EXCLUSIVE: Transgender Serial Pedophile Denied Appeal to Have ‘Sexually Violent Predator’ Status Revoked

A trans-identified male with a long and disturbing criminal history of sexual offenses against children has had his appeal to have his status as a “sexually violent predator” revoked. Joseph Matthew Smith, who now uses the name Josie Maria Dunham or Josie Smith, is currently serving a life sentence in the state of Iowa, and has previously attempted to claim he was no longer a sexual risk due to being on feminizing hormones.

In December 2023, Smith was deemed a Sexually Violent Person. In Illinois, being deemed a Sexually Violent Person (SVP), or colloquially referred to as a “sexually violent predator” allows the state to keep an individual in custody for specialized care and treatment beyond the completion of their criminal prison sentence, if they are determined to pose a severe ongoing risk to public safety. An SVP is defined as someone with a “mental abnormality” which makes the person “more likely than not to engage in predatory acts constituting sexually violent offenses, if not confined in a secure facility.”

Smith has been involved in an appeal process seeking to have the SVP designation removed, which would enable him to be released from specialized custody. However, on July 22, the Iowa District Court for Buena Vista County rejected Smith’s appeal to have his SVP status overturned.

In September 2023, Smith completed a sex offender treatment program, and the State petitioned to have him civilly committed as a sexually violent predator in December. In April 2025, the case went to trial, with the State calling on psychologists who work with sex offenders to present oral arguments.

Throughout the court documents, Smith is referred to with feminine pronouns.

While both psychologists had diagnosed Smith with pedophilic disorder and had categorized him in the “well above average” risk category for reoffending, Dr. Luis Rosell, testifying in defense of Smith, argued that his completion of a sex offender treatment program, coupled with his use of feminizing hormones, meant that Smith was not likely to engage in sexually violent offending in the future.

However, expert witness Dr. William Schmitt disagreed, saying that Smith “lacked insight” into his sexual offense history, which increased his risk of reoffending. “You have to look at the case as a whole. And again, what have they done? What have they learned about what they’ve done? How do they talk about it? What’s their concept of what their remaining risk is going forward, and how well does that map onto the risk measures?”

Dr. Schmitt pointed out that when questioned, Smith had denied offenses that he had previously admitted to. The serial pedophile had also said, “I’ve changed. I’m not interested in kids anymore.” He also stated that he believed he was now capable of babysitting children overnight, and, “while she wouldn’t go into a bathroom with a child, she could do so safely if needed.”

The jury, siding with Dr. Schmitt’s opinion, then agreed with the State’s 2023 decision to classify Smith as an SVP. Smith appealed the decision. Counsel for Smith claimed that Dr. Schmitt’s judgement was “flawed” and “ignore[d] significant mitigating factors.”

“The State’s case, built on speculative statistics, ignores overwhelming evidence of Ms. Smith’s amenability to treatment and profound personal change, creating a substantial reasonable doubt that she meets the narrow criteria for commitment,” the appeal argued.

Despite the appeal, district court judges have upheld the sexually violent predator status, while noting that “while in prison, Smith refused sex offender treatment, was disciplined for sexual misconduct, and engaged in more than one thousand consensual sexual interactions with other inmates.”

The decision similarly recounted details of his prolific history of preying on over a dozen children, with the youngest victim being a one-year old infant.

Smith’s history of sexual abusing children began in 2011, when he was just “fourteen or fifteen years old”. While a teen in Louisiana, Smith was charged with indecent exposure after he masturbated in front of two girls under the age of seven on a school bus. Smith was placed on probation until 2012, after which time he moved to Iowa to live with his father. Smith “almost immediately” began sexually abusing his three-and-a-half year old sister, and was placed in a residential treatment facility.

At the age of sixteen, while in the care of the treatment facility, Smith voluntarily recounted details surrounding another five victims he claimed to have sexually abused in the state of Louisiana. According to the recent appeal decision, “one of those victims was an eleven-year-old girl whose genitals Smith touched under a lunchroom table… Another was Smith’s one-year-old half-sister.”

In 2013, while Smith was still at the facility, he was charged with sexually abusing a ten-year-old boy who he had been mentoring there. Smith was convicted of lascivious acts with a child for that offense and sentenced to ten years in prison as a suspended sentence. Instead of being locked up, he was placed on probation, the terms of which he went on to violate thirteen times.

In 2015, the court finally revoked Smith’s probation and imposed the prison sentence. At the time, Assistant Attorney General Andrew Schoonhoven determined that Smith suffers from “at least one mental abnormality, specifically the mental abnormality of pedophilic disorder,” which predisposes Smith to “commit sexually violent offenses to a degree constituting a menace to the health and safety of others.”

After serving less than half of his sentence, Smith was released in 2020 and placed on lifetime parole.

That year, Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller had endorsed the move that saw Smith released from custody. Despite his record of sexual offending, on January 9, the Iowa Attorney General’s office filed a motion to dismiss a petition requesting that the serial pedophile be considered a sexually violent predator.

The petition, filed in December in Buena Vista County District Court, requested a civil trial in order to determine whether Smith should be re-classified as a sexually violent predator with a high chance of re-offending.

“[Smith]’s mental abnormality makes him more likely than not to engage in predatory acts constituting sexually violent offenses if not confined in a secure facility,” the petition reads. “[Smith] should be committed to the custody of the Department of Human Services to be held in a secure facility for control, care, and treatment until such time as his mental abnormality has so changed that he is safe to be at large in the community.”

The Iowa Attorney General office’s defended the decision to dismiss the motion by citing Smith’s reduced testosterone levels as a result of hormone treatments. Attorney general spokesman Lynn Hicks stated that “an offender’s hormone levels are an important part of substantiating an offender’s likelihood of recidivism.”

Officials claimed Smith was at a lower risk of re-offending due to an altered testosterone level, and that he “no longer had the sex drive of a man.”

Smith had been receiving hormones related to his self-declared gender identity while being held at Newton Correctional Facility, where, in January 2016, he began serving an indefinite sentence after being convicted of molesting a child. In October 2017, he first expressed a desire to “get started on transgender classification” and started using female pronouns.

Hicks also claimed that an expert had determined that Smith was not at a risk of re-offending due to his gender identity. An Iowa district court judge therefore granted the motion to dismiss “in the interests of justice.”

In January of 2020, Smith was released on parole; but by October of 2021, he had already violated the terms of his strict conditions by using an unauthorized electronic device and seeking out sex. Despite the violation, Smith was not remanded to custody, and was instead allowed to continue to live in the small city of Sloan, Iowa.

In January 2022, Christine Louis, administrative law judge for Iowa Correctional Services, sentenced Smith to two more years in prison, as he had again violated the terms of his parole. During an inspection in January, Smith’s parole officer discovered child pornography on his phone which depicted boys and girls aged between five and eight years old. Smith requested leniency, but was ultimately denied.

During the April 2025 civil trial, when the jury confirmed that Smith was a sexually violent predator, he was ordered to be commited to the Cherokee Civil Commitment Unit for Sex Offenders (CCUSO) for an indefinite period based on what he determined to be a high likelihood of sexual re-offending. A pre-sentence psychological report was prepared by the State’s expert, Dr. Jeffrey Davis, a psychologist from the University of California.

Davis recommended that Smith be confined at the CCUSO. The report noted that Smith had told a state forensic psychologist he had molested as many as 15 children under the age of 13, the youngest being a 1-year-old baby. He added that he believed Smith was more likely to commit a sexual assault than 92% of male sex offenders.

There has not been even one recorded case of a female patient having been committed to the CCUSO in the unit’s 25-year history, reports the Cherokee Chronicle Times. But there have been at least three trans-identified males in the civil commitment unit. One of those patients, a man named Christian Dane Schiebel who uses the feminine name Tina Keller, told the Storm Lake Times-Pilot he was advised by his attorney that a transgender identity would increase his chances of release.

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