A person who was incarcerated at Southern State Correctional Facility in Springfield has sued superintendent Mike Lyon, claiming Lyon ignored his attempt to report a corrections officer’s sexual abuse against him.
In an interview and in court documents, Michael Lewis, 42, said he brought his allegations to a peer counselor in the months before Lyon was placed on administrative leave amid an investigation into unspecified misconduct allegations on April 13.
The Vermont Department of Corrections announced last week that the investigation had cleared Lyon of wrongdoing. He was returned to his post.
It’s not clear whether Lewis’s allegations are linked to Lyon’s paid leave. Corrections officials declined to comment, and Lyon did not respond to an email.
Lewis, who is now lodged at the Northern State Correctional Facility in Newport, filed his lawsuit against Lyon and two other Southern State employees in Windsor County civil court on May 5, alleging denial of due process, cruel and unusual punishment, deliberate indifference and retaliation related to the alleged sex abuse and response. He is seeking a total of almost $2 million in damages from the three defendants and asking a judge to allow him to represent himself.
The Department of Corrections is not named in the suit. The defendants have yet to file a response in court.
In the 25-page handwritten court filing and in video interviews from prison, Lewis said he had a good relationship with Lyon. The two have known each other since about 1998, when Lewis was lodged at the prison in Newport and Lyon worked there, he said.
But Lewis wrote that when he tried to tell Lyon about a female corrections officer sexually touching, kissing and propositioning him, the superintendent tried to remove himself from the situation in order to protect himself.
In an interview, Lewis asserted that Lyon told him, “You can’t report this with me.” When other prison officials later learned about the allegations, Lewis claimed in his lawsuit, Lyon “cornered” Lewis and suggested the episode could hurt his reputation.
In an email, Isaac Dayno, policy director for the Department of Corrections and chief of staff for corrections commissioner Nick Deml, declined to comment on the lawsuit and did not answer questions regarding the allegations.
“The Department, as per policy, does not comment on ongoing litigation or Department of Human Resources investigations,” Dayno wrote. “We take these types of claims with the utmost seriousness, and investigate these allegations according to federal law.”
Through Dayno, Deml and the defendants were not made available for an interview on Friday.
Lewis has been incarcerated since 2009 on convictions of vehicular manslaughter and related charges. He previously served time for domestic assault, simple assault, escape, false pretenses and other crimes.
He’s filed at least a dozen other lawsuits involving Vermont’s prison system, mostly against the Department of Corrections and its leadership, for issues related to small claims, wrongful imprisonment and Covid-19 conditions within the facilities. According to Lewis, he also filed a restraining order and emergency injunction against a caseworker alleging unwanted sexual advances while he was lodged out of state in Pennsylvania, which resulted in him being transferred back to Vermont.
Lewis became a paralegal in 2020 while incarcerated, he said, and his goal is to become a lawyer when he is eventually released. In filing so many lawsuits, he said he hopes to hold corrections accountable for the rights provided to incarcerated people, and he often agrees to settle out of court with the department.
While at the Springfield prison, he worked as the facility’s law librarian, assisting other incarcerated people with legal issues.
In an interview, Lewis said that he “shouldn’t have been participating” in the sexual acts with the female officer, but that he went along because he feared angering her and risking retaliation.
In an email, state police spokesperson Adam Silverman wrote that state police “did conduct an investigation” into the abuse claims, “but there was insufficient evidence to support a finding that a crime had been committed. The matter was referred back to the Department of Corrections for administrative review.”
Lewis told VTDigger he decided to tell Lyon that he was being sexually abused after the turn of the year.
“I started to share with him that there was this issue going on with this female officer,” Lewis said in an interview. “That’s when Lyon was like, ‘stop.’ He’s like, ‘Mike, listen, I can’t have you do this with me.’ He’s like ‘I can, I will put you with somebody who you can report this to, but you can’t report this with me.’”
Lewis alleged that Lyon nevertheless inquired further, asking how bad the abuse was, to which Lewis responded, “It’s worse as it gets.”
“(Lyon) goes, ‘All right, I can’t have this conversation,’ and he left,” Lewis said.
In the complaint filed in Windsor County civil court, Lewis wrote that he later recounted what happened to a peer support counselor who was also incarcerated.
That person, according to the suit, then reported Lewis’s allegations to Michaela Merrill, assistant superintendent at the Springfield prison and its Prison Rape Elimination Act coordinator.
Merrill, a defendant in the suit, directed questions posed via email to a department of corrections spokesperson.
“On or about that same night,” Lewis wrote in his court filing, “Lyon by himself cornered (Lewis) … (and) asked (Lewis,) ‘How is this going to hurt me, Mike?’”
Lewis alleges in court documents that Merrill failed to inform him of the rights afforded to him as an alleged sexual assault victim. Merrill also failed to have Lewis screened by medical or mental health staff, he claims.
Lewis said he spoke to an investigator with the Department of Human Relations via video chat while at the Newport prison, where he was moved in January, about the sexual abuse and the problems he faced having the allegations taken seriously.
The defendants were sent summonses on May 8, according to court documents. They have 21 days after receiving the summons to answer.