Featured Image Credit: Instagram/liziane_gutierrez
Topics: Travel, Police, Transgender, Instagram, Celebrity
Niamh Shackleton
Topics: Travel, Police, Transgender, Instagram, Celebrity
A bikini model says she was accused of being trans and forced to show officers her genitals after being arrested in Morocco.
Liziane Gutierrez said she spent a month in jail for filming a policeman in Marrakesh.
But before being admitted to the women’s prison, the Brazilian influencer said she was forced to undergo a genital inspection to prove she's not a transsexual.
Sharing her disturbing experience, Gutierrez said: "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."
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"I never felt so humiliated in my life," she went on.
"And they were looking up inside me like a doctor or whatever, and I was just crying."
When they realized that she was 'actually a woman', law enforcement put her in a women's prison.
Gutierrez suspects that had she been trans, they would have placed her in a male prison.
The model, who boasts 1.5 million Instagram followers, said her nightmare began when her bag was swiped outside her hotel in Marrakesh on October 30, with her phone and her husband’s work phone inside.
But her husband still had his personal phone, so the couple tried to track their stolen devices.
The next day, a location pinged for one of the stolen phones, and they rushed to the nearest policeman to urge him to act.
She continued: "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."
The Brazilian embassy confirmed that she was arrested to Leo Dias, a celebrity news website in her home country.
Her husband was released after one night after agreeing to hand over the password to his phone, which was used to record the officers.
But the influencer’s ordeal was just beginning.
Gutierrez was soon moved to a holding facility which she called 'complete hell'.
She said: "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 transferred to a large prison where she would remain until a month after her arrest.
For Gutierrez, it was her most awful travel experience – even above her journeys to North Korea and war-torn Ukraine.
She said: “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 contacted for comment.