San Francisco Charged a Jailer With Groping an Inmate on Camera —
A Federal Lawsuit Says It Wasn’t an Isolated Incident.
On July 12, 2025, a San Francisco sheriff’s deputy allegedly asked a female inmate whether she had “surgically augmented her body,” then touched her breast without consent — an incident the District Attorney’s office says was captured on jail surveillance video. One year and one day later, on July 13, 2026, DA Brooke Jenkins (D) charged the deputy, Nanette Musto, 51, with battery and misdemeanor assault by a public officer.
Musto has been reassigned away from inmate contact. She has not been fired. She is presumed innocent, and is scheduled for arraignment July 14, 2026 at the SF Hall of Justice.
The DA’s own announcement ties the criminal charges to something larger: Musto is a named defendant in a federal class-action lawsuit filed weeks earlier by twenty women who allege a mass, degrading strip search at the same jail in May 2025 — conducted, they say, in violation of the department’s own rules barring male deputies and body cameras from such searches.
- 2 charges — battery and misdemeanor assault by a public officer, filed against Deputy Nanette Musto, 51 · Source: SF District Attorney press release, July 13, 2026
- 20 women — plaintiffs in the federal class action alleging a mass strip search at the same jail, filed May 22, 2026 · Source: Lopez v. CCSF docket, N.D. Cal.
- 1 year, 1 day — the gap between the alleged July 12, 2025 incident and the July 13, 2026 charges · Source: SF Standard; SF District Attorney
- 0 firings — over the Musto allegations specifically — she is reassigned away from inmate contact, not terminated · Source: SF Standard; Mission Local
- 3 cases — of alleged deputy misconduct at San Francisco jails now publicly documented since May 2025 · Source: Civic Intelligence review of KQED, SF Standard, Local News Matters
According to the DA’s complaint, Musto was on duty at San Francisco County Jail No. 2, at 425 7th Street, when she approached an inmate identified in court filings as Marilyn Lopez and asked about rumors circulating among other inmates that Lopez had “surgically augmented her body.” Musto then, prosecutors allege, “reached out and, without permission or lawful necessity, touched the inmate’s breast,” leaving her “humiliated and embarrassed.” The DA’s office says the incident was recorded on jail surveillance video.
Defendant: Nanette Musto, 51, San Francisco Sheriff’s Deputy
Charges: Battery; misdemeanor assault by a public officer
Alleged incident: July 12, 2025, San Francisco County Jail No. 2
Charged: July 13, 2026, by District Attorney Brooke Jenkins
Arraignment: July 14, 2026, 9:00 a.m., Department 17, SF Hall of Justice
Musto has not entered a plea. She is presumed innocent. Source: SF District Attorney press release, July 13, 2026.
Lopez’s own federal complaint, filed weeks before the criminal charges, describes the same incident and adds that Musto made “repeated unsolicited references to her sexual anatomy” in the weeks around it. Her attorneys, Anthony Label and Elizabeth Bertolino, called the criminal charges confirmation of what their client had been saying for over a year.
“This is vindication.”
Elizabeth Bertolino, attorney for Marilyn Lopez — via SF Standard, July 13, 2026
Musto remains a San Francisco Sheriff’s Office employee. She has been reassigned away from inmate contact pending the outcome of the criminal case, but she has not been fired. That stands in contrast to a separate, unrelated matter: a different deputy was fired on October 16, 2025 by Sheriff Paul Miyamoto (D) over alleged sexual misconduct with a transgender inmate in a September 19, 2025 jail-bathroom incident. The two cases involve different deputies, different alleged conduct, different inmates, and different outcomes, and this page keeps them explicitly separate rather than treating one scandal as a stand-in for the other.
A Sheriff’s Office spokesperson, Tara Moriarty, said only that the department “takes all allegations of employee misconduct very seriously.” The office has not said whether Musto will face internal discipline separate from the criminal case, or whether that process is on hold until the case resolves.
The DA’s own press materials frame the Musto charges as arising from a pattern already documented in federal court. On May 22, 2026, Lopez and nineteen other women filed a putative class action, Lopez v. City and County of San Francisco (No. 3:26-cv-04854, N.D. Cal.), alleging that roughly a dozen deputies — some of them male — forced women in County Jail No. 2’s B-Pod to strip, lift their breasts, spread their buttocks, and squat and cough during a mass search on May 22, 2025, with body cameras allegedly running throughout. The department’s own policy bars both male staff and cameras from strip searches of women.
Label, one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys, said the policy violations were not incidental to the harm alleged. Roughly seven weeks after the mass search, the complaint alleges, Musto singled Lopez out again — the incident the DA has now charged criminally.
“The Sheriff's own policies forbid male staff during women's strip searches and forbid body cameras.”
Anthony Label, attorney for the plaintiffs — via Local News Matters
Public Defender Mano Raju has argued the Musto allegations cannot be understood as one deputy’s isolated failure. “What happened one year ago did not happen in a vacuum,” he said of the case. “It happened in a system with processes that dehumanize.”
The Musto charges are the third publicly documented allegation of deputy misconduct at San Francisco’s jails inside fourteen months. Beyond the May 2025 mass strip search and the July 2025 Musto incident, a separate lawsuit filed April 24, 2026 accuses Deputy Abraham Escobar of beating a different inmate. Board of Supervisors members Shamann Walton (D) and Jackie Fielder (D) have publicly pushed for a full outside audit of the Sheriff’s Office, a call Fielder first made March 10, 2026, citing the strip-search allegations alongside a 2024 tear-gas leak inside the jail and disputes over the department’s cooperation with federal immigration authorities.
“These are not isolated incidents. This is a system that allows abuse to go unchecked because the offices responsible for accountability do not have the staff or resources they need to do their job. When oversight is underfunded, people in custody, especially women, are left vulnerable.”
Supervisor Shamann Walton (D), San Francisco Board of Supervisors
Sheriff Paul Miyamoto (D), San Francisco’s 37th sheriff and in office since January 2020, is not personally accused of wrongdoing in the Musto case. He is also not a reliable partisan foil: in July 2025, Miyamoto crossed party lines to endorse Republican Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco for California governor. The office he runs is nonetheless the common thread across three separate misconduct allegations in just over a year, and the supervisors’ audit push predates the Musto charges by four months — suggesting the pressure for outside review was building well before this particular case became public.
Musto is scheduled for arraignment July 14, 2026 in Department 17 of the SF Hall of Justice, where she is expected to enter a plea for the first time. Nothing about the charges resolves the federal class action, which proceeds separately and covers nineteen other women whose allegations do not depend on the outcome of Musto’s criminal case. DA Jenkins’s office has not said whether additional deputies from the alleged May 2025 mass search face charges.
What is already on the record is simple to state and does not require the criminal case to resolve first: a Democratic district attorney, in a Democratic-run city, charged a sheriff’s deputy with assaulting a woman in custody, and tied that charge explicitly to a federal lawsuit alleging a wider pattern the department’s own rules were supposed to prevent. Musto is presumed innocent. The pattern around her is not in dispute — it is in federal court, under oath, from twenty women who say the system failed them long before Musto is alleged to have.
DA Brooke Jenkins (D) charged San Francisco Sheriff’s Deputy Nanette Musto, 51, with battery and assault a year after the alleged jailhouse groping the DA says was caught on camera. Musto is reassigned, not fired, and presumed innocent pending her July 14 arraignment. The DA’s own announcement links the charges to a federal class action from twenty women alleging a mass strip search at the same jail in violation of the department’s own rules — the third publicly documented misconduct allegation against Sheriff Paul Miyamoto’s (D) office in fourteen months, and one two supervisors say proves oversight itself is underfunded.
