Los Angeles DA faces backlash after light sentence for child molester

Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón has appeared to take a step back on his soft-on-crime stances recently, after Fox News revealed jailhouse tapes showing that a transgender woman sentenced as a juvenile for sexual assaulting a minor in a bathroom bragged about the light sentence she received.

On Monday, Fox News revealed that it had obtained explicit Los Angeles jailhouse recordings of convicted child molester Hannah Tubbs, who had been sentenced to jail for two years for molesting a 10-year-old girl in a bathroom. It happened when Tubbs was 17 in 2014, but she wasn't sentenced until 9 years later.

In the tapes, she had boasted that "nothing would happen to her after she pleaded guilty due to Democrat District Attorney George Gascon's policies and laughed that she won't have to go back to prison or register as a sex offender. She also made explicit remarks about the victim that are unfit to print," Fox News reported.

"I'm gonna plead out to it, plead guilty," Tubbs says in one recording. "They’re gonna stick me on probation, and it’s gonna be dropped, it’s gonna be done, I won’t have to register, won’t have to do nothing."

According to the Los Angeles Times, Gascón had very recently backed his policy of not trying juveniles as adults, saying he thought "the Tubbs case still does not belong in adult court."

But this stance had changed on Sunday, telling the outlet that his approach was incorrect: "The complex issues and facts of her particular case were unusual, and I should have treated them that way."

The change of hearty came after Gascón's staff learned that Fox News was preparing to publish these tapes.

"It's unfortunate that she gamed the system," Gascón told the Los Angeles Times. "If I had to do it all over again, she would be prosecuted in adult court."

Critics say though that his remorse over the decision to try Tubbs as a juvenile are merely a public stunt against recall efforts that are growing against him.

"He knew Fox was going to run with those tapes. It was damage-control time," Eric Siddall, a deputy district attorney, told the Times.

Tubb's victim told Fox News that Gascón's handling of the case has been "insulting" and "unfair" to her.

"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," she said. "I want him tried as an adult for the crimes he committed against me."

She added that the sentence Tubbs was handed offered her "no true justice."

"I’ve also heard that my attacker goes by she/them pronouns now," she added. "I see it also unfair to try him as a woman as well, seeing how he clearly didn’t act like one on January 1st of 2014."

Following the revealing of the tapes, as well as over a year of declining safety in the city, a large portion of Los Angeles prosecutors voted in support of recalling the District Attorney.

According to Fox News, of the 83.3 percent of prosecutors who participated in the recall supporting vote, 97.9 percent voted in favor of a recall.

If the recall petition receives enough signatures to go to a vote, this would be the second time that the district attorney has faced a recall.

"It's been one year of Gascon's social experiment," Siddall, who is also the vice president of os Angeles Association of Deputy District Attorneys (LAADDA), told Fox News. "I think after that one year, people have had time to evaluate whether this is working or not working. I think most people who actually live in Los Angeles [and] understand what's going on in Los Angeles, including the political leadership here in LA, feel that this has been a miserable failure."