Tucked in a residential neighborhood of bungalows and crape myrtle trees, the federal women’s prison in Bryan, Texas, doesn’t look like a traditional lockup. The women live in dormitory-style rooms without doors. In khaki uniforms and boots, some of the country’s most high-profile prisoners move freely between buildings for meals, work programs and recreation.
But as sprawling and open as Federal Prison Camp Bryan appears, some women and staff whistleblowers say the minimum-security facility conceals a sinister secret: inescapable sexual misconduct, and punishments for those who try to report the abuse.
Six women who were incarcerated at Bryan since 2020 told The Marshall Project and NBC News that staff members pressured them into unwanted sex acts in deserted corners where there were no security cameras or witnesses. Two more women said staff members groped them or touched them inappropriately.
“Looking back, I wish I did a hundred things, you know, kick him, scream, cry, whatever,” said Darlene, 32, who alleges a prison chaplain sexually abused her in the chapel and in a closet after months of grooming her with compliments and hugs. Once, she said, he cornered her in a bathroom and reached into her underwear. She said she reported him to a correctional officer and a captain in early 2020 and also spoke to a Bureau of Prisons investigator but doesn’t know what happened to the report.
Darlene is one of several women incarcerated at Bryan, who, along with three former staff members, say they faced retribution or threats from prison officials after reporting misconduct against incarcerated women under the Prison Rape Elimination Act, a federal law meant to protect prisoners from abuse.
Days after she reported the chaplain, Darlene, who was incarcerated for methamphetamine possession, said she was shipped to a more restrictive facility.
Others said they were too afraid to file complaints or didn’t expect that the employees would face consequences after seeing what happened when women had complained.
“What made me upset was when they didn’t believe me — it’s frustrating and hurtful,” said Timeiki Hedspeth, who in 2020 reported a correctional officer who she says grabbed her buttocks twice while she was handcuffed in a hallway with no cameras.
Hedspeth never learned what happened to the report she filed. Her complaint was forwarded to bureau officials for review, documents show, but Hedspeth, 48, says she left Bryan in 2024 without knowing if the officer was disciplined. The officer said in a recent call that she did not remember such an incident and denied inappropriately touching anyone.
“It doesn’t give someone the right to abuse their power and feel like we can be treated as less than just because we’re in prison,” said Hedspeth, who is completing her sentence for fraud charges on home confinement. “At the end of the day, we’re still human beings.”
In all, the women accused five staff members of sexual misconduct. Two of them still work at Bryan. Three others are no longer employed by the Bureau of Prisons, including Timothy Martin, the chaplain who Darlene says abused her. The circumstances of Martin’s departure are unclear, and he did not respond to requests for comment. None of the accused employees appear to have been criminally charged.
The Marshall Project and NBC News reviewed sexual misconduct reports, court records, emails and memos to bureau officials, and spoke with staff members and other incarcerated people to corroborate the women’s accounts. Most of the eight women who shared their stories asked not to have their full names published because they were recounting sexual misconduct; four are still incarcerated or under supervision and said they fear retaliation.
Tanisha Hall, the warden at Bryan since 2023, declined interview requests but said in an email that the Bureau of Prisons has a zero-tolerance policy on sexual abuse.
“We take seriously our duty to protect the individuals entrusted to our care as well as maintain the safety of correctional employees and the community,” she wrote.
Donald Murphy, a spokesperson for the Bureau of Prisons, said in an email that he could not discuss individual allegations or any related investigations, but the bureau “thoroughly investigates all credible allegations to ensure the safety of inmates.”
According to the Bureau of Prisons’ conduct code, “there is never any such thing as consensual sex between employees and inmates.” Because of the power imbalance, any sex act between a prison staff member and an incarcerated person is a felony, punishable under federal law by up to 15 years in prison — and up to life in prison for sexual abuse where “force is used or threatened.” Any form of sexual misconduct, including harassment and inappropriate touching, is grounds for firing, the policy says.
On the surface, Bryan is a desirable placement in the federal prison system. About 600 women convicted of nonviolent and white-collar crimes are housed there, including disgraced biotech executive Elizabeth Holmes. The Justice Department faced criticism last year for transferring Ghislaine Maxwell, the convicted sex trafficker connected to Jeffrey Epstein, to Bryan from a higher-security prison.
Allegations that Maxwell received preferential treatment from the staff at Bryan drew the attention of the top Democrats on the House of Representatives’ Judiciary and Oversight and Government Reform committees. As they investigated, U.S. Reps. Jamie Raskin and Robert Garcia said they also uncovered allegations from more than a dozen people that staff members sexually abused women or retaliated against them for reporting abuse.
“The alleged instances of sexual abuse at FPC Bryan are numerous, detailed, and substantiated,” the congressmen wrote to Attorney General Pam Bondi in January, demanding answers. Women and former staff members “report a regime of silence, fear, intimidation, and retaliation at the institution that permeates daily life at the camp and prevents individuals from coming forward with misconduct.” Raskin said Bondi did not respond.
Some of the formerly incarcerated women and staff members interviewed by The Marshall Project and NBC News said that over the past six years, they had been contacted by investigators from the Bureau of Prisons, the Justice Department’s inspector general or the FBI. None of them knew what came of those probes.
A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment on the status of any investigations or on communications with legislators, but said the department would work with Congress to “protect the safety of all inmates, security and staff at BOP facilities.”
A spokesman for the Justice Department’s inspector general declined to comment, citing the office’s practice “not to confirm or deny the existence of investigations.” The FBI did not respond to requests for comment.
The women accusing Bryan workers of sexual misconduct say they remain traumatized, not just by the abuse, but also by officials’ response. When Darlene came forward to accuse the chaplain of months of abuse, she said, prison staff members repeatedly asked if she was lying.
Three women who were incarcerated with Darlene at Bryan said she told them about the sexual encounters at the time; one of them, Lynn Espejo, said Darlene came to her crying, asking her for help. “She was not a willing participant,” Espejo said.
The doubt Darlene said she faced from staff members still crushes her.
“I just felt like I didn’t have a voice the entire time,” Darlene said.
The GED testing room was down a long hallway, and the door stayed locked most of the time.
While Marie was incarcerated at Bryan, working in the education department as a clerk, her boss, Donald Ross, often sent her to a storage closet in the testing room to organize supplies. Then, he joined her. Throughout 2023, in that closet and in other places at Bryan with no cameras, Marie said through her lawyer that Ross grabbed her breasts and genitals and told her to touch him and perform oral sex.
Marie and four other women who spoke with The Marshall Project and NBC News said that during Ross’ employment as a teacher at Bryan, from 2020 to 2025, he groped them or manipulated them into sexual encounters they did not want. The women said he groomed them with gifts and privileges, then exploited his position to discourage them from reporting him.
In a phone call, Ross repeatedly denied that he engaged in any inappropriate sexual behavior with the women at Bryan.
“Y’all don’t understand the games that these inmates play,” he said in a phone interview, adding: “Whatever you hear from inmates cannot be corroboration. They lie. They’re not people who can be trusted.”
Ross could issue disciplinary tickets, the women said, so if he accused them of breaking a rule, they could lose time they had earned through classes or drug treatment programs to get home early. A couple of the women said he told them that he could monitor their communications — phone calls, video visits and emails — which they believed was a warning.
Marie, now 39, said Ross had chosen her to work as his clerk when she was serving three years for charges related to counterfeiting keys to steal mail. Her job in the education department came with a desk of her own, which felt like a luxury, and she was allowed to order whatever supplies she wanted. Ross ordered her packs of pens, including glittery ones — “a very big deal,” she said, because they weren’t available in the prison’s commissary.
He brought her food from outside, she said — Chick-fil-A, Starbucks, barbecue — against prison rules. But while she savored the meals in a back room in the education building, he reached under her clothes, Marie’s lawyer said.
Sometimes she liked the attention; it was rare to feel like someone cared about her in prison. Other times, she felt disgusted.
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.
Anderson and the colleague who also reported R. and Smith’s encounters had both received promotions and positive work reviews in the past. They were fired last year, after making their reports about abuse and misconduct at Bryan. They were accused of minor infractions, such as cursing, missing a day of work or bringing a personal cellphone into the administration building. Among their list of fireable offenses was “conducting an unauthorized investigation” — for gathering information about a range of alleged staff wrongdoing. They are fighting their terminations.
R., who was released to a halfway house in August, is finding it hard to build new relationships outside of prison. She said she used to see the good in people, but after what happened with Smith and the other prison employee, she is mistrustful and quick to anger. She picks arguments with those close to her and finds herself inexplicably enraged whenever a man compliments her or asks her out.
The way that officials treated her after she reported being abused was almost worse than the abuse itself, she said: “I was kind of thrown away. Let’s just put her over here, and then it never happened.”
Every federal prison and jail is required by law to comply with standards meant to prevent sexual abuse.
Prisons must provide ways for people to report incidents without reprisal, and outside auditors visit facilities every three years to make sure they’re following the rules.
Federal Prison Camp Bryan met all the standards in its most recent audit, in 2023. It had adequate staff training, the auditor noted, and a written zero-tolerance policy for sexual abuse. The audit listed one report of “staff-on-inmate sexual abuse,” but bureau investigators deemed it “unfounded.”
These audits have not stopped the sexual abuse of women incarcerated across the federal prison system. A 2022 Senate investigation found cases of sexual abuse by staff members in most of the 29 facilities where the Bureau of Prisons held women, including 32 allegations at Bryan over the previous decade. Five of these were sustained, 19 were not and eight were still being investigated. The investigation also found that the bureau was so slow to investigate cases that staff members were acting with impunity. Rather than implementing systemic changes, the bureau treated cases as if they were one-off problems, the Senate found.
“They want it to be some sort of anomaly, and it’s not,” said Deborah Golden, a civil rights attorney who has represented more than 50 women who sued the Bureau of Prisons saying they were sexually assaulted by staff at federal prisons. “It’s rotten from the top down and from the inside out.”
Responding to the Senate investigation, the bureau’s then-director acknowledged during a congressional hearing that insufficient resources and staffing had hindered sexual misconduct investigations and created a growing backlog.
In one of the most egregious cases in recent years, the former warden of the federal prison in Dublin, California, was convicted in 2022 of sexually abusing three women in the prison. Ultimately, eight other staff members were convicted of sexual abuse-related charges. The abuse was so widespread that prisoners and workers dubbed it “the rape club.” That prison had also met all standards on its most recent audit for preventing sexual abuse.
The Bureau of Prisons shuttered Dublin in 2024, concluding a scandal that staff members and incarcerated women at Bryan followed closely. Rhonda Fleming, who had been incarcerated in Dublin before she was transferred to Bryan, wrote to a judge: “This prison is run just like FCI-Dublin.”
In the wake of Dublin, the Bureau of Prisons launched an initiative in its women’s institutions to assess and improve prisoners’ safety, including by training staff. Bryan’s latest assessment was this month, and prisoners expressed no concerns about safety or retaliation, the Justice Department said.
But some of the women who served time in Bryan remain skeptical that the prison camp has been transformed.
Marie never found out what became of the investigation into allegations against Ross, the teacher who she says sexually abused her. She said her experience with Ross made her jumpy and anxious around male officers, and she began taking medication for depression. Though her lawsuit was dismissed, she plans to sue again when she gets out of federal prison in Alabama in April.
“Keeping all of the secrets, including what was happening to me, really did break me,” she wrote in an email from prison, “and I did not realize it till I left Bryan.”