Second woman alleges repeated rape by prison staff member at Fort Worth’s FMC Carswell
Another woman who was incarcerated at FMC Carswell, the federal medical prison for women in northwest Fort Worth, has filed a lawsuit alleging a staff member repeatedly raped her while she was in prison.
The lawsuit — filed Wednesday in the Fort Worth division of U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas — uses a pseudonym for the woman. She and one of her attorneys spoke with the Star-Telegram.
According to the lawsuit, prison recreation specialist Marerllis Nix would take the woman to supply closets or other rooms in the prison that didn’t have cameras, in order to assault her. The lawsuit alleges he raped her repeatedly over the course of several months in 2021. The suit also says that Nix made comments indicating he was doing similar things to other women at the prison at the time, that he didn’t think he would be punished for the assaults, and that he had previously been reported for similar behavior without major repercussions.
Nix did not respond to the Star-Telegram’s requests for comment. Randilee Giamusso, a spokesperson for the Federal Bureau of Prisons, said in an email statement that the agency doesn’t comment on legal matters.
Giamusso’s statement noted that Nix is no longer employed by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, and that the agency “strongly condemns all forms of sexually abusive behavior.” An agency spokesperson declined to comment on how Nix’s employment ended. Nix does not have criminal charges listed in online databases.
The woman, who was released from prison and is living in Kansas, said in a phone interview with the Star-Telegram that the repeated rapes broke her trust in the system and in authority figures.
“I just felt so much more damaged than I was when I went in,” she said.
The abuse, she said, also shook her sense of self, particularly after she had spent several years in prison working on her education ahead of her release.
“I was improving my life, improving myself, so that I could come out here and reclaim my life — to be that little percent that snatches their life back,” she said. “I was so proud of who I was. And I still am. But for a little bit, that got stripped away from me.”
The lawsuit, which was filed against both Nix and the U.S. government, is strikingly similar to a separate suit filed in December. In that suit, April Lacey alleged that the same man, Nix, raped her twice on consecutive days while she was incarcerated at Carswell.
Both Lacey and the anonymous woman are represented by the same attorneys.
One of the attorneys — Regina Powers, with New York-based firm Bedlock Levine & Huffman — said that Carswell and other federal prisons have a pattern of ignoring or covering up abuse by staff members.
“This kind of abuse, it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It exists in large part because of the people at the prison that enabled it,” Powers said.
In contrast, Giamusso’s statement said the Federal Bureau of Prisons has a “zero-tolerance policy for sexual abuse of any kind.”
“We are actively rooting out and addressing employee misconduct,” the statement said. “Allegations of employee misconduct will continue to be met with rigorous investigations and decisive action, which will serve as a deterrent against future misbehavior by employees.”
Giamusso’s statement said the agency aims to create a culture where employees and incarcerated people can safely report misconduct.
The formerly incarcerated woman who filed Wednesday’s lawsuit said she didn’t experience such a culture when she was at Carswell. She decided take legal action, she said, in part because she’s more able to speak up about the abuse than women who are still incarcerated.
She’s also felt a lot of anger about the way she was treated in prison, she said. She hopes the lawsuit can shed light on what she described as a corrupt system, and maybe prompt a “sweep” of staff at Carswell.
She wants to see change, she said, “to really have the correctional system be a correctional system, and not somewhere where you’re in danger.”
Carswell has long been plagued with sexual abuse and cover-ups, according to a 2022 Star-Telegram investigation. In a federal report, Carswell was found to have had more sexual abuse reports against staff members than any other federal women’s prison.
