Incarcerated Women Featured in True Crime Media Face Flood of Sexual Harassment

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https://truthout.org/articles/incarcerated-women-featured-in-true-crime-media-face-flood-of-sexual-harassment/

Incarcerated Women Featured in True Crime Media Face Flood of Sexual Harassment

Incarcerated women are being made involuntary performers in a spectacle that attracts men who dehumanize them.

By Kwaneta Harris & Leigh Goodmark , TRUTHOUT
Published February 19, 2026

Most true crime media is consumed by women, some of whom may be watching because they relate to the true crime genre’s victims. But another group of true crime junkies has different motives for watching: men looking to connect with incarcerated women.

True crime media has manufactured a uniquely degrading pipeline: Women convicted of crimes become involuntary performers in a spectacle that attracts precisely the men most likely to dehumanize them. Incarcerated women featured in these venues are then flooded with letters, with a significant portion coming from self-described incels, men who frame their desire for connection through the language of sexual entitlement and misogyny. The genre itself engineers this outcome.

The messages incarcerated women receive range from odd to downright creepy. L.S., an incarcerated woman in Texas who was convicted of killing her ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend and sentenced to decades in prison, told Truthout that she was contacted by a news/entertainment show a dozen times before it aired a program made without her participation. She decided to watch the show to see if there were any updates about her case. During the commercial breaks, she shared the messages she gets when media like this airs: Guys declaring their unyielding love. Men proposing marriage. She later received a nine-page handwritten letter describing her as coldhearted because she never replies. He swears he will never write to her again, but the next week, another letter arrives, saying he has visited her mother to ask why she won’t write him back. Another man writes to explain that she must learn her place as a woman without jealousy. He regularly proposes marriage, telling her that she can be his second wife. These programs make women vulnerable to abuse from correctional officers too — prison staff have threatened to take nude photographs of her to post, and to sell her personal items to stalkers.

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…The economics of prison provide an answer. Women in Texas prisons are forced to work full time for no pay and are not provided with basic hygiene supplies. Imagine working more than 40 hours a week and still not being able to buy tampons because you aren’t paid to work. Women write back to get $30 a month to buy hygiene supplies. It’s not much, but it is enough for them to buy necessities. So when these men ask women to put lipstick on their nipples and labia to press on paper and they’ll send them $10, some women are desperate enough to do it.

Each time a woman’s true crime media is published or aired, the letters and emails begin anew. The messages are almost always sexual.

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