Meet Our Team
Get to know the people you’ll hear from the most while supporting VenusGuard.
Hope Copeland-Leone | Campaign Manager
Hope Leone is the Campaign Manager for VenusGuard’s online presence. Hope is from Atlanta, Georgia in the United States, where she studied Psychology and Philosophy at Georgia State University.
She is a survivor herself, but so is her mother. Hope tells her powerful testimony as a way to let people know there is a deep, genuine need for a product like VenusGuard, as she herself was conceived by a r-pe. This has led her to an intense and sincere passion for the pursuit of justice, and her drive to protect the psychological sanctity of people who are offended against.
Hope’s experience in graphic design and social media marketing is the drive behind VenusGuard’s new brand look.
Hope’s intentions for VenusGuard as a brand are to be survivor focused, and to comprehensively contribute to ending s-xual v-olence. She is vehemently passionate about the pursuit of justice and human rights in all facets.
Hope’s dream is that VenusGuard gains enough notoriety so it will be available to anyone who wishes to use it, and to donate them to less privileged areas of the world. She is interested in even further developments to help aid the mission in securing justice and preventing all types of v-olent crime. Hope hopes that one day, VenusGuard can expand to programs that help even more oppressed people.
With your help, we can realize the security of justice for people all across the world, and start a domino effect in the fight against s-xual v-olence.
Vincent is the technical visionary behind VenusGuard. Mr. Leskowich has led the core engineering and innovation efforts from the earliest concepts to the current model, and will also be the lead of designing future improvements. He has over forty years of experience as an engineer specializing in product design, development, and commercialization, particularly for medical devices.
He has intentionally remained behind the scenes to ensure VenusGuard is represented by strong female voices from a survivor-informed perspective.
Vincent’s commitment to this mission stems from a deep belief in empowering women with a right to personal safety. He has helped maintain focus on VenusGuard’s compassionate, trauma-informed branding while quietly ensuring the technology itself is both safe and reliable. His effort in creating a VenusGuard that is trusted to perform properly has taken decades of meticulous research, outreach, and engineering creativity. The dedication to our product’s performance is instrumental to the core of our mission.
Vincent Leskowich | Inventor and Product Designer
Allie is a public policy career woman finishing her degree in PPE (Politics, Philosophy, and Economics) & Theology. Allie is particularly talented in her ability to write, understand, and administer complex ideas relating to political subjects and societal constructs.
Like many of us, Allie first learned about VenusGuard through hearing about it on the internet. She expressed both her fascination and disdain that there were so many obstacles getting the product to market.
Since then, Allie has done thesis writing referencing the subject of our women’s self defense sleeve. Thanks to her impeccable writing & relational skills, she was inaugurated to the team as a Public Relations Specialist.
She is deeply invested in matters of social justice, and free market solutions to the problems that oppressed people most need addressed. Allie, along with every other member of VenusGuard, is a staunch believer that women everywhere have the right to feel safe, and the right to obtain justice.
Allie’s intention for the project is that VenusGuard becomes a solution accessible to all women across the planet, regardless of their location or financial status.
Allie Jones | Public Relations Specialist
Our design team consists of experienced medical professionals who have dedicated more than 20 years to developing this protective device. Their expertise in medical product design has been shaped by extensive research and thoughtful collaboration with a wide range of specialists. We have incorporated direct input from thousands of rape survivors worldwide, along with convicted rapists, and consultations with criminologists, law enforcement officers, medical clinicians (including gynecologists, surgeons, and urologists), psychologists, trauma counselors, legal experts, polymer and materials scientists, and design professionals. There are a lot of people who have helped us get to where we are now.
All of this work has been carried out on a volunteer basis to ensure VenusGuard is safe, reliable, and truly effective. Our volunteers put themselves at great risks by promoting a product that regards this subject matter. There is a lot of support, but also a lot of backlash. Our business operations and approach have to be very delicate and deliberate.
Our digital media team is a dedicated group that focuses on online communication, platform strategy, and crowdfunding outreach. They fully support and endorse the product design team’s work while applying modern digital and political expertise to help navigate today’s media and community standards.
There are several women on our team who are helping out greatly, but they don’t want their name on this page for security reasons.
To those who have followed the project for a long time: yes, this is the same product initiative you may have seen before! The original name created significant barriers to media coverage and public acceptance, despite the urgent need for open discussion around sexual assault prevention.
Recognizing the need to reach the widest possible audience, we made a deliberate decision to pursue parallel paths. The VenusGuard brand was created specifically for markets that apply strict social media content guidelines, AI moderation, and greater sensitivity around graphic language. This allows us to reach more women effectively while still navigating local community standards and platform rules.
One of our original co-inventors, Sonnet Ehlers, continues her own important work promoting and educating about Rape-aXe in South Africa and other regions where more direct terminology is readily accepted. VenusGuard is our pivot to open ears and bypass censorship in Western cultures. She is aware of the pivot happening with VenusGuard, but she still keeps the old name in her country.
We are fully committed to our mission: delivering a discreet, effective, accessible, and reliable tool for women’s personal protection.
The time is now. VenusGuard is the modern evolution of a women’s self defense sleeve. We hope that our new branding comes from a more palatable and trauma informed angle, so we can finally make this a reality for those of us who want them.
VenusGuard Founding and Origin
