Mick Hartley

This is astonishing.

When I asked my 46th District legislators about the lawsuit from the former female prisoner forced to share a cell with a 6’4” male who sexually assaulted her, their response was … interesting. What do you think? pic.twitter.com/NuaBFUoATi

— Beth Daranciang (@bethsd) January 11, 2025

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Transcript (via):

Question: Hi. Washington State is being sued by a woman who was forced to share a jail cell with a six foot four male who sexually harassed and assaulted her over many days and weeks. And she was told by the prison the Washington State Prison to not report it because she might get retaliated against. She had to suffer that for a long time until he was found on top of her when she was unconscious. His hands on her body and it’s being sued. There are many, there are about a dozen males in the Washington State Prison for women, and women are being traumatized. This is a Geneva Convention violation against women again, against women’s rights. What, what will you do to stop it, especially since you passed a bill that made it harder to find out which males are in the women’s jail? Thank you.

Response: So before getting elected, I worked on an organization called Disability Rights Washington. And at this organization I did some work around this issue of making sure that trans women who are incarcerated had what they needed to be able to navigate safely through our business system. I’m proud of the work that we did there. One of the bills, I’m not sure if it’s what you’re referring to, but one of the bills that I worked on was actually to make sure that things like sensitive images are not released to our public records act. One of the things that we found out in our work with trans women was that you know, those big body scanners you go through at the airport, walk through them to stand up with your arms up. The prisons have similar ones but that are much more high tech, so they don’t have to do invasive cavity searches, but they take pictures of naked bodies and that was subject to our Public Records Act. So we went in and we made that change to protect not just trans women, but to protect all people who were having to go through that to make sure that their naked bodies did not end up in a public records disclosure somewhere. I’m proud of the work that we did there. We need to hold to the work that we did there and we were always gonna stand up for folks who are incarcerated, who are dealing with all sorts of different horrible situations. We can do that. I continue to work on that the community safety committee, and I find it important to state that we’ll always stand with the LGB LGBTQ community.

And they applaud at the end! Hey, she said good things about always standing with the LGBTQ community! And she completely avoided that awkward question – even pretended it was another question entirely ("I’m not sure if it’s what you’re referring to") – without a hint of embarrassment. Now there's a good politician.