They promised Karen Frye she would not be sexually assaulted again. The wire she was wearing and the secret video camera planted inside a hollowed-out Bible in her jail cell would be enough to catch her abuser before he could touch her, the officers said. But they were wrong.

Frye, a longtime drug user awaiting trial in Kern County’s notorious Lerdo jail, alleged she had been repeatedly abused by deputy Anthony Lavis, her jailer. She had initially kept quiet, terrified of the repercussions for reporting him. Fearing for the safety of other vulnerable inmates, however, she finally told another deputy of the attacks during a hospital visit.



The sting was supposed to put a stop to it all. But investigating officers did not reach her in time.



“He came inside and pushed me against the wall and pulled down my pants, and that’s when they pulled some kind of alarm,” Frye said, struggling as she recalled the details. “He got out quick, but not until I was assaulted again.” The next day, Frye was taken to the sheriff’s office in Bakersfield and offered a $1,500 cash payment in return for waiving her right to sue.

Articles in this series have so far have examined fatalities and excessive force at the hands of law enforcement officers in Kern County, California, which has the highest per capita rate of officer-involved deaths anywhere in the US so far this year. But a Guardian investigation into the county’s two largest police departments also identified a string of sexual misconduct cases involving officers, and a pattern of secretive attempts to pay off victims with small sums of cash.

At least eight vulnerable victims were offered – and in some cases accepted – cash payoffs by the sheriff’s office shortly after the alleged abuse occurred. These payments, in some cases as low as $200, absolved the department of civil liability and were made without the presence of lawyers, according to a review of depositions, internal sheriff’s office memos and victims’ accounts. Lavis was one of two Kern County deputies convicted in the past five years for assaulting multiple women.



Meanwhile the police department in Bakersfield, Kern County’s biggest city, is facing allegations from a former female trainee officer that she was fired and placed on a national blacklist barring her from becoming a police officer elsewhere after complaining about sexual harassment from male officers.



There’s no question in my mind that law enforcement in Kern County have a problem with gender

Among other claims, the former officer accuses colleagues of calling her a whore, telling her that she was expected to have sex with them, and bullying her about her physical appearance. The department employs 27 women out of a total of 355 sworn officers, well below the national average for large departments.



“There’s no question in my mind that law enforcement in Kern County have a problem with gender,” said Penny Harrington, a California-based co-founder of the National Center for Women and Policing (NCWP) and the former chief of the Portland, Oregon police bureau.



“They have this outlaw mentality: ‘We can do whatever we want to do, we’re the police.’ And they don’t feel accountable,” Harrington added, after learning of the findings of this investigation, which includes interviews with women, including Frye, who have never spoken in public about their experiences before.



In 2009, Frye, 51, was facing a charge of driving away after injuring someone in a car accident. She had been receiving medical treatment in the jail’s infirmary for a series of cancers found on her uterus and gall bladder. Despite being prescribed a course of powerful painkillers, she was left in excruciating pain. It was at this time, at her most vulnerable, she said that deputy Lavis preyed on her: he watched her shower, he bullied and humiliated her, and he sexually assaulted her multiple times.



Lavis admitted, during a deposition, only to the assault that was caught in the sting operation on 8 October of that year. He was charged and pleaded no contest to three counts of assault by a public officer, including one related to Frye. The full list of charges related to four different women and included a host of other allegations. Through the plea deal he was sentenced to three years and four months in prison, but Lavis’s lawyer claimed his actions involved “nothing truly non-consensual”.



Frye, who was jailed after not contesting her own criminal charge, still has nightmares. She rarely unlocks the gate to her home by a dusty highway where she lives with her three chihuahuas. She requested the location not be disclosed as she continues to fear for her life.



“I will never feel safe again,” she said, her eyes darting around the small bedroom, bathed in morning sunlight splintering through a black curtain that is rarely opened.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest On the outskirts of Bakersfield, where the city’s police department employs just 27 female officers. Photograph: Mae Ryan/The Guardian

“That night was the worst night of my life,” said another woman, named only as Jane Doe in court to protect her identity. Her abuser, 28-year-old Kern County deputy Gabriel Lopez, was sitting in court awaiting sentencing in September this year. “I did absolutely nothing wrong and yet this man used his badge to take advantage of me and sexually assault me,” she continued, at the judge’s invitation. “I will be scarred for the rest of my life because of what he did to me.”

The assault occurred on 25 March 2013, just two weeks after Lopez had completed his field training and qualified as a patrol officer.



He and deputy Christopher Escobedo entered Doe’s apartment in Tehachapi, a small city in the county’s south-west, and conducted a spot check on her boyfriend who was out on probation. They then moved to her bedroom and found the 21-year-old woman stirring from sleep. The officers placed her in handcuffs. Lopez patted her down and then, according to a civil lawsuit, proceeded to move his hands down her shorts, grab her crotch and grope her. The handcuffs were removed. Then the officers left.



Ten minutes later Deputy Lopez arrived back at the apartment. This time, he was alone.



He told Doe he needed to perform a cavity search on her to check once more for drugs. He took her back to the bedroom and instructed her to take off all her clothes. He touched her all over her naked body as she bent over with her hands against the bed. She sobbed throughout. She begged him to stop, but he refused. And then he left.



Doe reported the assault to the sheriff’s office.



A week later, on 1 April, two senior officials from the Kern County sheriff’s office – Commander Shaun Beasley, who ran the human resources division, and civil litigation coordinator Michael Mahoney – arrived at her door. They brought with them $5,000 in cash, taken from a safe kept in a locked human resources office at the sheriff’s headquarters.



An internal sheriff’s office memo, obtained by the Guardian, shows the two men started with an offer of $1,000 in exchange for waiving the department’s liability. Doe declined, but gradually the men moved their offer upwards, reaching $7,500.



In Mahoney’s sworn deposition he recalls Commander Beasley left the meeting at this point. “He had to make some calls to get the right money,” Mahoney said.



“And then he came back in and said: ‘The money’s on the way.’”



Doe considered their final offer, and thought about how it might help pay off her bills. But then she refused, after her father called telling her not to settle.

The same strategy, however, initially prevailed in the case of Karen Frye. Almost as soon as the botched sting operation concluded, she was taken away to the sheriff’s headquarters in downtown Bakersfield. She was then assessed in hospital. A day after the sting, in an interview room at headquarters, she was given a free meal from a local Chipotle as Mahoney’s predecessor, Michael Etcheverry, placed $1,500 in bills on the table in front of her and asked her to sign away her right to sue in the civil courts.

Frye, who was still taking strong painkillers for her tumours, signed the paperwork and the money was added to her jail bank account, effectively placing the cash back into the custody of the county. She claims she thought it was cash for taking part in the sting and had no idea she was signing away liability.



“I was totally tricked by the sheriff’s department. They stick together. They knew what they were doing was wrong,” she said with disgust.



Lawyers who took up Frye’s case successfully argued that the waiver was unenforceable as it was signed only a day after the sexual assault occurred, and after Frye had received medical treatment, leaving her not competent enough to sign away liability.



Lavis faced accusations of abuse from four other women.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Anthony Michael Lavis. Photograph: Felix Adamo/The Bakersfield Californian

The day after Frye signed her waiver, two of these other female accusers were brought to the sheriff’s department in downtown Bakersfield. According to Etcheverry’s sworn testimony, a transcript of which was seen by the Guardian, one settled for $1,000 cash, the other for $200. Weeks later, the two remaining victims, who had been transferred to prison in Chowchilla, in central California, were both paid $200 to waiver liability.

Etcheverry recalled that he was joined on the 142-mile drive from Bakersfield to Chowchilla by two Kern County sheriff’s detectives who were criminally investigating Lavis, and who had informed Etcheverry the women would seek to file a civil lawsuit against the department.

“How did you come up with that figure for those two victims?” Frye’s attorney David Cohn asked Etcheverry during deposition.

“I believe that was just the starting point,” he replied.



“So, essentially, you throw out a number, and if they accept it, you’re done; or if there’s negotiations, you keep going?” Cohn continued.



“Yes,” Etcheverry said.



How they tried to buy her off, I think, was egregious

Frye sued Lavis, the sheriff’s office, Etcheverry, and detectives involved in the investigation – not just for the sexual battery, but for fraud, conspiracy, negligence and other constitutional violations. The case was settled for $300,000.



“How they tried to buy her off, I think, was egregious,” said Cohn, a veteran of Bakersfield’s criminal justice circuit.



Harrington, co-founder of the NCWP and America’s first female police chief of a large metropolitan department, said she had never heard of police departments paying off the victims of sexual attacks at the hands of their own officers. She described the payments as “almost underground”.



“It saves the department the embarrassment, they can brush it under the carpet and of course the community never hears about it and that’s just not OK.”



A spokesman for the Kern County sheriff’s office did not comment on the payments.



•••

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Deputy Gabriel Lopez. Photograph: The Bakersfield Californian

Deputy Lopez was eventually sentenced to two years for the assault of Doe and another victim, an 18-year-old woman whom he molested during a strip search on 26 March 2013, a day after his attack on Jane Doe in Tehachapi. Lopez pleaded no contest.

The teenager had reported a domestic disturbance in her home involving her mother. Lopez took her to another room and sexually assaulted her similarly to the way he had the day before. But this second woman, also named as Jane Doe in court, was quietly paid $5,000 during a meeting with Mahoney soon after the attack, and was unable to bring a civil claim.



Lopez’s third alleged victim, Lori Kaplan, a 79-year-old woman who called the sheriff’s office during a violent dispute with her husband, who was diagnosed with late-stage Alzheimer’s, has claimed in a civil suit that Lopez sexually assaulted her in a similar fashion to his other victims, on 10 March 2010.

Kaplan was also visited by Mahoney shortly after the alleged assault occurred. Payment was discussed, her lawyer said, but no figure was agreed upon.



Neil Gehlawat, a lawyer representing both Kaplan and the 21-year-old Jane Doe, described the ongoing civil suit against Lopez and the department as a potential “seven-figure case”. He questioned why Lopez was ever allowed onto the force:

“I think the question in my mind is: to what extent do these deputies get psychologically screened,” said Cohn. “I suspect it’s not much.”

Donny Youngblood, the Kern County sheriff, argued in an interview that his deputies were subject to the “most stringent examination” before they were allowed out on patrol or inside jails. He said trainees were given a polygraph test where they were probed over prior sexual behaviour, and were subjected to a psychological exam consisting of “500 questions”.



“It’s not foolproof,” said Youngblood. “But we deal with that, and we deal with that harshly.”



The sheriff pointed out that both Lavis and Lopez were convicted following investigations by the Kern County sheriff’s office itself. In Lopez’s case, the investigation was conducted by the department’s dedicated sexual assault and abuse unit. There were a total of 181 reported rape cases in Kern County last year, a rate of 20.7 per 100,000 residents, which is lower than the statewide rate of 24.22. The number of domestic violence calls in Kern for 2014, 4,868, represented a rate of 557 per 100,000 residents – much higher than the statewide rate of 402.



Following the Frye case in 2009, Sheriff Youngblood vowed to reduce the amount of contact between male officials and female inmates at the Lerdo jail, a sprawling facility that holds over 1,200 male and female inmates on the outskirts of Bakersfield. But two years later the department settled a $7m class action lawsuit from a group of former inmates who were inappropriately strip-searched by detention deputies between March 2005 and October 2007.

It made me feel objectified. Are they looking at me? Am I doing something wrong?

The lead plaintiff, Marsial Lopez, a former inmate at the Lerdo facility, claimed he was subjected to multiple strip and cavity searches in the presence of other inmates and female deputies, following visits to and from court. Lopez, who was detained for two years and four months on a murder charge before he was acquitted after DNA evidence was presented at a retrial, was also forced to undergo a final cavity search as he was processed for release.

According to the suit, others in the class action (of which lawyers estimated to include at least 44,000 plaintiffs) were subjected to unwarranted strip and cavity searches, often in the presence of detention deputies and inmates of the opposite sex. “In many instances,” the lawsuit states, inmates were “forced to touch each others’ bodies during the searches”.



Youngblood argued at the time of the settlement that his deputies were “doing exactly what they were supposed to be doing”. With reference to a number of other counties in California that settled multimillion-dollar class actions for strip and cavity searches, Youngblood added: “We were doing things the way everyone in California were doing things at the time.”



The jail implemented a host of reforms, including privacy screens for use during searches. Nonetheless, in 2014 another former Lerdo inmate, Christine Donaldson, sued the department for an alleged improper strip search. The incident, she argued, occurred in February 2012. Although she was searched by a female officer, she claims that a male deputy surreptitiously watched it occur.



Two Kern County officers are meanwhile accused of sexually assaulting girls at the county’s secure detention facility for juvenile offenders run by the probation department. Cesar Navejar, 36, has been criminally charged with sexually assaulting a girl inmate repeatedly in September 2014. The girl alleged in a civil lawsuit against the county that the abuse culminated in Navejar molesting her intimately in her room.



A second officer, however, is facing similar allegations but has not been charged. George Anderson is accused of assaulting a girl at the facility several times between September last year and January this year – “grabbing her buttocks, fondling her breasts and digitally penetrating her”, according to a civil lawsuit filed by the girl against Kern County and Anderson.



The girl also alleges that Anderson asked her to masturbate him, give him oral sex and have full intercourse with her, but that she refused.

•••

Deputy Carly Snow was inspired to join the sheriff’s office after her mother was murdered by a violent partner. She enrolled with the department three and half years ago, and now patrols the streets of Bakersfield’s drug riddled Oildale neighbourhood.

“You don’t get a lot of respect from the public,” Snow said during a patrol one evening last month. “You go to calls to deal with people and they don’t really want to talk to you or they’re kind of old fashioned and they feel like women don’t really have a place in law enforcement.”

Snow said that she was often called to domestic violence incidents, and is frustrated by the cycle of abusers she comes into contact with. Despite this, she said, she rarely uses force on the job.

“I just try and talk to them and tell them what their options are and see if you can get them to go peacefully with me. And most of the time I can.”

But, Snow said, female KCSO officers had to prove to their male counterparts they could “handle business”.

The sheriff’s office did not provide the Guardian with statistics on the number of women they employ. But Sheriff Youngblood said in an interview the department employed women in a broad range of ranks, and repeatedly pointed to his department’s second most senior officer, Undersheriff RoseMary Wahl.

“We don’t look at ‘male’ [or] ‘female’ in our organisation, I hope. We shouldn’t. We look at them as police officers,” said the sheriff. “[At] almost every rank we have female officers.”

The same certainly cannot be said for the Bakersfield police department. An International Association of Chiefs of Police study of the department in 2014 found just 7% of sworn officers were women. It honed in, particularly, on the lack of women in senior roles, noting that just one officer in an executive position was female.

The department falls well behind the national average. According to US Department of Justice statistics, police departments with 100 or more sworn officers employ on average 15% female staff. Sheriff’s offices of the same size are composed of 13% female officers.

•••

Hillary Bjorneboe had only wanted one job since growing up in Bakersfield among men who had sworn to serve and protect. “As a kid, you see their uniforms, you see their badges – they are the heroes,” said Bjorneboe, in her first interview since being forced out of the city’s police department. “I felt like I was made to be a police officer. I felt it was my calling.”

Bjorneboe made it through Bakersfield’s police academy program, one of only three women that year, she claimed, adding that at least five female trainees did not make it through. She passed a written test, a physical test, a psychological test, a lie-detector test and an interview with a captain.



At age 24, she graduated into the department as a trainee officer in August 2014. But just seven months later she had been forced out and left with no prospect of resuming her short career in the service she adored.



Her mistake, she claims, was to have complained of sexual harassment from officer Travis Brewer, her field training officer (FTO), or supervisor, during her first weeks in the job. Bjorneboe alleges that Brewer and his best friend, officer Steven Glenn, quickly began bullying her over her serious demeanour, her refusal to curse and her lack of interest in discussing sex.



“It was a really big deal to them that I never partied and I never drank,” she said. On one occasion, she said, Brewer told her it would be “real cool if she was a stripper”.



During one shift, said Bjorneboe, Brewer asked her how many men she had dated. Three, she said. “Oh, so you’re a whore,” Brewer replied. Another day, Brewer and Glenn allegedly hassled her to explain why she was no longer dating a man she had been seeing. After she told them it was because she had rejected his sexual advances, the male officers allegedly laughed at her and from then on frequently told her she was a lesbian.

At another point Brewer told her she was expected to have sex with him, she alleged. “You know all trainees sleep with their FTOs?” Bjorneboe quoted him as saying, adding that Brewer and Glenn also made fun of her appearance. “It made me feel objectified,” she said, recounting her experience with a quiet steeliness. “Are they looking at me? Am I doing something wrong? How am I supposed to take it? I didn’t like it.”

Five weeks in, Bjorneboe told a senior officer about the “hazing” she was receiving. A sergeant privately apologised to her, she said. But nothing else was done. In the following weeks, Bjorneboe was ensnared in an internal affairs inquiry when she reported that Brewer had ordered her to not record as evidence some marijuana they had seized from a suspect during a street search, and to instead place it in the back of his patrol car, which he used to drive to and from work. Her training manual instructed her: “The FTO’s directions are to be accepted and followed at all times.” She did what she was told, she said, but promptly confided in a retired officer she knew. Word got back to the department and the inquiry was launched.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hillary Bjorneboe filed a lawsuit against the Bakersfield police department for sexual harassment, gender discrimination and other complaints. ‘I’m standing up against corruption and for other girls who have been in similar situations to me.’ Photograph: Mae Ryan/The Guardian

According to Bjorneboe’s civil complaint, the union representative assigned to her urged her to lie and say she had invented the allegation because she “was just emotional”. She ignored his advice and told her story – including details of the harassment. Rumours began circulating that she was in trouble after sleeping with Brewer. But, according to Bjorneboe, after a three-month internal inquiry she was told she had been cleared of wrongdoing and returned to full duty. She went on to receive written confirmation that she had passed the first phase of her traineeship.

Yet in March this year, Bjorneboe said, she was called in to the office of captain Joseph Bianco and abruptly informed that she had not, in fact, passed the first phase. She would have to leave. “I know you’re shocked,” she quoted Bianco as saying, “but in a paramilitary organisation such as this department, the bottom layer of officers does not know what is going on at the top, and the officers at the top have made the decision.”

“Does this have to do with Brewer?” Bjorneboe asked the captain. “Yes,” Bianco replied, “but it also encompasses your whole time at the department.” A suggestion was made that they would recommend her to another department, she said. But a couple weeks later, on the day before her birthday, Bjorneboe received a letter from the district attorney. She was being placed on the so-called “Brady List” of police officers found to have lied. She was unhireable.

I’m not the weak little girl that they thought I was. I’m very strong

Her dream ended, the 25-year-old is now suing the department for sexual harassment, gender discrimination, wrongful termination and other complaints. Brewer and Glenn are believed to still be working for the department, which declines to discuss personnel matters.

“I’m standing up against corruption and for other girls who have been in similar situations to me, to let them know that this doesn’t need to be tolerated,” said Bjorneboe. “I’m not the weak little girl that they thought I was. I’m very strong.”

Bjorneboe is not alone in accusing authorities in Kern County of not taking sexual misconduct by law enforcement officers seriously enough. In 2009 a Bakersfield police officer was charged with inappropriately touching a woman who rode in his patrol car from a party. The two criminal counts against him were eventually dropped by prosecutors and a civil lawsuit from the woman was settled for $72,500 before coming to trial.

The Bakersfield police department did not respond to a request for comment on the Bjorneboe’s allegations.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Karen Frye says she was placed in solitary confinement for two months after she was sexually assaulted by a Kern County sheriff’s detention deputy. Photograph: Alex Parker

After Karen Frye signed the liability form in October 2009, she was transferred back to the booking jail in downtown Bakersfield. She was then left in solitary confinement, inside a tiny cell, for two months. She was told it was for her own protection, but Frye believes it was to prevent details of the abuse going public. Her jailers refused to talk to her, she recalled.

“I started talking to the walls,” Frye said. “I mean I was like going crazy.”

Following her release, Frye got hooked on drugs again. She claimed in an interview that she received threats from Lavis as his criminal trial approached.

But now, five years on, she is trying to piece her life back together. She’s been clean for 20 months. Lavis’s actions continue to haunt her. She has never received an apology from the sheriff’s office.

To heal completely, she says, she needs one more thing.

“This is where I was born and raised, and I don’t want to be here anymore.”

She drew breath.

“I want to move out of Kern County.”

Additional reporting by Ciara McCarthy, Jamiles Lartey, Alex Parker and Grant Slater

• This article was amended on 11 October 2018 to remove some personal information.