A federal lawsuit says a transgender inmate arrested on misdemeanor charges was raped by a male cellmate in New Orleans’s new $150 million jail. The incident is alleged to have happened in September 2015 when the victim was transferred to the new Orleans Justice Center. The victim, whose birth sex is male but who “chooses to live as female,” “repeatedly screamed for help, but no deputy ever came to the cell to investigate,” the lawsuit alleges. The lawsuit says workers at the jail lack basic training and that the “failure to separate transgendered inmates from the general inmate population” contributes to violence. The man who oversees the jail, Orleans Parish Sheriff Marlin Gusman, has been under fire in the past for rampant violence at another facility he headed, the Orleans Parish Prison. That jail has been under federal oversight since 2013 over an “epidemic of violence” that the U.S. Department of Justice said posed “an immediate risk of harm and death” to inmates. Gusman had promised the new facility would be free from the violence that plagued the other jail.
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