Prosecutors have filed criminal charges against a San Francisco sheriff’s deputy who allegedly groped a woman who was in jail. The charges come after Marilyn Lopez in May filed a federal lawsuit alleging that she was the victim of misconduct by deputies that included nonconsensual sexual contact and strip searches that were recorded. Deputy Nanette Musto, 52, has been charged with battery and assault by a public officer, according to the district attorney’s office. She is set to be arraigned Tuesday. Musto, who has been reassigned pending the outcome of the criminal proceedings, did not respond to requests for comment. After initially filing an internal complaint with the Sheriff’s Department, Lopez filed a class action civil rights lawsuit against the city that detailed alleged abuse and what she described as demeaning searches of her and 19 other incarcerated women, according to her attorney Anthony Label. “The most important thing is that it really vindicates Marilyn’s allegations,” Label said of the charges. “She made a complaint and nothing was done.” Musto is one of several deputies named in Lopez’s suit who allegedly strip-searched the incarcerated women on May 22, 2025, and filmed the proceedings with their body cameras. According to the lawsuit, the woman were “compelled to strip naked, expose their genitalia, lift their breasts, spread their buttocks, squat, and cough. The male deputies present were not there by accident, were not unaware of what was occurring, and did not look away.” The lawsuit claims that Musto groped Lopez’s breast in a separate incident two weeks after the strip search. According to the lawsuit, Musto also made “repeated unsolicited references to her sexual anatomy, asked her about her sex toys … and made degrading remarks about the appearance of her body.” Rumors had spread in the County Jail 2 that Lopez had her body “surgically augmented,” according to the DA. Prosecutors say Musto asked Lopez if the rumors were true and touched her breast. The incident was captured on jail surveillance cameras, according to the DA. The case is being investigated by the Department of Police Accountability as well as the DA. “The San Francisco Sheriff’s Office takes all allegations of employee misconduct very seriously,” said spokesperson Tara Moriarty. The sheriff’s Criminal Investigations Unit conducted the initial investigation, then referred the case to the DA for review and charging consideration, Moriarty said. The Sheriff’s Department has faced other accusations of sexual misconduct by deputies who guard the jails. Last fall, a newly hired 33-year-old deputy was fired over allegations of sexually assaulting a trans inmate. The incident came to light after the victim told a public defender that the encounter was not consensual. “This is by no means the only allegation of inappropriate treatment of women in our jails. A grand jury report recently affirmed many of the pervasive problems that our office has been raising and pointed to factors that have driven up our jail population and subjected people to unacceptable conditions,” the public defender’s office said in a statement.