Imagine you a Black woman sitting on the side of a road and two cops pull up on you. You are in shoot-a-negro Texas, so quite naturally you are afraid. One of the cops is female and Black, so you feel a little less unsettled. What are they gonna do to you? Then you think about Sandra Bland.
That’s when the other officer requests that the female officer does a vaginal cavity search on you. Why? It is unclear, but you comply because…. well we all know why.
This is not a made up story, but actually happened to Natalie D. Simms in San Antonio in 2016. She filed a federal lawsuit against the city, believing she was targeted unjustly, violated and humiliated in public. According to Simms, she was waiting for her boyfriend and talking on her cell when the police approached her. News4Jax reports that according to the lawsuit, she gave the officer consent to search her car. After the search, nothing was found. Not satisfied with the results, they proceeded violate her by pushing for the female officer, Mara Wilson, to search her in her private part (she told them know, but that did not matter). While performing this invasive vaginal search, the officer pulled a bloody tampon out. Simms was on her cycle.
This was partially caught on camera and here is the transcript of the conversation between the two.
WILSON: “Uh-huh. Are you wearing a tampon, too?”
SIMMS: “Yes.”
WILSON: “Okay. I just want to make sure that’s what it is. Is that a tampon?”
SIMMS: “Come on. Yes.”
*Wilson pulls tampon out*
WILSON: “Huh? Is that a tampon?”
SIMMS: “It’s full of blood, right? Why would you do that?”
WILSON: “I don’t know. It looked like it had stuff in there.”
SIMMS: “There ain’t nothing in there.”
Simms filed the lawsuit in March 2018 and the city is expected to pay the settle from its self-insurance liability fund, if approved.
Read the full lawsuit.
