Woman Enters MRI With Butt Plug, Ends Up In Hospital

It’s the sort of injury that will make you suspicious of sex toys for a long time. The internet has caught wind of a resurfaced story involving a young woman who was sent to the hospital after she underwent a MRI scan while having an apparently metallic butt plug inside herself.

An anonymous medical provider reported the strange incident to the Food and Drug Administration in April 2023, though it’s received renewed media attention this week. The 22-year-old woman reportedly screamed out in pain as she was pulled out of the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine following a scan, which then prompted her delayed admission of having had a “butt plug” inserted. Though an ambulance did take her to a hospital afterward, the patient’s ultimate fate is unknown.

Here’s the entire blurb, as documented in the FDA report:

Patient was screened for [an] mri and did not disclose that she had a “butt plug” inserted. She went in for the mri and when the mri was over and the tech was pulling the table out the patient started to scream. The patient stated that she felt nauseous, was in pain, and felt like she was going to pass out. An ambulance was called for this patient and she was sent to the hospital. The patient was checked out by the radiologist at the site before transport to ensure the patient was doing okay. The patient has not returned any of our calls yet to try and follow up to see how she is doing.

As anyone who’s ever gotten an MRI exam should know, the magnet powering an MRI is always on. And patients are usually told repeatedly not to bring anything potentially magnetic like metals into the room to avoid injury. People will sometimes ignore these warnings, however, which has led to incidents like a woman getting shot in her buttocks by a gun she had taken into an MRI room.

In this case, it’s unclear why the woman chose not to tell her doctors about her rectal passenger. Soon after the FDA report was originally publicized, social media posts circulated a purportedly true story with similar but expanded details. According to this version, the patient wrongly believed that their butt plug was 100% silicone due to the product’s labeling, only to later—painfully—find out that it had a metallic core. The person reportedly endured major injuries, but survived their experience and was planning to sue the plug’s manufacturer as a result of the mislabeling.

This version of events is wholly unconfirmed, however, as is a supposed scanning image of the butt plug inside a body. And there’s reason to believe that someone is just pulling the internet’s leg with it. The source of this account is third-hand, purportedly being a recollection of a lawyer’s latest client, the lawyer being named Chris Goodnow. And while there is at least one personal injury lawyer with that same name, I couldn’t find any evidence tying Goodnow to such a case outside the original post (Gizmodo has reached to Goodnow and will update if we hear back).

That said, the FDA adverse event report is certainly genuine, so there was a real patient here. According to the report, an ambulance was sent for the woman to take her to a nearby hospital. But after that, no one knows what happened. The medical providers who filed the report tried repeatedly to contact the woman again, but (perhaps understandably) she never returned their calls.

Here’s hoping that the most lasting repercussion of this incident for this woman was simply embarrassment.