Lynch also has personal experience confronting police brutality and other abusive behaviors by police. In 1997, a police officer sodomized a handcuffed Haitian immigrant named Abner Louima with a broken broomstick in the bathroom of a police station. Louima suffered a ruptured colon and bladder from this incident, and he spent two months in the hospital. According to one witness, the cop bragged to other officers about how he had tortured Louima, at one point pointing the stick that he inserted in Louima’s rectum at another police officer’s face and saying “Smell this. Smell this.”

The case quickly became a national symbol of police brutality generally, and of brutality against the African American community in particular. Lynch, who was then a senior career prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s office that she currently leads, supervised the successful prosecution of the officer who assaulted Louima. The officer was sentenced to 30 years in prison.