OAKLAND — The ordeal for a Bay Area woman started when she started talking to a man on Facebook Dating and agreed to meet him at the Coliseum BART station, according to court records.
It ended days later, at the Lake Merritt BART station, when police stopped the woman and her male companion and told her to remove her sunglasses and ski mask. When she did, they saw her horrifying injuries — broken bones in her face, both eyes bruised and swollen shut, and a missing tooth, according to police and the woman’s own testimony.
“I mouthed to the officer to help me,” the woman recalled from a witness stand at a July preliminary hearing.
Her alleged attacker, identified by police as 30-year-old Devin Budd of East Palo Alto, had spent the last several weeks barely escaping serious legal consequences in other incidents of alleged domestic violence and sexual assault. But this time, prosecutors brought a multi-count felony complaint against him, charging Budd with human trafficking, rape, sexual abuse, and assault of the woman over a six-day span last June, court records show.
Budd remains jailed without bail, and has an upcoming court date set for November. Prosecutors allege that after meeting the woman through the social media dating app, Budd subjected her to multiple sexual assaults at an Alameda hotel, forced her into sexual servitude under threat of violence, and beat her so badly that hotel staff inquired about the bloody room; Budd allegedly forced her to wear a ski mask in public to prevent attention to her obvious injuries.
The lone witness at Budd’s preliminary hearing was his alleged victim, known in court only as Jane Doe. She testified that Budd took her phone, refused to allow her to contact her mother, and would tell her things like “don’t make me kill you” when she attempted to resist sexual advances or his orders to prostitute herself in East Oakland. She said he provided condoms and instructions on how much to charge “customers,” and that she spent much of the multi-day ordeal high on cocaine, somewhat fogging her memory of what took place.
“I have never done anything like this. I’m not that type of person,” she testified. She said that when she would stand on International Boulevard, waiting for men to buy her services, Budd was always posted across the street or somewhere nearby.
“He said it was for my protection,” Doe said of Budd’s close proximity.
“Did you feel that he was able to protect you?” Deputy District Attorney Alexis Causey asked her.
“I mean, he was the only one harming me, so no, not really,” Doe replied.
During the preliminary hearing, Budd — through his attorney — accused a District Attorney inspector of attempting to influence Doe’s testimony through hand signals from the courtroom gallery. Judge Clifford Blakely said he hadn’t witnessed anything like that but he had noticed Budd “gesturing” during the woman’s testimony. He told Budd to knock it off.
“My bad,” Budd replied, according to a transcript of the hearing.
Once, near International Boulevard and 8th Avenue, Budd punched her in the face, knocking out a tooth and causing her to bleed “profusely,” she testified. A stranger she recognized by his outfit as a member of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club offered to help her, but she refused the gesture because Budd was still there, watching, she said.
Related Articles
Three arrested on suspicion of running sex trafficking operation out of San Jose motel
Feds drop human labor trafficking probe into California Christian college
Supreme Court rejects appeal from Ghislaine Maxwell, imprisoned former girlfriend of Jeffrey Epstein
Man sentenced for trafficking 13-year-old girl from LA to Oakland
Woman was lured to East Bay to be ‘OnlyFans’ model, sexually assaulted upon arrival, police say
After BART police discovered her injuries at the Lake Merritt station, Doe was hospitalized and Budd was arrested. He was initially charged with torture — a legal term defined as hurting another person simply to inflict pain — but prosecutors dropped that charge at the hearing, according to court records.
For the past several weeks before these alleged crimes, Budd had been accused of sexual assault, domestic violence, or both, multiple times. Police arrested him in mid-April for allegedly beating, choking, and sexually assaulting a woman in Fremont, but the case was dropped two weeks later due to a “lack of evidence,” court records show. Then, on May 4, Budd was accused of attacking a woman who reported that he “started punching her in the face an unknown number of times,” a probation report says. Once again, the case was dismissed, this time when the alleged victim failed to follow up on the initial report, according to court records.
A probation report on Budd says that he was given a four-year prison sentence in 2022 for domestic violence in Sacramento, but was released in October 2024. In 2018, he reported being shot in the spine outside a girlfriend’s house, according to court records.
Budd is also a suspect — but hasn’t been charged — in a Livermore sexual assault of a developmentally disabled woman. In that case, police allege that he instructed the woman to steal items from a local Target, then later “choked her with his hands” during a sexual assault. Budd’s DNA — entered into the system due to a conviction of “gassing” a corrections officer in Lake County — was matched to the woman’s rape test kid, according to court records, but no charges have been filed.