YPSILANTI, Mich. – More than 500 women say their privacy was violated by correctional officers at The Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility.
A $500 million lawsuit alleges female guards would routinely perform nude strip searches while their body cameras were recording.
Attorney Todd Flood with Flood Law says the women they’ve interviewed say the correctional officers also record them in various states of undress in the bathroom and showers.
“90% are the women have already suffered from some sort of traumatic event,” says Flood, who went on to describe the lewd remarks that accompanied the strip searches. “The comments were if you could use this imagination about opening certain parts of your body, showing certain parts, bending over. Not in a nice way, in a tone of brute.”
He says some of the women stopped taking visits from loved ones or attorneys in order to avoid the searches, which he says were done in violation of their own policy. In the complaint which alleges invasion of privacy, intentional infliction of emotional distress, sex-based discrimination and violation of Michigan’s constitutional rights, it says recording the strip searches “directly contradicted MDOC’s own internal regulations. The Department’s Prison Rape Elimination Act Policy explicitly defines “voyeurism” to include “taking images of all or part of a prisoner’s naked body” … This represents not merely negligence but a conscious disregard for the Department’s stated commitment to preventing sexual abuse.”
He says women who complained about the behavior were ignored and some were retaliated against. The strip search recordings only stopped in March of 2025, he says, when he and his legal team began interviewing the inmates.
We reached out to the Michigan Department of Corrections about the lawsuit but did not hear back.