Two years ago a Russian woman was arrested in the US and made look like a honeypot spy by bloodthirsty media. Maria Butina recalls how she was thrown into the hellhole of the US penal system.
Butina is a gun rights activist, who got dragged into the Russiagate saga and sentenced to 18 months in prison by a federal court. US prosecutors and the media worked hard to present her as a cunning spy using her feminine charms to slither into the corrupt underbelly of the National Rifle Association and expose American conservatives to malign Kremlin influence.
Now back in Russia, Butina works as a rights activist as well as a co-host of a program on RT Russian. She shared an excerpt from her upcoming memoir, which tells how she arrived in a city jail in Alexandria, Northern Virginia, after her arrest on July 15.
Confused and not fully understanding what was happening to her, she was questioned by a jail psychiatrist during her booking. At one point she considered claiming she was suicidal in the hope that they would send her to hospital instead of a cell.
“Later, it turned out I was right not to go down that road because self-destructive prisoners were kept in the same conditions as the rest with only one exception,” she wrote.
They were put in a straitjacket and laid out as a mummy on a metal bunk ‘until further notice.’
Among many shocking things she experienced in prison was being placed next to a male inmate, who ‘welcomed’ her arrival in the most humiliating way.
“The wall between us had no windows so I couldn’t see my ‘neighbor’, but he certainly liked to tune in to any sound I made. He got so stimulated hearing me moving around next door and choking on my tears that he pleasured himself loudly all night long – and I had to listen,” Butina said.
There was a lot of misery, despair and humiliation at the detention facility. A black woman in the cell across was “moaning and swearing at the guards” most of the time. “She asked for much-needed feminine hygiene supplies, but they didn’t give her any, so she smeared the walls with her blood.”
Butina stayed at the Alexandria jail for almost a year as her trial dragged on. The first months were in summer time, when the heat “seemed to make the prison stench a billion times worse.” But inmates got regularly blasted by powerful bursts of air from a giant fan that the guards brought with them when inspecting cells.
“It blew right through me. I shivered as I curled up in the corner of my metal berth, pressing my knees to my chin,” she wrote. “I quickly realized that the warmest part of my ‘outfit’ was my thick red hair. I covered myself with it, spreading it over my body toward my feet the best I could, and it helped me warm up a bit.”
After her conviction, Butina was moved to the Federal Correctional Institution in Tallahassee, Florida, where she spent five more months before being released. She says she was victimized by the US justice system and forced to change her plea to ‘guilty’ even though she didn’t do anything wrong.
