In Mississippi, Open Secrets Lay in a Pile of Records

The accusations of sexual misconduct against Eddie Scott, the sheriff of Clay County, Miss., will be new to almost everyone who reads our latest investigation.

They are not new to the residents of Clay County, where Sheriff Scott has been in office since 2012 and was chief deputy sheriff before then. But the particulars of what the sheriff has been accused of and the accounting of how people in power handled the allegations is a long story — one we wanted to tell.

After months of reporting, Jerry Mitchell, a veteran investigative reporter in Mississippi, and I published an article this month that charted allegations against the sheriff that date to his earliest days in office. Two women accused the sheriff of using his power to coerce them into sex. Another woman said she endured sexual harassment from the sheriff while she was an employee in his office. At least five people who accused the sheriff of misconduct, or who were potential witnesses, said he had retaliated against them.

Many of these allegations, despite being detailed in courtroom transcripts, lawsuits and Facebook posts, went nowhere.

Our investigation is part of a series on the extraordinary power of Mississippi sheriffs from The New York Times’s Local Investigations Fellowship, led by the former executive editor Dean Baquet, and co-published by The Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting at Mississippi Today.

The fellowship gives reporters a year to focus on one project, without juggling the demands of daily news. It requires fellows to live in the areas they cover, ensuring that we are connected to the places and communities we write about. I’m one of three reporters based in Jackson, Miss. The Times also has fellows investigating issues in Maryland, Hawaii, Maine and Wisconsin.

The investigation into Sheriff Scott began with a tip. In January 2022, a woman named Amber Jones posted on a public Facebook page accusing the sheriff of forcing her into sex in 2017, when she was incarcerated at the Clay County jail.

Ms. Jones agreed to talk with us, but it took time to build trust with her. Before we interviewed her, she had spoken to lawyers and F.B.I. agents who were investigating the sheriff’s actions. But those conversations, she believed, had gotten her nowhere. As she waited a year or more for news from federal authorities, she said, she endured vitriol from people in her town for publicly accusing the sheriff.

As Jerry and I talked to witnesses and reviewed court records to check the veracity of Ms. Jones’s allegations, we found dozens of people who were critical of Sheriff Scott. We talked to several witnesses who said they believed they had been targeted for arrest after speaking up. We obtained a recording of a man who said he planted drugs in Ms. Jones’s car at the request of a Clay County Sheriff’s deputy.

The reporting was complicated by lax record-keeping in Clay County. Jail records, such as sign-out sheets that could have confirmed aspects of Ms. Jones’s allegations, were missing or stacked in huge, lopsided piles on the floor of the sheriff’s office. One file detailing allegations against Sheriff Scott had been misfiled in the court clerk’s office. The file contained court testimony in which a woman accused Sheriff Scott of coercing her into sex starting in 2009, while he was a deputy sheriff working on her case.

After months of interviewing sources and digging through court records, we were finally ready to speak with the sheriff himself.

He appeared to be very open with us; he even agreed to be interviewed on camera — at which point I showed him screenshots of Ms. Jones’s Snapchat records and texts that he had written. And, still, he denied any untoward conduct.

After our article was published, he again denied any wrongdoing on local television and in a Facebook post.

While people across the country have expressed shock over our reporting, many in the tiny town of West Point — where the sheriff remains popular — have called our work an effort to smear him before his re-election bid on Aug. 8.

But that couldn’t be further from the truth. The mission of the Local Investigations Fellowship is to devote journalistic resources to regions where local newsrooms have emptied out. And we have been told that certain lawmen in Mississippi have long ruled like kings, untouchable even when faced with serious accusations of abuse.

We don’t plan on stopping our reporting anytime soon.