LOS ANGELES — A transgender woman sued Los Angeles County, the Sheriff’s Department and Sheriff Robert Luna today, alleging her civil rights were violated when she was housed with male inmates in the Twin Towers jail after her 2023 arrest despite having fully developed breasts and other feminine attributes.
Coretta Simo Love Monk’s Los Angeles Superior Court lawsuit seeks unspecified compensatory and punitive damages. She contends that while in custody with men, she was subjected to “ongoing and pervasive foreseeable threats of violence, intimidation, humiliation, sexual harassment and discrimination.”
Deputies disregarded Monk’s legal gender identification, her fully developed size 38B breasts “and other female gender identity markers,” according to the suit, which further states that Monk was in custody from September 2023 until March 2024.
An LASD representative did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
Monk refrained to a point from showering with male inmates out of fear for her safety and her emotional distress was so extreme that she tried to take her own life in December 2023 by “drowning herself in a filthy toilet bowl,” the suit states.
Monk was taken to Harbor-UCLA Medical Center after her failed suicide attempt and remained there until her release three months later, all the time believing she was still in custody while at the hospital, according to the suit, which also states that the plaintiff is bipolar and filed a similar complaint in federal court in 2020 alleging she had previously been wrongfully housed with male inmates.
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