GLENWOOD, Iowa - Six former Glenwood Resource Center employees are suing the Department of Human Services (DHS), along with former DHS Director Jerry Foxhoven and former Glenwood superintendent Jerry Rea. Several others Glenwood employees and state employees are also named in the lawsuit.
The suit claims Rea and others tried to transform Glenwood from a patient care facility into a research center focused on medical experimentation, notably "sexual arousal research."
Glenwood Resource Center houses roughly 200 intellectually and physically disabled people.
The lawsuit claims that public money was used to purchase items such as silk boxer shorts, sexual lubricants, pornographic images, and a dedicated computer for the research.
It says that sexual arousal experiments were performed on residents without their consent. The lawsuit also accuses Rea of silencing and punishing employees who tried to stop experiments on patients.
Rea is not a medical doctor. The suit describes him as a child psychologist from Kansas who led other Gelnwood personnel on a scheme to "creatively destroy" the healthcare and supervisory system in place at the facility. It claims patients were used as "guinea pigs" in research.
The U.S. Department of Justice launched an investigation of Glenwood last fall over allegations of human experimentation.
Read the lawsuit as filed here.