At least 20 women being held in a San Francisco jail say a group of sheriff’s deputies earlier this year ordered women to strip down in front of each other while the deputies laughed and filmed them with their body-worn cameras.
“I’m still having nightmares about it,” said one of the women, who Mission Local agreed to keep anonymous after they expressed fears of retaliation. Many of the women who reported being searched are still incarcerated, their attorneys said.
Late this afternoon, 17 women filed a claim with the city, alleging that the deputies violated multiple laws and policies. It is the first step toward filing a state or federal lawsuit, their attorney Elizabeth Bertolino said.
Seven of the women involved in the claim were allegedly subjected to searches, and the other 10 were allegedly forced to watch. Attorneys and formerly incarcerated people Mission Local spoke to, however, said that about 20 women in total had been forced to undress while others watched.
“This Claim arises from a mass, unlawful and degrading strip search of women housed in the B-Pod of the San Francisco County Jail on May 22, 2025, and from continuing harassment, intimidation and gender-based violence by deputies in the days and weeks that follows,” Bertolino wrote in the claim.
Multiple women “were forced to strip in an open setting, were subjected to visual body-cavity searches, and were required either to undergo or to witness these invasive searches while male deputies, some armed with weapons, stood by watching, laughing and making comments,” the claim said.
“Deputies activated body worn cameras during the strip searches, despite a specific policy prohibiting that practice, and a supervising sergeant taunted the women that their nude videos could be posted online,” the claim continued.
If the allegations are substantiated and damages awarded, the payout could be hefty. Similar past cases include a 2019 $53 million settlement paid by Los Angeles County to a group of women who reported being strip-searched in front of male deputies.
The sheriff’s department is looking into the allegations, and could not comment on specific details, said spokesperson Tara Moriarty.
‘Mass strip search’
The “mass strip search” at the San Francisco jail at 425 Seventh St. allegedly occurred around 4:45 p.m. on May 22, according to a separate complaint sent in September to the sheriff’s department and San Francisco Department of Police Accountability by assistant chief public defender Angela Chan.
At least 18 of the women present were clients of the public defender’s office, Chan wrote. At least seven of those women were also part of today’s claim.
In separate interviews with Mission Local and with attorneys, multiple women said that at least 10 deputies, mostly men, came “rushing into” their unit — a large, semi-circular room with bunk beds lining the edges — without warning or explanation.
“They started screaming,” said Ari, one of the women Mission Local interviewed, whose name has been changed to protect her privacy.
They told the women: “Everybody get off your bunks right now,” she recalled. Ari was told to sit at a table and not ask questions, she said. “Obey,” she remembered deputies saying.
At least 11 of the women told attorneys that the deputies wore vests and face shields, and were carrying large weapons with scopes. This, they said, was not typical. They appeared to be dressed in “assault gear,” said one woman in an interview with Mission Local.
According to the women’s claim and Mission Local’s interviews, deputies handcuffed the women one by one and brought them to either a conference room or bathroom on the mezzanine level of their holding cell, which was visible from where the rest of the women waited below.
The San Francisco sheriff’s Custody and Court Operations Policy manual states that deputies must “take all reasonable measures to minimize the extent to which strip searches intrude on an individual’s privacy.”
Strip searches are to be “conducted in a private location.” Male staff are not to be present while women are subjected to a strip search, except in emergencies. People strip-searched must be provided a clean set of clothing.
The complaint filed by Chan, the public defender, describes a situation of “zero privacy; Women waiting to be searched, or who had already been searched, could see the current nude subject of a search being told to ‘bend over, spread cheeks and cough.’”
“Women were required to spread or manipulate body parts,” today’s claim reiterated. “They lifted our arms, under our breasts,” said one person Mission Local interviewed, who asked to go by Maggie. Maggie remembered some of the deputies “giggling and laughing.”
“It was out there in the open and it was just very uncomfortable,” said Ari, who described being searched in a shower room. “There were several of us taking off our clothes at the same time.”
One woman told Bertolino that she has mobility issues and had to tell deputies “I physically cannot bend lower,” the attorney said.
Two women told Bertolino they were on their menstrual cycle. One said she was instructed to take off a menstrual product during the search and place it on a partition next to her.
“It was just very shameful, because there were male deputies there,” Ari said.
Eleven women who are part of the claim, including two interviewed by Mission Local, said they saw deputies wearing body-worn cameras with blinking green lights, indicating that they were recording the entire time.
The sheriff’s Administration and Field Operations Policy manual states that deputies must turn off their body-worn cameras during strip searches.
“One deputy, Sgt. Ibarra, reportedly taunted the women that the videos would be posted online, but they’d have to blur their genitalia,” Chan wrote in the public defender’s complaint. The allegations against Ibarra were echoed in today’s claim.
None of the women Bertolino, the public defender’s office, or Mission Local talked to knew whether the deputies had found any contraband during their alleged May search. It is unclear why the alleged search occurred.
‘The most violating and terrifying experience’
One woman interviewed by Mission Local described being taken to a conference room and told to sit facing the wall, her hands still cuffed behind her.
“I just thought, ‘okay, this guy is going to shoot me in the back of the head,’” the woman said. She had been born in a country where it was not uncommon for women to be taken to jail and never heard from again. She began worrying she was going to “disappear.”
After some time, she said a male deputy grabbed her by the shoulder and pulled her up so hard she felt it had been dislocated.
“I told him, ‘you’re being really rough with me,’” she recalled.
In the shower room, the same woman said she started crying as she undressed. It was, she said, “the most violating and terrifying experience” she’d ever had.
As she was searched, she said she could see deputies watching her through a screen placed in front of the bathroom door.
Harassment was allegedly ongoing
Multiple women filed written grievances about the May search, today’s claim said. The Sheriff’s Office subsequently investigated these grievances, a source close to the jail said.
The department allegedly asked one supervisor to turn over his body-worn camera footage, and found that he had violated policy. Line deputies, the source said, were found not to be at fault.
“Through grievances, internal reports, or other incidents,” the sheriff’s department knew the women “were being mistreated, yet failed to act reasonably to retrain, discipline or remove those deputies,” today’s claim said.
Meanwhile, women told Bertolino that deputies’ misconduct continued.
According to the claim, in the aftermath of the May search, women housed in the unit “continued to suffer ongoing harassment and intimidation, including sexual comments about their breasts and buttocks and, in at least one instance, physical groping of a detainee’s breast by a deputy.”
“This conduct constituted sexual battery and gender-based violence,” the claim read.
Bertolino said one of her clients had requested that the body-worn camera footage of her strip search be removed from the sheriff’s database. Her client said that she received confirmation from the sheriff’s department that it had been taken down.
Privacy ‘ripped’ away
This is not the first time the sheriff’s strip search policies have been scrutinized.
In September, attorneys, jail staff, and incarcerated people complained that deputies had begun routinely strip-searching people in custody after they met with their attorneys, deterring them from seeking counsel.
In October, that practice was modified after Mission Local reported on lawyers’ concerns that it violated their clients’ constitutional rights.
Ari said that groups of women were strip-searched five other times during the approximately 18 months she spent in San Francisco County Jail. Several of the searches that she had witnessed, she said, involved deputies forcing women to sit on the floor and wait for hours before and after getting undressed.
Deputies often threatened women in the jail with strip searches when they were “behaving bad,” Ari said, because “they know it’s hard for us to go through those searches.”
Bertolino’s 17 clients could seek damages on the grounds that the sheriff’s department enabled negligence, dangerous conditions, and intimidation. The women may also be eligible for compensation under the California Gender Based Violence Act.
It’s also possible that the group could file a federal lawsuit over unconstitutional policies, which could lead to a class-action lawsuit or punitive damages against individual deputies.
The claim isn’t about compensation, though, Bertolino said. Her clients have told her that accountability is more important than money.
“We felt like our privacy was literally ripped out from us, not to mention our self-respect,” one of Bertolino’s clients told Mission Local. “It was a very dehumanizing experience, and it’s not one that I will easily forget.”
Following publication, two more women filed a claim with the city. As of Dec. 1, 2025, Elizabeth Bertolino represents 19 clients.
This is great investigative reporting. I hope this has reach so that it can spur changes.
I worked at the Sheriff Department/office for many years and under no circumstances was this operation done by policy and procedures that were in place when I retired in 12/2021. I can not imagine staff behaving so poorly but there has always been an element of the good ol boys mentality. And When I stood up for a wrong it was turned completely around and made very clear I was not considered a team player and the “boys” reported me and they came up with a very different story. It can be a very toxic place to work.
Has the Sheriff hired the IDF for jail guards? Probably not, The IDF would have raped the women, starved them, and then posted it all on Facebook. And let’s be calm and rational, this is not as bad as Abu Ghraib. But the women may file a federal lawsuit! That should help. Maybe the women will get deported to San Salvador where prison conditions are pristine. Luckily the Sheriff is “looking into it” so nothing to worry about.
Thank you for your reporting.
And you know who will pay the costs of the lawsuit? Taxpayers. Some of the officers may be disciplined, but some won’t, and eventually many of them will be right back in positions of authority. Their pay will not be docked, and their pensions will not be at risk. The department heads who encouraged this kind of behavior, or who looked the other way, will not see their department budgets reduced.
Imagine if that were not the case.
How much more proof do you need that police in even the most liberal American cities are gangs of Republican thugs?
You’d think they were trained by the IDF.
What are the hiring guidelines of the SF Police Dept’s hiring guidelines. This large group of kitted out officers exhibit a high level of stupidity.
Sheriffs Dept. Not SFPD.