A Southern California tenant says her landlord hid spy cameras in her bedroom’s smoke detectors and secretly recorded her while she was “naked and engaging in intimate situations,” according to federal court filings obtained by The Independent.
After downloading the illicit footage, the landlord allegedly shared the unauthorized videos with numerous associates — among them a male porn star he foisted on the tenant in hopes of surreptitiously capturing footage of them together.
In a civil complaint filed February 27, the woman, who is identified in court papers only as “Jane Doe,” accuses Bond Nichols, a 74-year-old father of three, of violating her “fundamental right to privacy,” contending the tawdry scheme caused her “severe emotional distress, anxiety, and mental anguish.”
Nichols admitted to everything when confronted by Doe, the complaint states. He did not respond on Monday to emails, voicemails, and texts seeking comment. The case against Nichols is a civil one and there is no indication he is facing any criminal action.
Jane Doe’s nightmare began in September 2018, when she rented a bedroom with en suite bath from Nichols in his 3,000-square-foot Long Beach residence, via Roomies.com, her complaint states. Long Beach is a coastal city of 450,000 roughly 25 miles south of Los Angeles, and is home to the second-largest port in the United States.
The complaint describes Nichols as a “real estate mogul” who owns numerous properties, and rents out rooms as well as entire homes using the Roomies.com platform. Doe kept her room locked, and had the only set of keys to it, according to the complaint.
“About three weeks into Doe’s rental, Nichols started making comments to Jane Doe about her body and asked her if she would ‘consider trading personal favors’ for rent,” the complaint goes on. “Jane Doe brushed him off. At first she merely thought he was simply acting like a degenerate old man. But when the comments continued and she noticed several young women come to the Property and enter his bedroom, she realized Nichols’ comments were not a joke.”
That November, Doe told Nichols she would be leaving for a two-week vacation, to which the complaint says he replied, seemingly out of nowhere, “You know I would never put a camera in you[r] room right?”
Unnerved by Nichols’s odd statement, Doe changed the lock on her bedroom door before going away, according to the complaint. But, it continues, while Doe was out of town, Nichols contacted her and said there was a leak in her bathroom. In order to fix it, Nichols told Doe a locksmith would have to unlock her door, the complaint continues. Upon her return, Doe found the lock had been changed outright, the complaint alleges.
Doe moved out in December 2018, when she found a place closer to work, according to the complaint. More than six years later, in February 2024, a friend of Nichols informed Doe that Nichols had “installed smoke detectors with cameras in them in her room,” and that “Nichols’ cameras recorded Jane Doe naked and engaging in intimate situations with third parties,” the complaint states.
The friend, who is named in the complaint but did not respond to The Independent’s requests for comment, told Doe that Nichols had shown him the videos, which were forwarded from the smoke detector cameras to Nichols’s phone and email. Nichols also showed the videos to an unknown number of “friends and third parties,” the complaint states.
A short time later, Doe “confronted Nichols about his actions,” according to the complaint, which says Nichols “directly admitted to Jane Doe that he secretly installed the surveillance cameras, took the Illegal Videos and showed the Illegal Videos to his friends.”
“Recently, Jane Doe learned that Nichols sent the Illegal videos to a male pornographic star and secretly tried to arrange for a meeting between Jane Doe and this individual so he could secretly record them,” the complaint contends.
The videos “captured [Doe’s] personal, private and compromising moments, in a space she rightfully believed to be comfortable, safe, and private,” according to the complaint, which calls Nichols’s conduct “extreme and outrageous,” and beyond “the bounds of human decency.” It says she has since suffered “severe emotional distress… anxiety, shock, embarrassment, loss of self-esteem, disgrace, humiliation, powerlessness, sleeplessness, and loss of enjoyment of life,” and has sought “professional counseling and treatment to deal with these injuries.”
Doe is asking a judge to hand down an injunction blocking Nichols from further distributing the videos, and seeks a minimum of $150,000 for each violation, as well as punitive, actual, and liquidated damages, plus attorneys’ fees.
Last year, an Indiana man was hit with felony voyeurism charges over allegations that he installed a hidden smoke detector camera in his girlfriend’s daughter’s bedroom, having already been caught once filming her as she got out of the shower. A few months prior, a North Miami Beach landlord was arrested when his tenant, who rented a room in the home with her two children, discovered the smoke detectors in her bedroom contained hidden cameras. In June 2024, a Louisiana man was arrested on 11 counts of video voyeurism for allegedly using a smoke detector camera to spy on his children’s nanny in the bathroom.
On Monday, First Lady Melania Trump was in Washington, D.C. to lobby for the “Take it Down Act,” a bipartisan anti-revenge porn bill that passed the Senate last month.
