(Ken Silva, Headline USA) A guard at the federal correctional institution in Tallahassee—where notorious sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell is serving her sentence—has been charged with having sexual acts with an inmate.
An indictment unsealed Thursday alleges that, between June 2023, and August 2023, Kerontrez Lamar Kenon, 22, of Midway, Florida, engaged in sexual acts with an inmate while employed as a correctional officer for the Federal Bureau of Prisons. The indictment doesn’t identify the inmate.
If convicted, Kenon faces a maximum penalty of 15 years in prison.
The Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General and FBI investigated the case.
The indictment against Kenon underscores a report from Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General about the unsanitary conditions at Tallahassee FCI. That report found “black filth smeared on walls, rodent infestations, and sanitary products being used to plug leaks in dilapidated living quarters are a few of the issues recorded” at the facility.
The DOJ-IG report, which labeled Tallahassee FCI as “high risk,” also flagged the prison for its policies on transgender inmates. The report found that staff “misgendered” its roughly 119 transgender inmates, which marks the largest number of any Bureau of Prisons institution.
While Tallahassee FCI appears to be a hellhole for most inmates, Maxwell is likely spared from the worse of its conditions.
Recently, Maxwell was moved to the “honor dorm” of a low-security prison in Tallahassee, according to a report in the Daily Mail.
“Maxwell’s cushy new digs in D South – the so-called ‘honor dorm’ – are reserved for 30 to 40 of the low-security Florida lockup’s best-behaved prisoners,” the Daily Mail reported in March.
“There are two bunks per cell but so few occupants that the disgraced British socialite, 62, is almost guaranteed to have her own room as well as four times the storage.”
Meanwhile, Maxwell has an appeal pending in her case, as her lawyers contest her conviction on five charges of recruiting and grooming four underage girls for the late pedophile financier to abuse between 1994 and 2004.
Maxwell’s lawyers reportedly told New York’s Second Circuit appeals court this week that she should not have been prosecuted for grooming Epstein’s victims because of a provision in his 2008 sweetheart plea deal, according to the Daily Mail.
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.