A woman is suing the Graysville, Tennessee, police chief and two officers after she was arrested twice on what the woman claims were phony charges, with the second arrest taking place after the chief watched her undress, shower and use a feminine hygiene product.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court earlier this month, details two incidents - one on Dec. 26, 2018, involving officers Keith Post and Landon Trew, and another on March 31 of this year involving Chief Julie Tanksley.
The woman filing the lawsuit is not identified in this story because of the nature of her complaint. She is being represented by attorney Robin Flores.
Tanksley did not return a request for comment Wednesday.
During the December arrest, Trew and Post arrested the woman's minor nephew during a traffic stop, according to the lawsuit.
She asked the officers to produce the warrant they claimed to have, the lawsuit states. The officers "held up a piece of paper" but refused to let her read what it said. (The woman later learned that the piece of paper had reportedly not been "signed or approved by any judicial officer or judge.")
Then, "without any lawful justification or any probably cause," the suit claims, the officers arrested the woman for disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.
When she went to court in February, she learned the charges had been dismissed.
Just under two months later, the woman called police to remove two people from her property. Tanksley responded to that call and asked the people to leave, and they did, according to the suit.
But Tanksley didn't leave. Instead, she "walked unannounced into [the woman's] home and confronted [her]" about an alleged assault that Tanksley claimed to have witnessed between the woman and the woman's mother, the lawsuit claims.
The woman's mother was just outside the front door and overheard the allegation. She told Tanksley that "she never told Tanksley anything of the sort," according to the lawsuit.
Nevertheless, Tanksley told the woman to "get dressed and said, 'You're going for a ride to jail.'"
However, the woman was "enduring a menstrual cycle and wanted to get cleaned up before traveling to jail," so Tanksley let her shower. But Tanksley told the woman she would watch her shower, get dressed and "place a feminine hygiene product into her underwear," the suit claims.
"The entire time, [the woman] felt humiliated and had no choice but to allow Tanksley to observe every intimate moment," the lawsuit states.
The woman was then taken to the Rhea County Jail and charged with domestic assault. By April, the charge was dismissed.
According to the suit, Tanksley and officers Post and Trew deprived the woman of her Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment rights to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures and to be free from malicious prosecution.
The suit asks for a total of $2 million in damages in addition to attorney fees.
This isn't the first lawsuit filed against Graysville police officers.
In June, a man named Gary Doss sued after officers arrested him on what he claimed were warrants that hadn't been approved by a judge.
Both suits allege improprieties among law enforcement personnel in Graysville, a town of roughly 1,500 people in Rhea County.
The suits state that, in a May 2017 letter, District Attorney General Mike Taylor told then-City Mayor Ted Doss that his attorneys would no longer prosecute Tanksley's cases. His reason? Tanksley had previously been indicted by a grand jury in McMinn County, Tennessee, on two counts of extortion after allegedly seizing personal property until the arrestees contributed money to the police department's drug fund.
She was found not guilty of those charges, according to the Daily Post Athenian.
And before that, the lawsuits state, Graysville employed Jason Redden as police chief in 2008. Redden was indicted on 10 counts of official misconduct after a citizen alleged in 2013 that money had been improperly seized from her. Redden eventually pleaded guilty to two counts of official misconduct and was "no longer employed by the city," the suit says.
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