Woman’s lawsuit claims Motel 6 and other chains allowed her to be raped nearly 1,000 times
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She was just 13 when she fled child protective services in Dallas, and within days, she met a pimp who put a gun to her head and forced her to perform sex at three hotel chains in Los Angeles and Texas, her lawsuit alleges.
She was “raped nearly one thousand (1,000) times” at eight hotels operating under the banner of the three chains, according to legal documents filed Tuesday in Los Angeles County Superior Court. One of the hotels was a Motel 6 in Westlake just a few blocks south of MacArthur Park — a fortress-like structure with a two-star rating — and another was a two-story Motel 6 in Gardena, the suit claims.
The woman, identified only as Jane AB Doe, alleges that Motel 6 franchisor G6 Hospitality LLC, Wyndham Hotel Group and Red Roof Inn are liable for her forced servitude because hotel workers knew what was happening.
The hotel chains, the suit alleges, “enjoy the steady stream of income that sex traffickers bring to their hotels.”
In a superseding indictment, prosecutors increased the number of alleged victims from one to three and said Combs’ criminal conspiracy began years earlier.
The lawsuit is one of hundreds that have been filed against hotel chains in recent years, claiming that the corporations are complicit in sex trafficking. Plaintiffs argue that the chains bear more responsibility than franchisees because they set policy and control the booking and payment processes for lodging.
The woman’s lawyers, Nicholas Dagher, Robert Simon and Brad Simon, allege the chains violated the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act and are seeking unspecified compensatory and punitive damages. The federal law was expanded in 2008 to allow survivors to sue anyone who benefits from an enterprise they know or could have known was enabling trafficking. The suit alleges that the trafficking occurred from 2012 to 2014.
“Often, hotel employees would not only witness Jane AB Doe being trafficked, but they would actively help her trafficker perpetrate the crime, and on some occasions, would even watch Jane AB Doe as she was being raped or participate in the rape themselves,” according to the lawsuit.
At other times, the suit alleges, hotel staff would ignore “obvious signs of abuse,” including but not limited to visible bruising, malnourishment, being in a drugged state, and clothing inappropriate for the weather or general public.
Red Roof Inn said it could not comment on the litigation because it had not been served or contacted by the woman’s lawyers. The other two defendants had yet to respond to requests for comment from The Times.
Lawyers for alleged trafficking victims first used the novel legal theory to sue corporations about a decade ago, but the number of lawsuits has been growing in recent years.
According to the Los Angeles lawsuit, the chains have active programs to alert staff to the dangers of sex traffickers. It alleges that the plaintiff knows of “countless’’ other victims who were also raped at the hotels.
In addition to Motel 6 locations in L.A. and Gardena, the lawsuit identifies others in Dallas and Austin, Texas. It also names a Studio 6 in Dallas and a Red Roof Inn in Houston, as well as a Days Inn by Wyndham and a Super 8 by Wyndham whose locations were not specified.
The lawsuit claims that on one occasion, a maid went to the plaintiff’s room and told her she had been “warned by the front desk not to service that room.” Her pimp would make “specific room requests so as to find convenient entrances for buyers. Defendants would even instruct AB, her trafficker and buyer[s] to use certain entrances [and] exits so as not to be seen,” court documents said.
All of the defendants “financially benefited from the sex trafficking of Jane AB Doe and other victims like her and developed and maintained business models that attract and foster the commercial sex market for traffickers,’’ the suit alleges.
L.A. County Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman announced he will not charge Marilyn Manson, a.k.a. Brian Warner, in cases of alleged domestic violence and rape.
Nationwide, Homeland Security Investigations have identified hotels as one of the most common sites for human sex trafficking. According to the Polaris Project, a nonprofit organization combating sex trafficking, nearly 9,000 victims of sex trafficking identified hotels as the places where it occurred.
Last year, the Independent newspaper found that 117 Red Roof Inn locations were identified in sex trafficking lawsuits in 40 states. Such is the level of concern that the hotel industry and many of the large chains have begun educational campaigns.
The American Hotel and Lodging Assn.’s “No Room for Trafficking” campaign seeks to build awareness around human trafficking prevention by providing educational resources and training employees on ways they can play a role in preventing human trafficking.
Nonetheless, the L.A. lawsuit says that the chain’s “failure to investigate and monitor human trafficking is sufficient to establish defendants knew or should have known of human trafficking for commercial sex occurring at their brand properties, including the locations where Plaintiff was trafficked.’’
After running away from child protective services as a young teen in Texas, the plaintiff claimed that she met another girl and her boyfriend on a train. The suit claims the boyfriend became her pimp after he sexually assaulted her at gunpoint and told her that he owned her. “She wakes up the following day, and her trafficker gives her clothes and heels,” and within a day, she was forced to commit sex acts for money, court documents say.
She had to have sex with enough customers to satisfy her pimp’s daily minimum and was not allowed to leave the hotel rooms, she claims. “Her trafficker would beat, yell, and torment Doe often and loudly in the public common areas of the hotels in which she was trafficked,’’ according to the lawsuit
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