Video of FCI Dublin officer's wife cooking naked in kitchen denied at trial
Carla "Sissi" Smith pulls at her husband, former FCI Dublin correctional officer Darrell "Dirty Dick" Smith, during the first day of his second sex abuse trial. He claims he is innocent. Sept. 2, 2025
OAKLAND, Calif. - An eight-minute video of a former FCI Dublin correctional officer's wife cooking naked in the kitchen is being contested during the officer's federal criminal trial where he is charged with 14 counts of sexual abuse.
Asst. U.S. Attorneys Andrew Paulson and Sailaja Paidipaty asked U.S. District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers if they could introduce this video to the jury as they prosecute Darrell "Dirty Dick" Smith for sex crimes from 2019 to 2021 when he worked at the now-closed women's prison in Dublin.
In a brief ruling Wednesday morning, Gonzalez Rogers said the video could not be introduced to the jury, unless somehow, the wife of Darrell "Dirty Dick" Smith brought it up herself.
His wife, Carla Sisi Smith, is expected to be the final defense witness called to the stand on Wednesday, and the jury could begin deliberating as soon as Thursday. She did not testify in her husband's first trial, which ended in a mistrial in April.
The second trial against Smith began on Sept. 2, and he has maintained his innocence.
It's not exactly clear what she will testify to in defense of her husband.
1st day retrial for FCI Dublin officer charged with sex crimes: 'Never touched her'
As Darrell Wayne Smith was heading into the first day of his second sex abuse trial when he was a correctional officer at the now-closed FCI Dublin women's prison, he took the time to turn to a KTVU photojournalist outside court to speak his mind.
But in court documents filed Tuesday, Paulson and Paidipaty tried to persuade the judge that this video they have of her, taken from Darrell Smith's phone in May 2023, is relevant to his pattern of allegedly not listening to women. And they provided testimony from the trial of some of Smith's alleged victims asking him to stop, when he didn't.
In the video, Sisi Smith is seen in the kitchen cooking a meal while naked, prosecutors described. Her husband is not seen in the video, but his voice can be heard.
Sisi Smith realizes that she is being filmed and tells her husband that she doesn't like it, prosecutors described.
She repeatedly asks her husband to stop filming her, according to the prosecutors. "No more. Please don't. Stop, please. Please, I'm asking you to stop," the prosecutors wrote. "Kind of feeling a little some way about people filming me right now. For some reason, that's not stopping you. I don't quite get it."
About two minutes later, Sisi Smith gets a towel and wraps it around herself.
The prosecutors said that her discomfort in the video is "evident by her words and her actions."
The prosecutors also said they realize that this video is "prejudicial" to Darrell Smith and "personally embarrassing" for his wife, but they argued that the "probative value is extremely high."
Smith's attorneys, Joanna Sheridan and Noami Chung, argued that the video should not be shown to the jury, and the judge ultimately agreed.
Powerless in Prison: The fallout of FCI Dublin
In April, the Bureau of Prisons abruptly shut down the troubled FCI Dublin. KTVU interviews dozens of women and explains what led up to the closure, questioning whether this was retaliation for outside oversight over the prison, which has been riddled with sex abuse for decades.
Smith is one of 10 former FCI Dublin officers charged with sex crimes, and the only one at this point not to have been found guilty.
Nine other FCI Dublin correctional officers, including the former warden, have all either pleaded guilty, or been found guilty by juries, to various sex crimes between 2019 and 2021 at the women's prison, which was closed in April 2024 and now sits vacant.
This is the most Bureau of Prisons officers charged with sex crimes from any one prison in the United States.