Staff sexual misconduct, accusers say

Marie was released from prison in late 2023 and tried to put Ross out of her mind. But it was hard to move on, she said, because he called her almost every day, telling her he missed the things they did together. Those things had shattered her self-worth and her long-term relationship with her child’s father, she said. She had never had multiple sexual partners, but “I got out and I was just sleeping with people. Almost in a leverage kind of way,” she said. “’Cause that’s what I learned in there.”

Before going to prison, she had used drugs, and now she relapsed on methamphetamines. She begged her probation officer for help, asking to go to rehab, she said. Instead, in 2024, she was sent to a federal prison in Alabama for violating the terms of her release.

Dejected and alone, Marie got an unexpected visitor in prison, she said: a federal investigator who said she was looking into abuse allegations against Ross. Marie told her everything.

She hadn’t made the connection between her experiences with Ross and her unraveling outside of prison. Now, she said, “I realized that what happened wasn’t OK.”

As a federal investigation into Ross unfolded that summer, he was allowed to remain at work, but other prison workers were assigned to follow him around the facility and he wasn’t allowed around the women unsupervised, a Bureau of Prisons memo shows and witnesses confirm. Ross acknowledged to The Marshall Project and NBC News that he had been assigned an escort at the prison because of sexual misconduct allegations against him, but he said he was cleared of wrongdoing and ultimately allowed to return to his department.

At the end of 2024, while still incarcerated in Alabama, Marie sued Ross in federal court, accusing him of sexually assaulting her. Ross used his leverage over Marie to “exploit his position of authority,” the complaint said. “He made it clear that her job was at risk if she did not comply with his unwanted sexual advances.” The complaint was dismissed after she didn’t submit paperwork needed to waive the $405 filing fee. Ross didn’t respond to a written question about the lawsuit.

Ross left his job at Bryan in March 2025. He said that he quit for reasons unrelated to the misconduct allegations. The Bureau of Prisons wouldn’t say if he had been disciplined.

Three other women who said Ross pressured them into sexual encounters said they never felt safe enough to report what happened to them.

In 2023, D’lena was months away from leaving prison after 10 years on a charge of conspiracy to produce false identification documents when she said Ross accused her of not reporting a romantic relationship between two other incarcerated women, an offense he told her could get her kicked out of a drug program, delaying her release. He groped her, she said, and penetrated her with his fingers.

“Just to keep him happy,” D’lena, 51, said. “I was not interested in him, not in the least bit. I was just in survival mode at this point because I was ready to go home.”

People still talked about the time three years earlier when Darlene was shipped to a different facility after reporting the chaplain. D’lena said she knew better than to tell anyone.

For some who did try to report allegations of sexual misconduct at Bryan — both incarcerated women and prison employees — they say it came at great personal cost.

R. asked not to be named because she is still under the Bureau of Prisons’ supervision. In the summer of 2022, she was at Bryan after being convicted in a financial fraud scheme and receiving an eight-year sentence. She was assigned a job in the prison’s facilities department, and she and her boss, Jeff Smith, the head of the department, began flirting. Soon, she said, it turned physical.

R., 50, said she and Smith had sex about once a week in an office that had a door that locked and no windows. Other times, they met behind the garage, or in his government truck.

Five other people at Bryan told The Marshall Project and NBC News that her connection to Smith was an open secret at the prison.

Smith said in an emailed letter that the allegation of a sexual relationship with a woman at Bryan was false.

“These claims have been thoroughly investigated by my employing agency and by the United States Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General, and I have been officially cleared of any wrongdoing,” Smith said.

The Bureau of Prisons and the Department of Justice said they don’t comment on specific cases.

R. said she initially sought the encounters with Smith. New to prison, she was lonely. After several months, though, she became uncomfortable because he was married. But she felt she couldn’t end the relationship. Smith was not only her supervisor; he often filled in for some of the top-ranking correctional staff at the prison, acting some days as a lieutenant.

“How do you stop when somebody has that much control of your life?” R. said. “There’s no way I could.”

Ashley Anderson, an officer at Bryan since 2015, said she noticed a change in R. “She was sick. Laying in bed, crying,” Anderson recalled. “I would make rounds and I would try to make her get out of bed.”

In early 2023, Anderson said R. opened up and confided in her about Smith, and Anderson said she alerted prison officials — first a captain and then the warden. When, months later, Smith had not been removed from work, Anderson notified the federal prison system’s Office of the Inspector General. A lieutenant at Bryan who spoke on the condition she not be named because of an ongoing employment dispute said she also submitted a report to a captain about R. and Smith.

It wasn’t until July of that year that prison officials came to talk to R. about her allegations regarding Smith. But she didn’t trust the higher-ups at the prison, and she felt protective of Smith. When officials pressed her, instead of formally naming Smith, she told them another secret.

At the same time she was seeing Smith, R. said, a second prison employee began approaching her while she was working in a tool room, a small closetlike space. There, R. said that he touched her breasts, grabbed her crotch and put her hand on his penis, according to a report written by a sexual assault examiner at the prison. More than once, she performed oral sex, she told the nurse practitioner who did the exam. The report withheld the name of the accused staff member.

The bureau then transferred R. to the federal detention center in Houston, a move that she felt was retaliation for talking about the two men. Bureau documents say that R. was moved because officers in Bryan had discovered contraband vapes and R. confessed to helping smuggle them in; she says she wasn’t involved.

At Bryan, the women can go outside when they choose, to walk the track or sit and talk in the grass. Now at the Houston detention center, R. was among people who had committed violent crimes, crammed in a tiny cell behind a heavy metal door with a cellmate and a metal toilet.

In early 2025, she wrote in a grievance to prison administrators that “this feels like punishment,” and if she had known she would be moved to a harsher facility, she “would have just not come forward.” She underlined “not” twice.

Smith and the second employee are still working at the prison, a Bureau of Prisons spokesman confirmed. The second employee denied R.’s allegations and referred questions to prison officials.

Throughout 2024 and 2025, Anderson, the correctional officer, wrote a series of increasingly frustrated memos to bureau officials, all the way up to the director, alleging that at least five staff members had sexually abused women incarcerated at the prison while keeping their jobs. Some of them later left Bryan, although the circumstances are unclear.