Jenna Ryan served 60 days in a minimum-securityprison for participating in the Capitol riot.- She said she was denied "basic human needs" like a phone and daylight, and slammed COVID-19 rules.
Two prison consultants who worked with Capitol rioter Jenna Ryan slammed her for complaining about the 60-day sentence she served at a minimum-security facility, saying she was "hurting people in real prisons."
The Texas realtor pleaded guilty to a single federal misdemeanor charge of parading on Capitol grounds on January 6, 2021. She started a 60-day sentence at Federal Prison Camp Bryan in Brazos County, Texas, in mid-December, and was released on February 17, 2022.
Since then, she has called prison a "third world country" and said she was denied "basic human needs like sunshine, recreation, phone calls, visits" due to COVID-19 restrictions. She said it was a way for officials to "sadistically abuse all the inmates," without giving further details.
Ryan, who said before her sentence that she planned to detox and lose weight during her sentence, also said she ate "a lot of bologna sandwiches."
She told Insider ahead of her sentence last year that she was learning prison slang and was getting help from prison consultants. But in an interview with KTCK-AM radio in Dallas last month, she said prison wasn't "anything like the YouTube people said," referring to the consultants.
Two federal prison consultants she spoke to before her sentence, Dan Wise and Holli Coulman, reacted to her criticism with bemusement and anger. Insider has reviewed email and text correspondence between Ryan and the two consultants to confirm they briefly worked together.
Wise, who runs a prison consulting YouTube channel, told Insider that Ryan first reached out to him in November but that he broke contact with her in early December after he realized she wasn't taking "any accountability for her actions."
Now, he said, "she's sitting here talking about how she was in a 'third world' prison and it just takes away from all the people that are actually going through something in higher-security prisons."
"And now the spotlight is on this woman who had to deal with 60 days of incarceration because she stormed the Capitol and made [the insurrection] sound like it wasn't a big deal," he added.
Wise said Ryan's complaints about her sentence were "hurting the people that are in real prisons, who are really suffering."
"The worst thing about her stay in prison was that she had to eat bologna sandwiches," Wise added.
Coulman, who first started speaking to Ryan in October, also told Insider that her complaints were "hurtful to incarcerated people."
"She's going to make it so much harder for anybody now that actually deals with anything rough in the prison system," she said.
When asked about the COVID-19 restrictions Ryan mentioned, Wise said many prisons had to do what they can to "keep the spread of the virus down."
"I 100% explained it would be drastically different and that she should expect severe downtime," he added.
Coulman said she had warned Ryan that prison regulations might be different due to COVID-19, but that Ryan apparently responded by calling her an "alarmist."
"We passed her around in the consulting world and she got a bunch of advice. Yet she didn't listen," Coulman said.
In an email to Insider, Ryan confirmed having worked with Coulman and Wise and accused them of "lying about me to the press" and trying to get their "15 minutes of fame." She also doubled down on her claim that she was "tortured" in prison.
She said the duo's comments "will not hurt" her.
"The fact that they warned me and I dismissed them — what was I supposed to do? I couldn't stop the fact that I would be in quarantine," she said. "I acknowledged that it would be horrible. Did they want me to write a song about how their warnings were true? Ridiculous!"
After her release, Ryan said she plans on spending her newfound freedom selling real estate and launching her own YouTube show, which will focus on "prison reform."