A bikini model claims she was mistakenly identified as transgender and compelled to display her genitals to authorities after being detained in Morocco.
Liziane Gutierrez recounted spending a month in jail due to filming a police officer in Marrakesh.
Before entering the women’s prison, the Brazilian social media personality alleged she had to undergo an inspection to confirm she wasn’t transgender.
Revealing her troubling ordeal, Gutierrez stated, “The jail was a nightmare when I first got there. They thought I was a transsexual, so I had to open my legs in front of two women and two men.”
“I never felt so humiliated in my life,” she continued.
“And they were looking up inside me like a doctor or whatever, and I was just crying.”
Once authorities confirmed her gender, they placed her in a women’s facility.
Gutierrez speculates that if she had been transgender, she would have been placed in a men’s prison.
The model, who has 1.5 million followers on Instagram, said her ordeal began when her bag was stolen outside her Marrakesh hotel on October 30, containing both her phone and her husband’s work phone.
Her husband still had his personal phone, and they attempted to track the stolen devices.
The following day, they received a location alert for one of the phones and approached a nearby police officer for help.
She explained, “We saw these guys with the police car near the hotel and we went to contact them.”
“And we don’t speak Arabic, we don’t speak French, so I was trying to communicate in English and with Google Translate.”
“They were just ignoring us, so I grabbed the phone and I started to record them, to show to people: if you’re a tourist in Marrakesh and you need police, they’re just going to ignore you.”
“When I did that, they handcuffed me and my husband, and they threw us in a police car and took us to the police station.”
According to the Brazilian embassy, she was detained, as reported by Leo Dias, a celebrity news outlet in Brazil.
Her husband was released after a night in custody upon agreeing to unlock his phone, which had captured the officers on video.
However, Gutierrez’s troubles were just starting.
She was soon transferred to a holding center she described as ‘complete hell’.
She detailed, “In the little room, it was supposed to be like no more than 10 girls, and it was 20 girls.”
“There were bugs everywhere, flies everywhere.”
“There was no ventilation, but people were smoking inside that room. Some people stayed there for like a week. How? I have no clue.”
A day and a half later, she was moved to a large prison where she stayed for a month following her arrest.
For Gutierrez, it was her worst travel experience, even compared to visits to North Korea and conflict-ridden Ukraine.
She remarked, “I know that I’m not a person that is easy to deal with. But at that time, I did nothing wrong. I was just trying to get help.”
“I was in a country that didn’t speak good English, I don’t know nobody there but my husband, so I was just trying to look for help.”
The Moroccan authorities have been approached for their comments on the matter.