder, Bryan Kim, was removed from WCCW after being caught having sex with a vulnerable woman. 

Likewise, a female inmate who had been a victim of child rape, Mozzy Clark-Sanchez, reported repeated sexual harassment at the hands of a male child molester who was allowed to be housed at WCCW. 

The male child molester was none other than Christopher Williams. 

Indeed, the Department of Corrections knew Christopher Williams’s record, and they put him back in a women’s prison anyway. Now, another woman has paid the price.

So on August 13, attorneys with the America First Policy Institute (AFPI) sent a formal letter to the Washington Department of Corrections condemning the state’s Transgender Inmate Policy as the direct cause of Williams’s assault on Booher-Smith.

“Your Transgender Inmate Policy is, predictably, a catastrophe,” the letter said.

AFPI noted that female officers at WCCW themselves admit they fear Williams. 

“Women’s correctional facilities were established to address the unique vulnerabilities female inmates face through sex-specific safety protocols,” the letter reads. “By introducing biological males into facilities otherwise occupied exclusively by females, the Department of Corrections undoes those well-established safeguards.”

The group is demanding the immediate removal of all biological males from women’s prisons. Anything less, they argue, “will not only perpetuate a preventable danger but will further establish the Department’s liability.”

Booher-Smith remains shaken up by the incident weeks later.

“I have been adamantly asking, ‘Do I need to be afraid of him coming back to the unit?’ They can tell me ‘no’ all they want, I’m going to be afraid,” she admitted. “The only place I wanted to be was back in my cell, where I feel safe with my roommate.”

Evidently, the state has failed to uphold even the most basic responsibility to protect women in its custody––and policymakers and the public cannot ignore this reality any longer.

Prisons, by their design, strip people of freedom, and rightfully so. But they are not supposed to strip them of their humanity. The women at WCCW or any other women’s prisons around the world aren’t political pawns or ideological test subjects. They are human beings, who are already paying a price for their crimes, but are now being forced to pay a deeper toll under policies that elevate trans-identified offenders like Williams above their own right to safety.

The Washington Department of Corrections can either end this experiment or continue to let women be intimidated, molested, and terrorized in plain sight. There is no middle ground.