A male who wishes he were female had all his dreams come true in South Australia.

Leslie Graham Richards, also known as Krista Richards, a convicted drug trafficker, brothel owner and would-be hit-man is housed in a female South Australian prison.

He was in a single cell because he was known to be violent against women.

The 69-year-old criminal must have thought he hit the jackpot when he was moved into a cell with Katie (not her real name), who had no idea she was about to be housed with a violent male criminal. Unfortunately the vulnerable woman found out all too soon when he violently sexually assaulted her.

Katie has spoken out after the horrific revelation that a vile Victorian father who raped and filmed the assault of his 5-year-old daughter is also being housed in a female prison.

“It triggered me as to what had happened to me and I just thought, I’m going to speak out about this, because I don’t want it to happen to anybody else, and if it becomes normal, then it probably will just keep happening,” Katie told The Australian.

She wants the culture of silence to end. She wants politicians such as Victorian Premier Jacinta Allen, who has refused to weigh into the issue, to stop passing the buck to prison authorities and show leadership.

At 29, it was Katie’s first time in prison. She’d spent two weeks in the segregation area of Port Augusta Prison, where new female inmates are assessed before entering the women’s unit, in January 2019. Katie was given no choice about being placed in a cell with a trans inmate 40 years her senior.

Despite Richards having undergone surgery, he still acted like the violent male he is. He spoke and acted appallingly.

“Pretty quickly they were sexualising conversation and just sort of stand-over tactics that I found out later he was renowned for on the outside as well,” Katie says.

“Not long after me being in the same cell and feeling really uncomfortable, they started to touch me inappropriately, and I’d asked them to stop a couple of times,” she says.

“Then one night, it would have only been a couple of days after being in the cell, they put a blanket up to block the vision, to block the view of the CCTV.

“I was on the bottom bunk, and they sexually assaulted me.

“They got on top of me and put their fingers in my vagina, and I was telling them to stop. I made it clear that I was not interested. It was not like reciprocated flirting, or anything like that, but they kept going. Then they put their hand on my mouth to stop me from screaming, and just kept going. ”

When it was over, Katie says, she couldn’t move.

“After that I just cried and waited until the morning,” she says.

Katie reported the crime and begged the prison staff for help. She was ignored. No one responded to her request to move cells or the fact she was assaulted. She was in prison for a driving offence.

“I’d never been to prison before, so I didn’t know if I was going to be looked at in a certain way for talking to them,” she says. “So that was terrifying. There are other women that are watching you talk to prison officers and like you see in the movies you’re not supposed to talk to them.

“I didn’t know anybody else in there, so it was just me, scared, I had nowhere to turn.”

It took four days to finally move Katie but nothing was done about reporting the assault. Katie believes the staff were afraid of being labelled transphobic and that Richards knew how to play the system.

Katie says at least two other prisoners have been assaulted by the man.

The SA Correctional Services Department will not comment on the matter.

“The government had the opportunity to keep Richards in that segregation unit, so they had the facilities to be able to keep him in there, and they decided not to,” she says. “I don’t understand how they’ve just decided, well, our rights don’t matter.”

This is exactly the mess we end up with when the word woman is broadened to include males. No human can change sex. No man can become a woman. No woman should ever have to put up with males in a space thought out to be sex segregated.

Contact your local MP’s and South Australian senators, plus the Corrective Services Minister and premier to demand change.

^{Image source: The Australian. I was sexually assaulted by a trans inmate in a women’s prison, says Katie}