Madi Bolanos and Anna Sussman's new podcast We Are Jane Doe, by KQED and Snap Studios, investigates rampant sex abuse at the Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla, Ca. That was the advice that Ali Prout received from her cellmate. Prout had told her that she had been raped by Gregory Rodriguez, a corrections officer at the Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla, California.
ALI PROUT: She's like, you do what you have to do and be fake until you get out of here, and then you tell somebody. ROSE: Prout followed that advice, and for months, she bore more abuse and quietly collected evidence until she was released in August of 2022. When she got out, that evidence she collected, along with her testimony, would help convict Rodriguez on more than 60 counts of sexual assault.
He was sentenced to 224 years in prison. Prout's story, along with the abuse suffered by many other prisoners at the Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla, are the subject of a new investigative podcast, We Are Jane Doe, by NPR member station KQED and Snap Studios. And a warning - this story will contain details of violence and sexual assault.
Host Madi Bolaños and producer Anna Sussman join me now. ROSE: Anna, I want to start with you. Ali Prout's story is really central to the podcast.
Tell us a little bit about her and why her story was so crucial to your investigation. SUSSMAN: She was convicted of a nonviolent offense, and very soon after she arrived at the Central California Women's Facility, an officer named Gregory Rodriguez said something inappropriate to her about how beautiful her lips were and how attractive she was, and she felt very uncomfortable. And shortly after that, he proceeded to assault her, and it was during the very first assault, she said, that she decided to single-handedly kind of make this plan to fight back.
She said she knew she couldn't yell and fight in the same way that someone in the free world might be able to. She knew she had to kind of pretend to go along with things because the big fear she had, and that lots of women we spoke with had, is more time being added to their sentence. Most of the women who are there are there for much longer amounts of time than she was set to serve.
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