A lawsuit filed last month accuses Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds’s (R) staff of approving sexual arousal experiments on mentally disabled residents at a state-run facility.
The whistleblower lawsuit filed by six former employees at the Glenwood Resource Center alleges that Reynolds’s office and an assistant attorney general approved of the study, the Iowa Capital Dispatch reported on Wednesday.
The former employees initially filed a lawsuit in federal court in February, accusing former Glenwood superintendent Jerry Rea of using more than 200 patients with intellectual disabilities as “guinea pigs” in research on sexual arousal. Rea was fired from Glenwood last year after working at the center since 2017.
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But the suit was dismissed in October based on jurisdictional issues, prompting the lawsuit to be refiled in Mills County District Court in November.
The November lawsuit raised the allegations about Reynolds’s staff and the assistant attorney general backing the study for the first time, according to the Dispatch.
The plaintiffs, who said they were wrongfully retaliated against for raising concerns about the study, cite the Glenwood staff minutes from a meeting in 2018, which says the study was “discussed and approved by the highest level of Iowa state government.”
The lawsuit claims the former director of the Iowa Department of Human Services, Jerry Foxhoven, discussed and approved the research with one of his top administrators at the time, Rick Shults. The two then made plans to present the program to the governor’s office, according to the lawsuit.
“On information and belief, the governor’s office approved defendants’ illicit research programs in 2018,” the plaintiffs’ petition alleges.
Pat Garrett, a spokesperson for the governor, did not return The Hill’s request for comment about the new allegations.
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The complaint asserts that in 2018 Rea said he had “received a commitment from the Iowa special assistant attorney general to begin work” and the official was “quite excited about the prospects” for work involving “in-vivo assessments of sexual arousal,” according to the Dispatch.
Lynn Hicks, a spokesperson for the Iowa Attorney General’s Office, declined to comment to The Hill.
The plaintiffs include a former interim superintendent, two former physicians at Glenwood, a former nurse practitioner, a former treatment program administrator and the center’s former director of quality management. They are seeking $10 million in damages for allegedly being retaliated against.
The suit lists the Iowa Department of Human Services that runs Glenwood, Foxhoven, Shults, a former medical director and Rea as defendants.
The lawsuits came after the Justice Department launched an investigation into the sexual arousal research at Glenwood last year.
The complaint alleges that the study was conducted without resident approval, leading the researchers to “later scramble to get consent on behalf of the patients who had been experimented on, after receiving notice of a new Department of Justice investigation,” according to the Dispatch.
The former employees also allege that Rea changed some of the residents’ medication for the study, leading some of them to have seizures.
The Iowa Board of Medicine and the Iowa Department of Public Safety’s Division of Criminal Investigation are also investigating the case.