A former Colorado jail commander, accused of secretly viewing and replaying thousands of strip-search videos of female inmates over a five-year period, now is also facing a federal class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of his accusers at the La Plata County jail in Durango.

Edward Aber, 62, was charged in July with 117 counts of invasion of privacy for the purposes of sexual gratification and one count of first-degree official misconduct — both Class 1 misdemeanors — for what the indictment against him casts as a perverse abuse of power that began in 2019, a year after he was promoted to the top job at the jail, according to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation.

According to the agency, its investigation into Aber began in early 2025, when CBI was contacted by the La Plata County Sheriff’s Office to assist in its probe of “alleged inappropriate viewing of sensitive video footage.”

By then, Aber was already gone from the jail, having resigned soon after he was put on administrative leave amid allegations of unlawful sexual contact with female inmates and claims that he sexually harassed numerous female jail employees.

No formal charges resulted from those accusations, but Aber left his post in July 2024, amid the ongoing investigation, according to CBI.

Legally, there is no such thing as a consensual sexual encounter between inmates at a correctional facility and the officials charged with overseeing their incarceration.

According to the CBI, strip-search videos of 117 female inmates were illegally accessed and repeatedly viewed by Aber between Feb. 14, 2019, and Jan. 14, 2024, starting soon after he gained access to Evidence.com, a cloud-based “digital evidence management system” that helps law enforcement maintain and store video records.

Aber was back in court in La Plata County on Aug. 7 for an advisement hearing, which The Durango Herald reported was a brief affair primarily focused on “protection, non-harassment and no-contact orders for the 117 alleged victims named in the complaint.”

A pretrial hearing in the misdemeanor charges against Aber is set for Oct. 13.

Attempts by The Gazette to reach counsel for Aber, Durango-based Barrie Newberger King, were unsuccessful, with an automated email response saying attorneys were unavailable and out of the country, with only sporadic email access, through next week.

In a Thursday news release announcing the class action, the legal team for the plaintiffs — Colorado-based civil rights attorneys Kevin Mehr and Tyler Jolly, of Mehr Jolly, and Jason Kosloski of Kosloski Law — addressed the horrid and invasive nature of Aber’s alleged crimes.

“To say this is absolutely disgusting isn’t nearly strong enough,” Kosloski said. “The fact that Aber not only victimized these women for years violating their most fundamental rights as human beings, but that the county, the Board of Commissioners and the sheriff let him do it should shock and frighten us all.”

Mehr warned that if such abuses don’t merit a swift, severe response, it could clear the way for future abuse that not only breaks laws but “shocks the conscience.”

“It’s a violation not only of these women, but of our whole society. And if nothing is done to make sure it never happens again, it will, and it will be worse.”