A transgender woman in Los Angeles gloated in a recorded jailhouse telephone call that she would be let off easy for sexually assaulting a 10-year-old girl – a prediction that proved true when she was sentenced last month.
The recordings, which were obtained by Fox News, caught 26-year-old Hannah Tubbs boasting in November phone calls with her father that she wouldn’t have to go back to prison under the policies of Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascon. Tubbs also made explicit remarks about the young victim, talking about her sexual attraction to the girl.
“I’m gonna plead out to it, plead guilty,” Tubbs said in one call. “They’re gonna stick me on probation, and it’s gonna be dropped, it’s gonna be done. I won’t have to register [as a sex offender], won’t have to do nothing.”
The case in question concerned a 2014 assault by Tubbs – who was then named James and identified as a male – in the women’s restroom of a Denny’s restaurant. Tubbs, who was two weeks shy of turning 18 at the time of the incident, only began identifying as a woman after being arrested for the assault eight years later.
The prediction of a light sentence came true in June, when Tubbs was spared incarceration in adult prison. Gascon’s office refused to prosecute Tubbs as an adult, in accordance with the DA’s progressive policies. She was sentenced to two years in juvenile detention, which reportedly could mean being released in six months. Tubbs also correctly predicted that she wouldn’t have to register as a sex offender, despite having committed other offenses since the assault at Denny’s.
In one of her jailhouse calls, Tubbs admonished the caller to refer to her with female pronouns in court. She said she would seek assignment to a female prison if she were incarcerated.
The victim told Fox News it was “insulting” and “unfair” to prosecute Tubbs as a female and a juvenile, “seeing how he clearly didn’t act like one” during the sexual assault. “The things he did to me and made me do that day was beyond horrible for a 10-year-old girl to have to go through,” she said, adding that the light sentence gave her “no true justice.”
Gascon, who was elected in 2020 with the help of $2.5 million in campaign funding from billionaire activist George Soros, said on Sunday that he would have handled the Tubbs case differently had he known of the defendant’s disregard for the harm she caused. However, media reports indicated that Gascon’s office was well aware of the jailhouse recordings.
“We do not always get it right, as no one can, but we do believe that our fundamental beliefs are the right ones,” Gascon said.
With the DA facing a potential recall vote over his allegedly soft-on-crime policies, his office last week told staffers that there could be rare exceptions to his rules, including his ban on trying juveniles in adult court. Contrary to Sunday’s statement by Gascon, his office said the easing of policies was unrelated to the controversial Tubbs case.