Six years ago, in February of 2018, a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy named Giancarlo Scotti, who was working at LA County’s largest women’s jail, which is located in Lynwood, California, was charged with sexually assaulting six female inmates at the facility.
The alleged assaults occurred between March and September of 2017. And the accounts of the victims who came to court to tell of their experiences at Scotti’s sentencing hearing, were harrowing.
WitnessLA reported extensively on the issue, some of which you can find here and here.
We mention the Scotti issue all these years later because, right now we’re looking at new lawsuit that was filed in October 2025, which tells us that the sexual abuse problem in Centinela Regional Detention Center—or CRDF, as it is known, for short—is far from solved.
In the 30-page legal complaint filed by attorney Brian Dunn—and his fellow counsel, Leslie Ann Boyce—Dunn describes how, when the thirty-eight women represented in the lawsuit were residing in CRDF they were subjected to an array of voyeurism, non-consensual sexual abuse, and sexual harassment, the latter often taking place when the women were taking a shower.
There’s much more to this story, and as we race toward the New Year, we’ll bring you what we’ve found.
Also, in the coming days we’ll bring you a fascinating new series that’s researched and written by our gifted friend, Chandra Bozelko, in which she examines what last spring’s Menendez Brothers parole hearings tell us about California’s prison discipline system.
So…stay tuned.