Los Angeles district attorney criticized for reversal on transgender child molester case

Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney Eric Siddall on Tuesday criticized Los Angeles DA George Gascon after the office defended its light sentence for a transgender convicted child molester, Hannah Tubbs.

Tubbs, 26, laughed and bragged about receiving a light sentence after molesting a 10-year-old girl in 2014 in recordings obtained by Fox News. Tubbs began identifying as a woman after being arrested about eight years later. Tubbs, who was just a few weeks away from turning 18 at the time of the incident, received a two-year sentence at a juvenile facility, Fox reported.

Alex Bastian, special advisor to Gascon, defended the prosecution's actions in an interview with Fox on Tuesday.

"I think when the jail calls were brought to light... I was shocked. I was disturbed," Bastian said. "And as I began to look into whether the executive team of the DA knew about it, it was clear nobody knew about the contents of these jail calls."

The L.A. Association of Deputy District Attorneys Vice President Eric Siddal disagrees. He told Fox that "the DA's office knew about these recordings" of Tubbs last month.

"He is claiming that his boss, the DA, didn't personally know about the recordings until much later," Siddall told Fox. "That doesn't really comport with the timeline because we know that his executive management team was involved in the Tubbs case in late January. So they were involved at the same time that these calls were discovered."

In one of the recordings obtained by Fox, Tubbs used a derogatory term for transgender people and asked to be called by female pronouns.

"So now they're going to put me with other trannies that have seen their cases like mine or with one tranny like me that has a case like mine," Tubbs said. "So when you come to court, make sure you address me as her."

Tubbs' victim, now 18, told Fox News Digital, "The things he did to me and made me do that day was beyond horrible for a ten-year-old girl to have to go through... I want him tried as an adult for the crimes he committed against me."

L.A. County Sheriff Alex Villanueva criticized Gascon last week on the "Just the News" show for declining to prosecute more than 12,600 cases for the Los Angeles Sheriff's office alone in 2021.