An East Palo Alto man with multiple violent charges on his record, several of which involved assaults on women, allegedly met a woman on Facebook Dating in June and proceeded to kidnap, rape, brutalize, and sexually traffic her over a six-day span.
The woman’s extended nightmare of an encounter began around June 7, 2025, when she agreed to meet up with a man, identified as 30-year-old Devin Budd of East Palo Alto, at the Coliseum BART station in Oakland. As Bay Area News Group reports, via court records, Budd allegedly took the woman to a hotel in Alameda where she says he sexually assaulted her multiple times and beat her severely — which led to hotel staff inquiring about the bloody state of the room.
Budd then allegedly forced her into sex work, after getting her high on cocaine, making her stand on a corner on International Boulevard seeking johns, while he watched.
According to the woman’s testimony, per Bay Area News Group, Budd took her cellphone from her, and threatened her with further harm, saying, “don’t make me kill you” if she put up resistence to his demands.
In court testimony, the woman, identified only as Jane Doe in documents, told prosecutors, “I have never done anything like this. I’m not that type of person,” referring to the sex trafficking.
When asked by a deputy district attorney why Budd was watching her while she attempted to sell herself on International Boulevard, she reportedly replied, “He said it was for my protection.” And when asked if she felt protected, she told the court, “I mean, he was the only one harming me, so no, not really.”
It would be nearly a week after she met Budd that Oakland police officers approached her and the suspect at the Lake Merritt BART station, noting that she was wearing both sunglasses and a ski mask. Officers asked her to remove the glasses and mask, and saw that her eyes were bruised and swollen shut, she was missing a tooth, and had broken bones in her face.
Doe told the court that she mouthed to one of the officers to help her, and it was after this that Budd was arrested. He now faces multiple felony counts including rape, battery, human trafficking, and violation of parole.
It turns out that Budd had been arrested in Fremont just a month earlier, and intial charges included false imprisonment by violence, inflicting corporal injury on a spouse or cohabitant, and sexual penetration with foreign object by force or violence. Those charges were later dismissed when the victim failed to appear in court, as Bay Area News Group reports. A month before that, in April, Budd was accused of beating and sexually assaulting a woman in Fremont — it’s unclear if this was the same or a different victim — and those charges were reportedly dismissed for lack of evidence.
Budd had also spent time in state prison for domestic violence in Sacramento County, for which he was released early in 2024.
And, Bay Area News Group notes that Budd is a suspect in the sexual assault of a developmentally disabled woman in Livermore, and while the woman’s rape kit was matched to him, no charges have been filed in that case.
Budd’s lengthy rap sheet includes multiple other arrests, beginning with a robbery arrest in Alameda County in 2013, when he would have been around 18 years old.
He remains in custody without bail, and a court date in the Jane Doe case is set for next month.
Top image of Lake Merritt BART station via Wikimedia