Dana Rieck
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
When a Florissant woman was pulled over here earlier this year, she thought it was odd the cop asked her to unlock her phone to see her insurance card, then took her phone back to his car — for 10 minutes.
Five months later, FBI agents contacted her. They had found a nude photo of her, they told her. It was something she’d only shared with her husband. The Florissant cop, they said, went through her phone during that February traffic stop, stole the images and shared them with multiple people.
Now the young mother and her husband are suing the officer and city of Florissant.
The suit says they have reason to believe there are more photos, other cops involved, and more victims.
“She is eager to begin the discovery process to learn more about what happened to her that day in February,” said her lawyer, Rick Voytas.
The woman, listed under the pseudonym of “Jane Doe” in court filings, told the Post-Dispatch she found another victim through social media, who described an almost identical traffic stop experience. She encouraged other potential victims to come forward.
“They shouldn’t be embarrassed to come forward and speak about their experience,” Jane Doe said. “Because it is very embarrassing to know that your personal pictures are somewhere out there.”
Florissant Police Department spokesman Steve Michael said Wednesday that the department is aware of the lawsuit. Michael also confirmed the officer in question is no longer employed by the city.
“There is no indication that any other member of the Florissant Police Department was involved in the alleged misconduct,” he said, adding that the department is cooperating with the FBI. “We are deeply concerned by these allegations and want to assure the community that we take any claim of officer misconduct very seriously.”
The FBI St. Louis division declined to comment or provide information about its investigation.
The 20-page lawsuit was filed Friday in St. Louis County. It does not name the officer; Jane Doe said she does not know his name.
But it does detail her encounter with the officer, the revelation of what he did months later and the emotional turmoil it has caused her and her family since.
The ordeal began with a simple traffic stop in February, Jane Doe said. The Florissant officer pulled her over and said her tail light was out. He asked to see her insurance card on her phone.
The officer then “abruptly took Jane’s phone back to his Florissant Police vehicle without Jane’s consent,” the lawsuit says. The officer was in his car with her phone for at least 10 minutes. During that time, it was disconnected from her car’s Bluetooth and she “anxiously awaited his return.”
He came back, returned her phone and left without ticketing her. Jane Doe told the Post-Dispatch she thought it was weird at the time, but then “let it go.”
The FBI told Jane Doe that the officer scrolled through a text thread between Jane Doe and her husband — the only place where the photos were stored — while he had her phone in his patrol car, the suit says. He “scrolled years back into Jane’s messages, voyeuristically viewing naked photographs of both her and her husband and their intimate messages.”
The officer used his own phone to take photos of Jane Doe’s pictures displayed on her phone, the lawsuit states.
It added that she has “good reason to believe (the officer) has done the exact same thing” to other Florissant residents.
Jane Doe also said the FBI investigated and found the photos because the officer, dubbed in the suit “Officer Smith,” had shared them with many people.
“The conduct of Officer Smith as described above was outrageous — conduct so outrageous in character, and so extreme in degree, as to go beyond all possible bounds of decency, and to be regarded as atrocious, and utterly intolerable in a civilized community,” the lawsuit said.
The city of Florissant is also a defendant in the suit. Jane Doe said the city had received complaints about the officer’s “inappropriate behavior with young women” in similar situations and other scenarios, but continued to employ him as an officer.
Jane Doe says her family now has medical debt to treat her emotional distress and that she has acute anxiety stemming from this incident. She said she also has trouble sleeping.
She told the Post-Dispatch she has now printed out a copy of her insurance so that she doesn’t go through something like this again.
“(The couple has) been incredibly disturbed since learning of these events and have suffered humiliation and severe emotional distress,” the lawsuit says. “(Their) trust has been shattered and they constantly worry that their intimate marital photographs have been shared publicly. (They) have lost all faith in the Florissant Police, and grow nervous whenever they see an officer.”
The couple is asking for more than $25,000 in damages.
“We certainly understand these defendants have a right to defend themselves,” Voytas said, “And we’re going to be very careful to honor the rules of the process and be respectful of it, but within that process, we’re going to be working aggressively to get Jane justice and find out the true extent of what’s going on.”
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