A Texas police officer allegedly ripped out a woman's nipple piercing roadside

A Texas state trooper is being sued by two women who say they were inappropriately touched and injured.

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last updated 8 November 2016

A Texas state trooper named Michael Tice has come under fire after two women, Tayler Myers, 18, and Courtney Palacios, 19, say he roughly attempted to remove their nipple rings by the side of the road during a traffic stop on Oct. 31.

Myers and Palacios were riding in the back seat of a friend's car when Tice pulled them over. The officer said he found a single pill in the car and identified it as a narcotic. He arrested the women but asked that they remove all piercings roadside before taking them to jail. "And then we told him, 'Well, where do we go to take out our nipple rings?'" Myers said. "And he was like, 'You are going to have to do it right here, in the open.'"

Both teenagers were able to remove one ring but not the other, at which point Tice allegedly got a pair of pliers from his cruiser. "He came up to me and he got really close to it, and he was just staring," Palacios recalled. "So then, without gloves or anything — and I could see dirt under his nails, it was extremely disgusting — he gets on there and he tried to twist it and he starts shaking from trying so hard and he ends up pulling it and ripping it and it starts bleeding." She was not offered medical attention.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.

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