Male guards at San Francisco’s jailhouse for women have repeatedly strip-searched inmates over the past year, probing their breasts and genitals without any legal justification or evidence of wrongdoing, 20 women are charging in a lawsuit. The suit seeks damages and a court injunction against future searches.
Starting a year ago Friday, officers under the supervision of Sheriff Paul Miyamoto have subjected female inmates to “suspicionless, cross-gender strip and visual body cavity searches,” in a “coercive weaponization of strip searches as punishment and retaliation,” lawyers for the women said in a suit filed Friday in U.S. District Court.
They said male deputies were deliberately positioned “to observe women’s naked bodies during searches,” and the searches were recorded with body cameras “for no legitimate security purpose.”
Clara Bacmerster, right, of San Francisco, and others write notes not survivors on a large poster board during a vigil to honor survivors of an alleged mass strip search at the San Francisco County Jail on May 22, 2026, in San Francisco. (Lea Suzuki/S.F. Chronicle)
A sheriff’s deputy who searched one woman last May “subsequently made repeated unsolicited references to her sexual anatomy, asked her about her sex toys, groped her breast, and made degrading remarks about the appearance of her body,” the suit said. When another woman gave birth in September, the lawyers said, officers went to her hospital room before and after birth and while she was breast-feeding and refused to leave.
They said women who complained about the searches or encouraged others to speak up were placed in solitary confinement. And they said the male sergeant in charge of the operation told women in November that the searches would continue “if they kept disrespecting deputies and not listening to what they told them to do.”
The suit was filed by 20 women, who have been jailed while awaiting trial, on behalf of all women held since May 2025 in County Jail 2 at 425 7th St. All of San Francisco’s 80 to 90 female inmates are held at that location, along with about 300 male inmates, while serving jail sentences or awaiting trial.
Miyamoto’s office said the allegations are under review, but that investigations by the sheriff’s office and the city’s Department of Police Accountability have contradicted claims in the lawsuit.
“Male deputies did not strip-search female inmates at County Jail 2,” sheriff’s spokesperson Tara Moriarty said Friday. “The female inmates who were strip-searched were searched individually in a private setting.” She did not reply to questions about why the women were searched or whether any evidence of wrongdoing was discovered.
But after the searches were initially reported last year by Mission Local, Supervisor Jackie Fielder told the publication that the deputies’ actions amounted to “gender-based violence, and an abuse of human rights.” And Supervisor Myrna Melgar said the women would sue, and “we’re going to end up paying for it.”
According to the lawsuit, about 12 sheriff’s deputies, some of them men, entered the women’s jailhouse pod “in coordinated formation” last May 22, then “corralled all women” into one area under an armed guard and ordered individual women to “strip naked, expose their genitalia, lift their breasts, spread their buttocks, squat, and cough.”
One deputy asked whether she should turn her camera off, the suit said, and the sergeant in charge of the operation said no because the film might be “used for training purposes.”
Female inmates sued San Francisco over jailhouse strip searches in 2018, but a federal judge found insufficient evidence of intentional invasions of privacy by mail guards. Friday’s lawsuit said the current evidence is much stronger.
A banner reads “Stripped on Camera” during a vigil to honor survivors of an alleged mass strip search at the San Francisco County Jail on May 22, 2026, in San Francisco. (Lea Suzuki/S.F. Chronicle)
Starting in May 2025, the lawyers said, “male deputies were deliberately positioned … with sightlines into the search area; a supervisor explicitly refused to deactivate cameras recording women’s naked bodies … and a supervisor threatened continued searches against women who complained.”
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This article originally published at 20 women sue over ‘weaponization of strip searches’ in S.F. jail.