In Court, Women Detail Abuse by East Bay Federal Prison Officer: ‘It Finished Me’

Warning: This story contains graphic language and descriptions of sexual violence.

Darrell Wayne Smith had a reputation as a correctional officer at FCI Dublin.

Women incarcerated at the East Bay federal prison said he patrolled housing units wearing a cowboy hat and boots, often leaving his shirts unbuttoned with nothing underneath. When he wasn’t making rounds, they said, he sat back in his chair at the officer’s desk, kicking his feet up and leering at women as they walked by.

He made passing sexual comments and locked women in cells when they broke the rules, ordering them to flash him to get out or to be awarded special privileges, women testified in federal court in Oakland this week. Whenever new women arrived at the prison, they said they were warned about Smith.

“Officers were known for several things, but he was the officer that walked around with his shirt open, kind of cowboy style, not professional at all,” said one woman, who remembers learning his nickname, “Dirty Dick Smith,” soon after she arrived at Dublin in 2017.

“He carried himself in a different way than other officers,” she said. “He was always talking to the girls in inappropriate ways or trying to get with all the girls. Kind of flirtatious.”

“I heard rumors about him,” another woman told the jury. “But I never thought I was going to go through things like that.”

They are among eight women who have testified that Smith’s harassment went much further. Although they used their first names in court, KQED does not identify survivors of sexual assault.

Smith is charged with 15 counts of sexual abuse and related crimes against five women who were incarcerated at FCI Dublin between 2016 and 2021. The low-security women’s prison was shut down last year after a sprawling federal investigation revealed a culture of abuse, retaliation and cover-ups.

Eight officers were charged in the fallout. Smith, whose trial began Monday and will continue next week, is the last to be tried.

Three women named in Smith’s case have testified against him so far. This is what they say they endured under his watch.

‘He thought it was a joke’

The first woman who took the stand on Monday, wrapped in an oversized black coat with her long dark hair pulled tightly into a bun, recalled meeting Smith while picking up her mail. She had just arrived at FCI Dublin and said he tried to connect with her about her Native heritage and told her about his home in Florida and his marital problems.

Soon, she said, he began to invite her to the small desk and office that formed the officer’s station at the center of the housing unit, where he would ask her invasive questions about her sexuality and told her he liked small breasts. One day, he called her over as he was locking up at the end of his shift.

Looking down at a clipboard in his hands, he asked her quietly what she might need when she was released, she said.

“I said a job, I said a car,” the woman testified. “He said he’d get one for me if I’d be with him at night,” gesturing toward his groin as he responded.

The woman said she shook her head and walked away, upset, but Smith’s actions only escalated. He started to comment on her feet when she wore slides to the shower, tried to touch her, and came into her cell when she was alone.

In early 2020, the woman said, she was beading on her bed when Smith showed up in her doorway. He ordered her to grab a stack of books on top of her white metal storage locker across the cell.

“When I reached up, he took off one of my socks and he pointed to my foot. He said, ‘That’s nice,’ and I stood there,” she said. “Then he cupped my butt underneath and in between my legs.”

Over the next year, the woman said, Smith kissed her, stuck his fingers into her vagina and anus on multiple occasions, and once forced her to touch his penis. She started asking to be transferred to a different prison.

“I just wanted a change,” she told attorneys when they questioned why.

The final time Smith assaulted her, she said, was in the spring of 2021. She was kneeling, facing out to the window at the back of her cell, when he rushed in and stuck his hands down her pants, touching her buttocks, she said.

“He laughed and walked away. He thought it was a joke, and I was playing with him,” she testified.

Later that day, she said, he came back. She was standing with her back to the closed door, mixing instant coffee into hot water at her locker.

“He came in very fast. He had my arm with his arm, and at the same time, he was trying to put his hands down my pants,” she said.

She swatted and tried to push him off, but Smith backed her against a wall, she said. Pinning her by her wrist, she said, Smith reached into her pants and inserted his finger into her anus.

“I just kept trying to fight him off of me,” she testified through tears, looking down as Smith sat across the courtroom. “I was scared, and it brought back flashbacks of other times I had been assaulted.”

When Smith left her room, she said, she heard another woman in the hallway ask him what he had been doing.

“He said, ‘I’m trying to help her get transferred,’” the woman said, wiping her nose with a tissue.

After that, Smith continued to harass her but did not touch her again, she said.

For months, she feared she would be sent to a solitary housing unit or face a retaliatory investigation if she reported him, but she eventually did so in March 2022. Shortly after, she was transferred to a facility in Minnesota. Two weeks ago, she was released to a reentry center, multiple years before her sentence was set to end, after being granted compassionate release because of the abuse she endured at Dublin.

‘That was his unit’

The second woman who Smith is charged with abusing said her interactions with him started when she was moved to Housing Unit C during the pandemic.

“That was his unit,” she said Tuesday, looking out toward Smith, who sat next to his defense team in a blue button-down shirt. “He bid for the unit and worked doubles. I think he got a lot of attention from that unit, and he liked it.”

She said Smith started coming by her cell for a few minutes every now and then while she was reading in bed or making food by her locker.

“He would comment about my body if he thought I looked nice,” she said. “He told me I had the nicest ass he had ever seen.”

The woman told Smith that she was dating another woman in the unit, thinking it would get him to stop pursuing her. She said Smith responded by asking if he could watch them have sex.

A few months after she had moved into Housing Unit C, the woman said she went to the officer’s station to confront Smith.

“I told him to leave me alone and said he was causing problems in my relationships,” she told the court. He dismissed her, and she went back upstairs to her room.

“I didn’t even make it to the back of the cell before he was in the room, closing the door behind him,” she said.

She said she had just walked past the room’s toilet and was standing in front of the lockers squeezed into the corner opposite her bed when “he told me to take my clothes off.”

He said, “to lean over the locker. He put his fingers inside me,” she said. “I felt violated. I was in pain because he was rough. It didn’t feel like a sexual thing, it was an ‘I run shit’ thing … ‘This is my house, and I am going to do what I want.’”

The woman said Smith pulled back after that. Sometimes, he would stand in her way, forcing her to brush up against him when she passed, she said, but he left her mostly alone.

“I was really relieved and hoping that would be the end of it,” she said.

But one morning, in the fall or winter of 2020, she said, she was starting the early load on her new job as a laundry orderly for her unit when Smith came into the room behind her.

“He told me to bend over, and he again put his fingers in my vagina,” she said.

The job was one of the few positions that gave women permission to leave their cells during COVID-19 restrictions. Every morning, she would roll out of bed just after 4 a.m. and drag the first load of dirty uniforms down the dark hallway to the laundry room. She said she would be half-asleep as she started the washing machine and stumbled back to her cell.

Over the next few months, the woman said, Smith followed her into the laundry room again.

“I felt like, ‘When is this going to end?’” she said. “Before he even did it [the second time], I thought he was going to. I heard his keys coming down the hall, and he just said, ‘Bend over.’ It was almost like a routine.”

The woman said that after the two incidents in the laundry room, she wasn’t assaulted by Smith again. She filed a Prison Rape Elimination Act report against him at the end of 2022 and was released from prison in May, 18 months early, through a compassionate release agreement based on her abuse.

‘I felt like I couldn’t do anything’

The third of Smith’s victims who testified this week was also transferred to Housing Unit C in the early days of the pandemic.

“He said, ‘Welcome to my unit,’” the woman recalled.

“He started being nice to me, getting close to me, talking to me at the balcony outside my room,” she said. “I heard rumors about him. I never thought I was going to go through things like that, but he made me uncomfortable.”

He started calling her over to the officer’s station, where he would tell her about his trips to Tijuana and ask about her family, she said. He told her he was attracted to Hispanic women with long hair, like her.

If she was lying on her bed when she was supposed to line up for a count or have gotten up for the day, she said Smith would come in her room and spank her, saying she needed to “get ready for him.”

He began to call her his girlfriend, she said.

“I said he was crazy and that I didn’t want to be part of it, I was not his girlfriend,” she told the jury. “He said I would come around.”

Smith started withholding mail her husband had sent, she said, shaking the physical letters over her head while he motioned for her to lift up her shirt. On multiple occasions, he would pull back her shower curtain and stare.

“He would touch me, spank me, rub my back when I was sleeping,” she testified. “He told me to get up and look pretty for [him].”

She said he told her that if she didn’t cooperate, he would take away her mail or her telephone and commissary privileges. Once, he ripped up a letter of hers in front of her, she said.

Then, in September 2020, he came by her cell in the evening. He told her that if she met him in the laundry room after curfew, he would give her a cellphone to call her children.

“He told me to walk in, and he started touching me,” she said. “I started pushing him away and saying I just wanted to see my kids. He said I needed to earn it. I wasn’t ready for that.”

The woman said Smith assaulted her three times in the laundry room, sticking his fingers into her anus and vagina and exposing his penis.

“I just closed my eyes and just lost it,” she said. “I felt so disgusted, I felt powerless. I wanted to defend myself. I wanted to do something, and I felt like I couldn’t do anything. Who was I going to ask for help, who was I going to tell?”

The last time Smith assaulted her was in the winter of 2020, she said. This time, he told her to go to the janitor’s closet, which was down the dark, sterile hallway from the laundry room she had grown accustomed to meeting him in.

She said that she knew “he wanted more.”

“He didn’t want to finger me or play with me or just interact with me no more,” she said. “He wanted to hurt me by getting what he wanted, to use me, to have sex with me.”

Smith waited for her at the entrance to the hallway that led to the closet and followed behind her, walking slowly in his jeans and cowboy boots, she said.

“He just walked toward me and told me to turn around. I wanted to push him away, but I guess he was tired of me, my actions, my mouth,” she said.

Backed into a wall of tall black lockers, she said, she turned around and bent over. He forced her to have sex with him.

“I was nothing,” she said quietly in court, pausing as she spoke. “I had no say. I couldn’t defend myself toward somebody who was there to do right for us. Instead of helping, he had done all the wrongs and really hurt me, really damaged me and showed me that I had no way of getting out of it.”

The woman said that after that, Smith moved on to a new “girlfriend” but continued to harass her. She reported his abuse in December 2022.

She said she remained in Dublin until it was abruptly shuttered last April, when she was transferred to a federal prison in Florida. She was also party to a civil suit that was settled in December and has had her sentence shortened by seven years as part of a compassionate release deal. Smith’s defense pointed out that she was undocumented when she was arrested and will likely be granted a U-visa — which is set aside for victims of certain crimes — for aiding the government in Smith’s trial.

Still, she said, Smith’s “abuse broke me, it finished me.”

“There’s no money, there’s no visa that would change anything. Not even me looking at my kids would change the damage that he cost me,” she said. “It is more painful than anything, and I don’t think I can recover from it.”