Levi Gray: Guilty Plea, Civil Suits, and Coffee Creek Abuse

Levi David Gray is a former sergeant at Coffee Creek Correctional Facility, Oregon’s only women’s prison, who was sentenced in May 2025 to 20 months in prison for sexually assaulting a 19-year-old inmate inside the Special Housing Unit he supervised. He pleaded guilty to two counts of custodial sexual misconduct in the first degree, a Class C felony, and received the maximum sentence available under Oregon’s felony sentencing guidelines.¹

What Happened Inside the Special Housing Unit

On May 23, 2023, Gray sexually assaulted the victim in her cell at Coffee Creek in Wilsonville. He was the supervisor of the Special Housing Unit, and the cell he chose was the only one in the area without a surveillance camera.¹ A witness overheard the assault and urged the victim to report it.

The Oregon State Police investigated. A hospital examination of the victim identified Gray’s DNA on her body, and surveillance footage from other cameras in the unit confirmed that he had escorted her to the cell alone and lingered in the area, both violations of facility policy.² Gray, 47 at the time, had worked for the Oregon Department of Corrections since 2010 and had been a sergeant at Coffee Creek for roughly a decade, earning about $93,800 a year.³ He was placed on administrative leave after his August 2023 arrest and fired on July 23, 2024.⁴

The Guilty Plea and 20-Month Sentence

Gray initially pleaded not guilty to two felony counts of first-degree custodial sexual misconduct and two misdemeanor counts of official misconduct.⁵ On May 9, 2025, he pleaded guilty to the two felony counts. Under Oregon law, consent is not a defense to custodial sexual misconduct; the statute criminalizes sexual contact between correctional employees and people in custody regardless of any claimed consent.⁶

Judge Ricardo Menchaca sentenced Gray on May 23, 2025, in Washington County Circuit Court in Hillsboro. Senior Deputy District Attorney Allison Brown prosecuted. Along with the 20-month prison term, the court imposed three years of post-prison supervision, mandatory sex offender treatment, a mental health evaluation, and a permanent no-contact order with the victim. The court also revoked Gray’s Department of Public Safety Standards and Training certification and permanently barred him from serving as a corrections officer in Oregon.⁷

The Civil Lawsuits

J.B. v. Gray in Federal Court

The victim of the 2023 assault, identified in court records as J.B., filed a federal civil rights lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon (Case No. 3:23-cv-01962). The complaint named Gray along with more than a dozen other Coffee Creek staff and the State of Oregon, including corrections officers, lieutenants, a captain, the grievance coordinator, the assistant superintendent of security, and the superintendent. It alleged that staff knew or should have known about Gray’s conduct and turned a “blind eye,” and that supervisors allowed him to continue working at the women’s prison despite prior investigations into his conduct.⁸

In March 2026, Magistrate Judge Mark D. Clarke issued a sanctions ruling that found the defendants had failed to preserve video footage from the two months before the May 23, 2023, assault, despite investigators requesting it. The judge found an “intent to deprive” the plaintiff of evidence and ordered that the jury be instructed to presume the lost footage was unfavorable to the defendants. The ruling also noted that one Oregon Department of Corrections employee had instructed staff by text message to avoid using inmate names in emails in order to limit the creation of public records tied to anticipated litigation.⁹ The case remained active as of early 2026.

The June Doe Settlement

A second federal civil rights lawsuit involved a different woman, identified as June Doe, who alleged that Gray coerced her into sexual acts in April 2018 while she was in a mental health crisis in a segregation cell. According to The Oregonian, she said Gray used his authority over her placement to coerce her in exchange for moving her out of segregation. She reported the abuse in March 2024 after a phone conversation with her boyfriend led her to recognize what had happened as abuse. In March 2026, Oregon agreed to pay $225,000 to settle the case. She was represented by attorney Ginger Mooney.⁴ The allegations predate the 2023 assault by roughly five years.

Coffee Creek’s Pattern of Staff Sexual Abuse

Gray’s conviction is one in a series at Coffee Creek, which opened in 2001 and houses roughly 870 women as Oregon’s only state women’s prison.¹⁰ Prior staff convicted of sexual misconduct there include Tony Daniel Klein, a former nurse at the facility from 2010 to 2018 who was convicted by a federal jury in July 2023 of 17 counts of depriving victims of their constitutional rights and four counts of perjury for assaulting nine inmates, and was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison;¹¹ Paul Golden, a former landscape manager sentenced in 2009 to 11.5 years for sexual misconduct involving at least 10 inmates in an area the women called the “rape shed”; and Jeffrey Barcenas and Christopher Randall, a lieutenant and a food services coordinator convicted of official misconduct in 2004 after sexual relations with an inmate, in a matter the state settled for $350,000.¹²

A 2023 Gender Informed Practices Assessment described Coffee Creek as “replete with dysfunction and dominated by a para-military and punitive culture.”¹³ A separate state-commissioned report that year found that inmates and staff alike feared retaliation for reporting sexual misconduct and that the grievance system was effectively broken, with many grievances rejected rather than processed.⁵ The Washington County District Attorney’s Office, in its statement after Gray’s sentencing, credited the victim for coming forward and the Oregon Department of Corrections for taking “swift action” once the abuse was disclosed.¹

1
Washington County DA. Former Corrections Officer Sentenced 20 Months Prison Sexual Misconduct Case
2
KPTV. Former Oregon Corrections Officer Sentenced for Sexual Misconduct With Inmate
3
Oregon Capital Chronicle. Coffee Creek Sergeant Arrested for Sexual Misconduct With an Inmate
4
The Oregonian. State Pays $225K to Woman Who Alleged Guard Coerced Sexual Acts
5
IJPR. Coffee Creek Sergeant Arrested for Sexual Misconduct With an Inmate
6
Oregon Public Law. ORS 163.452 – Custodial Sexual Misconduct in the First Degree
7
KATU. Former Corrections Officer Sentenced to 20 Months for Sexual Misconduct
8
Disability Rights Oregon. J.B. v. Gray Et Al
9
Justia. J.B. v. Gray Et Al, Opinion and Order
10
KPTV. Reports Allege Widespread Dysfunction at Oregon’s Only Women’s Prison
11
ABC News. Former Nurse Sentenced to 30 Years for Sexually Assaulting Multiple Inmates
12
Statesman Journal. Reports of Sex Abuse Plague Coffee Creek Correctional Facility
13
Oregon Justice Resource Center. Women’s Justice Project