[CovertAction Magazine was founded by one of the most famous whistleblowers of the 1970s, Philip Agee. In addition to its coverage of U.S. foreign policy and the CIA, it is intent on spotlighting the stories of whistleblowers across the U.S.—and, when possible, the world—who have displayed courage in speaking truth to power and in exposing wrongdoing and/or cover-ups in high places. This story focuses on a whistleblower who exposed prison rapes in Oklahoma, where CAM managing editor Jeremy Kuzmarov has lived since 2009. Earlier this week we profiled a national security whistleblower in the 1940s as part of whistleblower commemoration week.—Editors]
Dr. Whitney Louis is a prison psychologist with more than 15 years of experience working in prisons and jails across the U.S. In 2018 she decided to take up a new position in her home state at Dr. Eddie Warrior Correctional Center (EWCC), a minimum-security facility located in Taft, Oklahoma.
Dr. Louis’s enthusiasm for her new position quickly turned sour when she found the conditions in the prison to be, in her words, “disgusting.”
For one thing, Dr. Louis said, the women at EWCC were not given balanced meals or adequate female products when they were on their cycle; some would come up to her and tell her that they had a tampon in for four or five days—which can cause all kinds of health issues.
The women were also expected to go without showers for days because of frequent plumbing issues that prompted the prison management to turn off the water for days at a time.
Group counseling sessions, Dr. Louis said, were cut because the management did not like that it was part of an incentivized system where women could get time off their sentence if they attended.
Additionally, Dr. Louis said that Warden Greg Breslin, who has since retired, was extremely cruel to the women. In one case, he made a public display of smashing a cat house that an inmate had spent a lot of time making for some feral cats that had come into the facility.
In January 2023, Dr. Louis was fired after she had reported eight sexual assaults and rapes she had become aware of to Deputy Warden Margaret Roper, and then to the Office of the Inspector General (OIG).
Dr. Louis had been told of the rapes by women whose trust she had gained through the programs that she ran.
In one of the cases, a female prisoner accused a male corrections officer of bringing her contraband in exchange for oral sex. In another, a woman accused a corrections officer of having a sexual relationship with her and using his state phone to take nude images of her, and in yet another, a woman reported to Louis that a male corrections officer opened her shower curtain and watched as she showered.
A ninth case reported on by Dr. Louis involved a woman, Amber Bacon, who was groped and sexually harassed by a CareerTech instructor at EWCC with whom she worked as an assistant.
After her initial report to Deputy Warden Roper, Dr. Louis created a list of names that included accused officers, witnesses and alleged victims, which she gave to an OIG agent, J. Dale Hunter, via email, so he could contact the women who made allegations or witnessed the sexual abuse.
As time passed, Dr. Louis says that she talked to inmate victims who told her that no one from the OIG had ever talked to them or interviewed them.
Dr. Louis herself was also never interviewed by investigators who only interviewed prison officials.
No charges were ever brought against correctional officials who were allowed to resign instead of facing punishment for their illegal actions.
Unequivocal Substantiation
The State House Committee on Criminal Justice and Corrections carried out hearings in July 2023, amassing an “abundance of supporting evidence,” that “unequivocally substantiate[d]” Dr. Louis’s claims, according to Chairman Justin J. Humphrey (R-Lane).
Jimmy Harmon, chief of the Attorney General’s Criminal Division, acknowledged in his testimony at the hearings that inmates and staff were having sexual encounters at EWCC.
Additionally, Harmon made an incriminating statement when he said that it is “hard to prove that some of the sex that went on between inmates and staff was not consensual.”
This latter remark is incriminating because sexual contact between inmates and prison staff—whether consensual or not—is prohibited under the federal 2003 Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA).
This law was enacted because there is a power imbalance and inmates cannot give consent in their position.
In fact, posters hung in prison advertise the illegality of having any sexual relations between inmates and staff, and Humphrey said that one of the first things that correctional officers are taught during their training is to never sleep with an inmate or have sexual contact.
Witness Dossier
The witness dossier that Dr. Louis compiled included sworn affidavits by inmates who said that they had engaged in sex with guards at EWCC in exchange for tobacco, clothing items and other contraband.
The sexual encounters, which took place in prison offices and bathrooms, were openly talked about by inmates and widely known in the prison.
The dossier Dr. Louis compiled included a statement by prison employee Heather Hughart, who said that she was informed by two inmates that their friend, Delaney Blansett, was having sex with an officer named Jason Osborn and that everyone on the yard was talking about this.
As a result of the affair, Blansett became pregnant and Osborn resigned.
Another inmate, Anastasia Pitts, specified in writing that she had an affair with an officer named Smith who had taken naked pictures of her on his cell phone.
When the warden and deputy warden found out, nothing was done, and Smith resigned without facing any criminal charges.
Like No Other Prison
In an interview in late June, Dr. Louis told me that most of the time that the illegal sexual relations/rape occurred, prison officers would “entice victims, saying, ‘I’ll bring in drugs or I’ll bring you cigarettes, or I’ll give you extra time, like going out and, and walking around the rec yard, you know?’”
Dr. Louis continued: “They would bring cell phones constantly for these inmates. We actually had one inmate and she was found with a cell phone they said, well, where’d you get this cell phone? And she said, well, I was having sex with officer so and so. They then put her in segregation and they kept her in segregation for over three days with no shower, not being able to go to the bathroom to clean herself because they said they were gonna do a rape kit on her and then they never did that. Later, the woman was transferred to a higher security prison.”
According to Dr. Louis, when Margaret Roper was given the cell phone video of an officer (Smith) performing oral sex on an inmate (Pitts), she deleted it.
Dr. Louis noted further that, before Greg Breslin took over as warden, there was a deputy warden, Christopher Redeagle, who was reported for “having a sexual relationship with an inmate in which he was bringing her panties and other stuff and would take her to a secluded area.” Dr. Louis says that the same day that the relationship was reported, “they closed out the investigation and nothing much changed, though Redeagle was ultimately let go.”
Asked if there was anything like what she witnessed at EWCC at any other prisons, Dr. Louis said emphatically “no….in the federal prisons I worked at people involved in sexual acts with inmates got arrested by the FBI. The FBI agents would come inside the prison and they would get them, like they would arrest them right there to…make an example before everyone.”
A Positive Role Model Who Gave Her Life to Inmates
Dr. Louis’s mistreatment is especially appalling because inmates speak very highly of her and say that she is someone who genuinely cares about them.
Holding a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Forest Institute of Professional Psychology in Springfield, Missouri, Dr. Louis has experience doing everything from individual counseling of inmates and family therapy to crisis and risk management.
J. J. Humphrey said that Dr. Louis has “worked in many prisons, has extensive knowledge of prisons, helps inmates, and has given her life to inmates. She never had any discipline issues and there is no legitimate reason for her to have been fired.”
Heather Hughart, a maintenance worker at EWCC, gave a sworn statement that Dr. Louis provided to the OIG asserting that Warden Breslin personally disliked Dr. Louis and had told her not to associate with that “crazy bitch [Louis].”
Hughart said that Dr. Louis had actually done a great job at EWCC and that women trusted her there and that she was a “positive role model for so many.”
By contrast, she said that Breslin should not be in charge of any prison and that she was cussed and screamed at by him in front of others for being nice to the inmates and offering a shoulder for them to cry on.
The official reason for Dr. Louis’s firing—which came after she had filed for whistleblower protection status and filed a retaliation complaint through the U.S. Department of Labor—was that she had failed to report on an inmate’s dream that portended violence.
However, Dr. Louis said that she could not forecast an act of violence because of a dream and was under no professional obligation to report what an inmate told her about her dream, which was said in confidence. (By contrast she was professionally obligated to report on the rapes.)
Dr Louis’s lawyer, Matt Frisby, told the House Committee on Criminal Justice and Corrections that Dr. Louis “was a squeaky wheel who reported on things that the Department of Corrections didn’t want to be reported….She’s not a bad employee, doesn’t have a horrible history….Her activity of reporting rapes that weren’t being reported ultimately cost her job.”
Feeling Like a Little Kid Again That Didn’t Have a Voice
Dr. Louis was herself sexually assaulted in late March 2022 when a female police lieutenant, Shanice Ledbetter, the chief of security at EWCC, grabbed her right buttocks when she was in the medical hallway by the staff bathroom.
The medical secretary, Christy Ward, witnessed the inappropriate act but was afraid to report it out of fear of losing her job. (The act was also caught on camera, the footage of which the OIG failed to examine.)
In a written statement, Dr. Louis said she was initially afraid to report the assault because the employee had a close relationship with Warden Breslin and Deputy Warden Roper. Louis said she experienced panic attacks when encountering the lieutenant throughout the prison.
“I felt like it threw me back into when I was sexually assaulted as a child,” Louis wrote, as was reported in Oklahoma Watch, “I didn’t know what to do. I felt extremely hot all over my body and felt like that little kid again that didn’t have a voice.”
ODOC Claims Disproven
Oklahoma Department of Corrections (ODOC) spokesman Kay Thompson said that the ODOC could not comment on Dr. Louis’s case because of the ongoing lawsuit and court cases. Previously, Thompson told Oklahoma Watch that the rape allegations at EWCC had been investigated but found to be unsubstantiated.
According to Oklahoma Watch, Dr. Laura Pittman, the director of population and programs for the Oklahoma Department of Corrections (ODOC), wrote a letter to Dr. Louis that was received on October 12, 2023, in which Dr. Pittman claimed that Dr. Louis had failed to report the allegations of rape promptly.
This seems ludicrous, especially in light of the fact that Dr. Louis was the main person to report the allegations—right after assembling the information about them that she had.
Dr. Pittman later emailed Dr. Louis to tell her that an investigation found her allegations unsubstantiated, adding that “the serious nature of these allegations can harm the reputation of accused staff and will not be tolerated.”
Pittman’s latter claims do not hold water because if an investigation had taken place, it did not include interviews with Dr. Louis or the victims, and it would have discounted video evidence and the confession of at least one guard.
Further, no explanation has been offered for the fact that at least five guards (Smith, Ignery, Rowland, Osborne, Robison) resigned in a short period of time—clearly because they were having sex with inmates.
In complete contradiction to what Pittman and the ODOC have claimed, Jimmy Harmon told the Oklahoma State House’s committee on Criminal Justice and Corrections that Dr. Louis’s complaint was reviewed by the Oklahoma Attorney General’s Office under John O’Connor (2021-2023) but never investigated.
Harmon said that, when Gentner Drummond (now a Republican Party candidate for Governor) replaced O’Connor, his office did not conduct an independent investigation into specifics of the complaint, but rather attempted to confirm if the Corrections Department had investigated the complaint and did not speak to individual witnesses.
The ODOC’s pattern of lies continued when then ODOC Director Stephen Harpe told state lawmakers that a state-contracted auditor considered Oklahoma one of the top states for meeting anti-rape standards. The auditor stated emphatically that he never said that.
Not the Only Girl That Happened to
A month after Dr. Louis’ firing—February 8, 2023—a former EWCC correctional officer reported sexual assault coverups at the prison, alleging that Deputy Warden Roper deleted nude images from an officer’s phone. “No charges or anything was filed because they didn’t want the bad publicity,” the officer wrote, according to Oklahoma Watch. “I know she was not the only girl that happened to.”
In July 2025, Oklahoma’s Channel Four News reported that Ashlee Teafatiller, an EWCC correctional officer, was fired shortly after she reported being sexually assaulted by a police lieutenant who came into her control room and tried to kiss her and jump on top of her.
Further corroboration of Dr. Louis’s allegations came to light during a child custody case where there was direct admission of sexual relations between an inmate and staff in court, according to Justin Humphrey.
A former EWCC correctional officer told me that Dr. Louis was correct in everything she said and that rapes were taking place at EWCC and that the perpetrators were allowed to resign rather than be prosecuted.
An inmate at EWCC told The Frontier that there was a history of prisoners losing their jobs at EWCC if they reported abuse—as occurred with Amber Bacon, who was fired from her job as an assistant to a Tech instructor who sexually harassed and groped her.
Additionally, Mason Shafer, a former correctional official, testified before the House Committee on Criminal Justice and Corrections that, when he worked at EWCC, a correctional officer quit because he was under investigation for a PREA violation but was subsequently rehired and promoted from corporal to sergeant—which, to Shafer, was terrifying.
A Law Enforcement Agency Refusing to Follow the Law
After Dr. Whitney was fired, she filed a lawsuit for wrongful termination and won her case—three times—in local court. This means she should be reinstated and given back pay.
At one of her appeal hearings, Whitney said that the ODOC lawyer—who is being paid $750 an hour—told her that, if her job was reinstated, she would just be fired again.
These disparaging comments underscore how fair play has been thrown out the window in Dr. Louis’s case.
Justin Humphrey notes that “it is wrong when they threaten to fire somebody that they’re saying, we will totally ignore the court’s order. You gotta kind of put in context. We’re talking about a law enforcement agency who is saying we’re not going to follow the law. And we’re now, when you have that kind of arrogance and ignoring the law and ignoring authority and nobody holding them accountable…The kind of agency and institution that we have right now…is completely out of control.”
Banana Republic
Dr. Louis’s saga reflects Oklahoma’s evolution into a “banana republic” under the leadership of Republican Governor Kevin Stitt. Under Oklahoma’s conservative economic program, the prisons are grossly underfunded and understaffed.
Bobby Cleveland, a former State Representative and President of Oklahoma Correctional Professionals, an advocacy group for state prison employees, told a local Fox News affiliate that the ODOC has been so “hush-hush” on many things because it is “critically short staffed and any negative press they fear will hurt recruiting efforts.”
Right now, Cleveland said, “Oklahoma has one guard for every two hundred inmates. Federal prison statistics say optimal staff is one guard for every five people.”
Justin Humphrey has held numerous hearings at the Oklahoma State Capitol documenting what Cleveland was pointing out and which uncovered that inmates were running understaffed prisons where contraband was being smuggled in on drones, inmates were being shaken down and extorted by violent felons and murder rates were on the rise.
ODOC has also been firing competent prison staff who were independent minded and intent on exposing corruption.
Justin Humphrey stated that “there have been 30 lawsuits filed against the ODOC for wrongful termination and that the people filing these lawsuits are winning their cases. “Its not just Whitney; they are doing what they did to her against anyone who has the audacity to speak up.”
Humphrey has himself faced retaliation for speaking truth to power. He was removed from his position as chairman of the State House’s committee on criminal justice and corrections after he chaired hearings that exposed the mismanagement of the ODOC under Stephen Harpe, a close friend of Governr Stitt who worked with him at his investment company.
Humphrey told me that Harpe “has zero knowledge or experience with prison systems” and is far and away the “worst director I have ever seen in my life. And I’m talking hands down, walk away. By far the worst director. And when I say the guy the worst, I don’t just say that. Look at the amount of murders that are occurring yearly, and look at how many occur weekly. Look at the extortions, the level of extortion. The institutions you also gotta look at their maintenance. They’re falling apart, the prisons are falling apart and nothing is being done.”[1]
Humphrey continued: “I’ve had officers resign, just quit, show up in my office the next day saying that inmates…were not being given a mattress, toilet paper, proper hygiene products, toothbrush, toothpaste. Those kinds of things for two weeks….That’s supposed to be one of the first things that are handed out. This officer also reported watching four or five officers assault the mental health inmate. Throw him on the floor, beat him. Lift him up and throw him on a bed with no mattress. Beat him some more. And that’s why the officer quit. She also reported about a situation where an inmate had been gang raped and had cigarettes burned on him. I have worked in corrections for 35 years and never seen anything like this.”
After Harpe resigned as ODOC Director in October 2025, he was appointed as a chief product officer for LEO Technologies, a company that won a $1.07 million contract from the ODOC in April 2025. Major problems persist in the Oklahoma prison system under Harpe’s successor Justin Farris, who at least has experience working in the correctional field. A June 2026 article in The Guardian exposed a subterranean dungeon in the Oklahoma State pentientiary at McAlester known as the Tombs where inmates alleged beatings, vermin, rampant mice, food trays being kicked in by guards through human waste and lack of access to light. Tremane Wood was quoted in the article as having written in a letter that “it’s really like living in cave. It’s dark and damp. Sometimes this place drives people mad. The hardest part is the isolation. In another letter Wood wrote: “You end up loosing [sic] track of days and nights and what day it is … It’s a real form of psychological torture that some people never come back from.” Dr. Sondra Crosby, an expert in torture survivors and a public health professor at Boston University and Physicians for Human Rights, calls the lack of sunlight in the Tombs “a form of cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment and torture.” Crosby, who has worked with people imprisoned after 9/11 in CIA “black sites,” says lack of sunlight was “used to punish people in the darkness of the prisons in Afghanistan. In my decades of evaluating survivors of torture, darkness and no sunlight has featured prominently. It causes disorientation and you just lose sense of yourself … We know that exposure to light is critical to wellbeing and is necessary to maintain a sense of self.” For a previous expose of human rights abuses in Oklahoma by Jeremy Kuzmarov, see here. ↑
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About the Author
Jeremy Kuzmarov holds a Ph.D. in American history from Brandeis University and has taught at numerous colleges across the United States. He is regularly sought out as an expert on U.S. history and politics and co-hosts a radio show on New York Public Radio and on Progressive Radio News Network called “Uncontrolled Opposition.”
He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and is the author of eight books, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023); with Dan Kovalik, Syria: Anatomy of Regime Change (Baraka Books, 2025), and Political Assassinations in America: The Intricate Nexus of Deep State Crime (Clarity Press, 2026).
Besides these books, Kuzmarov has published hundreds of articles and contributed to numerous edited volumes, including one in the prestigious Oxford History of Counterinsurgency .
He can be reached at jkuzmarov2@gmail.com and found on substack here.
