Five years after she was raped by a federal prison guard, a Kentucky woman is now talking publicly about the crime. Kimberly Yates hopes that other victims will come forward and that Americans will treat sexual assaults against prisoners as seriously as violence against anyone outside prison walls.
Yates said she was inspired to speak out by a famous former inmate, television host and business magnate Martha Stewart, with whom Yates shared a cottage at the women's prison in Alderson, West Virginia.
"It's going on right now. Today," Yates said in a WHAS11 News exclusive interview.
She has served her time for drug crimes, ten years in state prison, and six more years in federal custody, but she can't stop thinking
about what's still going on behind bars.
"There's women somewhere that are sitting in jail or a facility and they are afraid to say something," Yates said.
A drug trafficking conviction in 2001 sent Yates to several federal prisons and she said she had no problems with guards at the Kentucky Correctional Institute for Women in LaGrange
"I don't think I..... I didn't see it coming," she said.
In 2004, Yates landed at the Federal Detention Center in Philadelphia, a holding center for pre-trial inmates.
"I worked for the commisary. I was the clerk and I also helped to get the orders together and take them to the different wings," Yates said.
Months passed, and while Yates said she had no issues with the guards, but she heard whispers of sexual activity between guards and other prisoners.
"If you asked me did I see anything coming? Not that would have made me think that something like that was going to happen," she said.
And what was going to happen, Yates said happened several times with 33-year-old prison guard Theodore Woodson.
"It's really hard to talk about. I remember, there's a warehouse that is downstairs in the basement and he had asked me to go down there," she said. "Not asked me, he told me to and um when we got down there is when the first rape occurred. And he told me that if I ever told anybody that he knew where my family lived, where my children lived. and that he could find out information about me."
Yates said she has blacked out some details just to protect herself, but the last sexual assualt sent her to the hospital. According to the medical report she was bleeding after "unwanted" intercourse.
"It was a very demeaning thing, very. I want to say embarrassing, it made me feel as if I had done something. I felt that they wouldn't believe me," Yates said. "I felt like, I just felt like a piece of crap."
Yates said who is in prison is not less than human, nor any less deserving of human rights.
"I wasn't innocent. I was guilty of what i did," Yates said. "It didn't give him the right to violate me and to take part of my confidence. And will."
In A 2007 survey, the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that 4.5 percent of inmates held in federal and state prisons had been
sexually abused in the previous year alone.
Yates says Woodson acted like it was no big deal and she would later discover that other women had reported Woodson to the Federal Bureau of Prisons before he sexually assaulted her.
"And they just kind of swept it under the rug. They let the man continue to work in his position, knowing he was a predator," she said.
Woodson was eventually convicted, not of rape, but of a "sexual act with a ward." He served only four months in prison and is
not required to register as a sex offender.
Yates was transferred to Alderson Federal Prison for Women where she said she credits both a prison counselor with helping keep her sanity and a fellow inmate for giving her a voice.
"She gave me a lot of courage. You got to remember at that time I was still going through it," Yates said.
The prisoner who shared a cottage with Yates is none other than TV personality and businesswoman Martha Stewart, who served five months in a securities fraud case.
Less than two months after Yates' terror in Philadephia, she says Stewart gave her cause to smile.
"We did stay up until 2 a.m. on Christmas Eve cutting out doves and writing peace in about 20 or 30 different languages on paper, because we were decorating for the holidays," she said.
Stewart's publicist says she would have no comment. But Yates said she confided in the homemaking star.
"She seemed very angry. She's a woman who believes in what's just and what's right. No matter what they may be," Yates said.
Yates said Stewart encouraged her to tell her story once she was out of prison. Now, two years after her release she has a vested interest in telling her story because now her sister is incarcerated in Kentucky, and Yates said she fears her sister may be transferred to the privately run Otter Creek prison in Eastern Kentucky where at least six workers have been charged with sex crimes in recent years.
"She has a fear of going there because she doesn't want it to happen to her," Yates said.
Kentucky is one of only a few states where it is only a misdemeanor rather than a felony for a prison guard to have sex with an inmate. New proposed standards for federal and state prisons are pending with the U.S. Attorney General.
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