Jenn Budd, a former Border Patrol agent turned whistleblower who was raped while training at its academy in the 1990s, has been a fierce critic of abuses committed by the agency and its officers. That outspokenness has continued to make her a target, like when the agency’s former chief made a rape threat to her over social media this past September. Rodney Scott was installed by the previous administration, and this past June he was dismissed by President Joe Biden.

Rightfully horrified, Budd went to court to seek a restraining order against Scott. There, Scott played dumb about his remark. “That assertion met with disbelief from San Diego Superior Court Judge Robert Longstreth, who described Scott’s comment as a ‘classic’ rape threat,” VICE reports.

VICE reported that Scott made the threat from his personal Twitter account after Budd challenged him on border agents’ abuses against Haitian migrants in Del Rio, Texas, this past fall. “So what was for breakfast?” Scott replied to Budd, and referenced the rape allegations she’d made. “I investigated all your allegations. Not a crumb of evidence could be found to support any of them. But I did find out a lot about you. Lean back, close your eyes and just enjoy the show.” 

Screenshot of Scott’s tweet to Budd

But in court, Scott would say he “in any way, shape, or form” wasn’t making any threat, claiming he was referring to Budd’s “active imagination.” I mean, that is some fucking bullshit. “Maybe you were the one person in the world that’s never heard of ‘lie back and take it’ as referring to rape,” the report said Longstreth told him during the hearing.

VICE reports that in addition to seeking a restraining order, Budd had asked for a public apology and deletion of the tweet. But despite Scott’s very public threat and the court’s acknowledgement, it did not side with her. “The judge said he found Scott’s account of his Twitter message ‘hard to believe,’ but that his comments don’t rise to the level of a ‘credible threat of violence.’” 

But Scott in fact has a long history of disturbing behavior, including “a history of refusing to cooperate with investigating agencies on cases involving migrant deaths & Border Patrol agents,” the Southern Border Communities Coalition tweeted this past summer. As previously noted, Scott was named as a participant in the cover-up around the brutal 2010 killing of Anastasio Hernandez Rojas, a father of five U.S. citizen kids, at the hands of agents.

After being elevated to Border Patrol chief under the previous administration, Scott also shamelessly promoted a taxpayer-funded propaganda video laden with false anti-immigrant statistics and fictional, racist imagery. “I encourage all reporters to ask Border Patrol about its promotion of false statistics in this video,” journalist Jean Guerrero tweeted at the time. “Despite my fact-check, they doubled down and re-uploaded this. Check the stories they cite yourself. The numbers are fabricated.” 

But Scott still went into court last month to insist he didn’t really say what he said. And not just to play dumb, but still somehow insist that Budd, a sexual assault survivor, was the one imagining it all. 

“When I came out publicly about being raped in the academy by a classmate & the coverup, I did not do it to seek justice for myself,” she tweeted this week. “That is not possible for me. I did it bc I know how many of you are victims of #BorderPatrolRapeCulture. I am not the same 24 year old who desperately needed that job. I will not accept threats of any kind, especially a rape threat from an agent, from the former Chief of the Border Patrol. There is a huge rape culture w/in the agency & this demonstrates how high up it goes.”

Just this past October, a House committee revealed that just two agents were fired for their participation in a large Facebook group where posters shared violent, racist, and just plain vile content. One post depicted a doctored image of New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a frequent target of racist trolls both in and out of Congress, being sexually assaulted by the previous president. But maybe it’s all just our “active imagination,” Rodney Scott might respond.