Viral Mugshot Accounts Are Ruining Women’s Lives

Published 5 August 2026 · india

About a month after Megan Davis’ biological mother died of a drug overdose in July 2025, she went out for drinks with a friend in

About a month after Megan Davis’ biological mother died of a drug overdose in July 2025, she went out for drinks with a friend in Northgate, a cluster of bars in College Station, Texas. She downed a couple of shots and got into an altercation with another group of patrons after bumping into them, according to Davis and body camera footage. Security at the bar kicked Davis out and called the police, who charged her with public intoxication, resulting in an overnight jail stay and a $450 fine. “Right before my mugshot was taken, I had a panic attack,” says Davis, who was 23 at the time. “I knew I made a big mistake.” After being released the next morning, she set up a payment plan for the fine, and put the incident behind her. Beginning the day of her arrest, on August 21, 2025, Davis' mugshot started going viral. It was first posted to the Facebook page SayCheese Brazos County Mugshots & Arrests, one of about a dozen Texas-specific mugshot pages under the SayCheese brand, then turned into a hoax on Facebook, alleging she was an Olive Garden waitress who’d been arrested for throwing breadsticks at a customer over tips.

Then, on October 12, 2025, her mugshot appeared on Mugshawtys, a popular Instagram account that posts mugshots of young women, often framed as thirst traps. Thousands of people have now commented—and harshly judged—Davis’ looks and character; when Mugshawtys reposted her photo in a roundup in June, a man wrote in comment on the post “I bet there [sic] parents are proud of them.” Davis replied underneath that her mother had died weeks before the mugshot was taken. “I hope she’s proud of what I’ve done to better myself since this happened,” she wrote. Almost a year later, Davis is still wading through the fallout. “All that this has been for me is just being dragged through the mud,” Davis says, adding that she’s taken “full accountability” for the incident. “I just don't understand where we are going to draw a line with social media and privacy.” Mugshawtys was started around a decade ago by Josh Jeffery, a 31-year-old electrician in California. Up until very recently, it had about 1.8 million Instagram followers, including many loyal, mostly male fans—some of whom trawl arrest bookings and mugshot sites to send in submissions.

The brand, which gained a million followers after being featured on Joe Rogan’s podcast last year, according to Jeffery, also had 19,000 Facebook followers and currently has nearly half a million on X. Within the last week, in response to a list of questions from WIRED, both Meta and TikTok disabled Mugshawtys accounts on their respective platforms. A Meta spokesperson said the account breached multiple policies, pointing WIRED to its community standards page. A TikTok US spokesperson declined to comment on why the account was removed. Jeffery did not respond to a request for comment about the removals. X did not reply to a request for comment. Jeffery says he’s friends with some of the girls he features on the page—and claims he’s not trying to exploit them. “A lot of them end up doing some form of OnlyFans or content creation or something,” he claims, adding that he encourages Mugshawtys followers to chip in for the women's bail or legal fees. But the pages are rife with sexual fantasies and misogynistic jokes. “They don’t have to be old enough to drink, just old enough to swallow,” read one comment under an Instagram post featuring a woman arrested for underage drinking.