One recent evening at the Maine Correctional Center in Windham, Jennifer Albert awoke to a disturbing sight.

In the dimness of the six-person cell, an inmate she recognized as Andrea Balcer was pulling another inmate from her bed.

“She had the woman’s legs hanging over the bed and she was, like, kissing her thighs,” Albert said. “She was trying to get her arms around her so she could pull her from the bed.”

Albert believes it was not consensual.

She and several other inmates said in letters and calls from the prison that this was not the first time Balcer forced herself on other women at the facility. Several of them reported being groped by Balcer. Others said they were cornered in the bathrooms and forcibly kissed. A few said they were frequently propositioned by Balcer, who is transgender, with offers to impregnate them.

For months, the women said, Balcer has terrorized them, and attempts to address the behavior have been largely ignored.

According to prison records, Balcer is 6-foot-1 and 310 pounds. Now 27 years old, she was 17 when she was charged in 2016 with killing her parents and the family dog in Winthrop.

Known then to most as “Andrew,” Balcer around that time began identifying as a woman, following what she said was a lifelong gender identity crisis.

Balcer was convicted in 2018 and sent to the Maine State Prison. But due in part to a 2021 law that requires Maine prisons to accept “the consistent gender identity of transgender inmates,” she was later transferred to the women’s pod at the correctional center in Windham.

According to several inmates, at least six women — and perhaps as many as 11 — have filed complaints against Balcer since she arrived, but they said it has gotten them nowhere.

Occasionally, Balcer is segregated while prison officials investigate as part of the Prison Rape Elimination Act, the women said. PREA is a federal law enacted in 2003 to establish a zero-tolerance standard for sexual assault and rape in all U.S. confinement facilities.

Albert said that when she first got to Windham, Balcer was segregated as part of a PREA investigation. But soon after, she was placed back into the general population and in a cell with Albert. The women said that has happened several times over the past year.

Prison officials have refused to discuss the allegations against Balcer, citing privacy regulations. Attempts to reach Balcer for an interview were unsuccessful.

“I’ve complained at least four times,” Albert said. “I’ve gone in with the other four girls all in one stand and we brought it up to the men at the desk, who then forwarded it to the sergeant. But nothing really became of it.”

‘SHE PUT ME THROUGH HELL’

The situation came to a boil at the start of the year when one inmate, 45-year-old Katie Mountain, refused to go back into a cell with Balcer after what she described as ongoing sexual harassment.

“She is a terrorizer, honestly,” Mountain said. “She’s put me through hell.”

Mountain has a long list of complaints against Balcer, which she compiled in a file along with other paperwork chronicling her experiences.

“She’s shoved me against the bathroom wall and tried to force me to kiss her,” Mountain said. “I would wake up to her just staring at me and then making comments like: ‘If you don’t wake up, it’s because I smothered you with a pillow.'”

For Mountain, who’s incarcerated for violating probation and convictions for theft and burglary, sharing a cell with Balcer became just too much.

“I went to my sergeant six times and my unit manager twice to get moved out,” she said. “It took me refusing to go back in with her to get moved out of that room.”

Mountain said she was sent to segregation for four days as a result, losing some of her inmate privileges, including the chance for future home confinement or early release.

It was worth it just to get away from Balcer, she said.

Her husband, Matt Roy, agrees.

Roy, who lives in Gorham, said Mountain is “one of the toughest people I know. She’s 4-foot-nothing, weighs 140 pounds, but that woman can brawl. When she told me she was scared of (Balcer), that really hit, because I’ve never heard her say she was scared of any man.”

Roy keeps himself busy trying to get the prison to do something about Balcer’s alleged behavior.

He’s called prison officials. He’s contacted his state representative. He said he would go all the way to the White House if necessary.

“It’s insane,” Roy said. “It’s really stressful and it’s pissing me off. If nobody’s going to do anything about it, I’ll do something about it.”

Talk of contacting the White House isn’t as far-fetched as it may sound.

In April 2025, the Trump administration began pulling federal funding from state prison systems that house transgender inmates in facilities aligning with their gender identity. When that move was announced, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi cited Andrea Balcer’s case specifically, referring to Balcer as a man.

“So they were letting him be housed in a female prison,” Bondi said. “No longer. We will pull your funding. We will protect women in sports. We will protect women in prison. We will protect women throughout this country.”

Because of the 2021 legislation, Maine law requires prison placement based on gender identity.

“Housing placements and search practices must be consistent with the person’s consistently held gender identity except when such placement or search would present significant management or security problems to the jail or threaten the health and safety of the person,” the law reads.

Destie Hohman Sprague, who once helped train corrections officers during her work for the Maine Coalition Against Sexual Assault and is the executive director of the Maine Women’s Lobby, pointed to data that shows the rate of sexual violence over the lifetime of incarcerated women is much higher than it is for the general population.

“This is particularly true for trans women,” Sprague said.

Although she could not speak to the specifics of Balcer’s situation, she said a trans woman may be placed in a women’s prison because the chance of that person being a target of sexual assault in a men’s prison would be much higher.

“This is a sexual violence problem; a safety and security problem,” Sprague said of the situation described by the women at the prison in Windham. “This is not a trans problem.”

‘WE’RE ALL TRAUMATIZED’

According to court records, on Halloween 2016, Balcer used a hunting knife to stab her mother nine times in the back. When her father came to investigate the screams, according to trial testimony, Balcer stabbed him, too.

Balcer then killed the family Chihuahua, Lily, to quiet the dog’s barking, court records said. The only one in the house Balcer spared was her older brother, who fled the home.

She called 911 and reportedly laughed when she described her crimes to police, trial records state.

Before pleading guilty in September 2018, Balcer had claimed that she killed her parents because they failed to support her gender identity change. That claim was disputed by Balcer’s brother, who said that their parents would have rallied to Balcer’s side if she were truly having a gender identity crisis.

Balcer was sentenced to 40 years in prison after pleading guilty to two counts of murder.

It was not clear when Balcer was moved from the Maine State Prison at Warren to the women’s section at Windham. The inmates there said Balcer has been with them for at least a year.

As far as Megan Reeves is concerned, she was forced to share a cell with a man. Unlike others, she doesn’t refer to Balcer as a woman.

“He’s very big; very intimidating,” she said. “He is just very vulgar and very, very perverted.”

Reeves, who is 36, said she was forced to share a room with Balcer and during that time, Reeves said, Balcer would make “very crude and perverted” propositions.

“He’s done this to a lot of girls at this point and we’re all traumatized,” Reeves said. “A lot of us were scared. We even reported to mental health that we felt like we needed something to arm ourselves with because the staff kept putting it off and not seeing the danger, the severity of the situation.”

In addition to witnessing Balcer touch another inmate inappropriately, Albert, 45, said she was targeted as well.

“(Balcer) pulled my body right up against hers, like as tight as she possibly could,” said Albert, who is in prison for drug trafficking and possession. “She slid me down so that I could feel her … you know, so I could feel that it was a man.”

One woman, who feared reprisals and agreed to speak on the condition that her name not be published, said that Balcer once pushed her up against a bathroom wall and asked her to touch Balcer’s breasts.

She said she complained, but Balcer was not removed from her cell.

Another said Balcer repeatedly tried to kiss her while making sexual remarks about her body.

“I talked to the unit manager and was told, ‘Well, I don’t make the laws in Maine so there’s nothing I can do about it,'” said Mountain. “But to me, when it gets to a point where somebody has assaulted seven women, that shows that the person needs to be moved.”

Mountain’s full log of complaints against Balcer includes roughly a dozen grievances filed with the prison along with requests to speak to the warden. She also implored her unit manager to contact the Department of Justice for clarity about what could be done about Balcer’s behavior.

“And this place just doesn’t seem to care,” said Mountain. “Like, they’re so nonchalant about it.”

WAITING FOR RELEASE

Maine Department of Corrections spokesperson Jill O’Brien said she could not talk about Balcer’s case because of privacy rules or answer questions about the number of complaints filed or whether the prison has taken any disciplinary action.

But she described what steps the prison might take in similar situations.

“Allegations of physical violence by any resident would be investigated,” O’Brien said, and “may be cause for discipline, and may be referred for criminal prosecution.”

O’Brien provided a copy of the policies that govern how accusations of sexual misconduct are handled within the prisons. The most relevant are the PREA policies that outline “the right of prisoners, residents and persons under supervision of the department in the community to be free from sexual misconduct and sexual harassment.”

The Maine Department of Corrections is also required to have a statewide PREA coordinator and a compliance manager at each facility.

While he waits for Mountain, his wife, to be released, Roy said he spends every day in stress and frustration.

He’s now searching for a lawyer to help navigate the red tape, and visits with his wife several times a week.

The situation with Balcer, Roy said, bothers him on a moral level.

“My wife is in there,” he said. “But even if she wasn’t, I’d still have a problem with all this.”

Roy said he’s heard there are other transgender inmates at Windham. Efforts to find out how many were unsuccessful, but the inmates said there are several.

Roy doesn’t have a problem with any of the others. “As long as they’re not preying on the other inmates,” he said, “I don’t give a damn.”

Mountain could be released as early as June 5. She has been in the prison since November and said her time there has been twice as difficult as expected because of her experiences with Balcer.

“I knew it wouldn’t be a walk in the park coming here,” Mountain said. “It’s prison. I get that. But I did not think that they’d put me in with a man. With a predator.”