SAN DIEGO (CN) — Multiple hotel chains must face claims of being complicit in sex trafficking because they either knew or should have known that traffickers used their hotels to exploit, abuse and prostitute people after a San Diego federal judge declined the chains’ motion to dismiss on Friday.
In a complaint filed at the beginning of 2024, an anonymous woman claims that from 2013 to 2015, she was coerced into prostitution and sex trafficking under the threat of violence from human traffickers.
She claims she was repetitively trafficked in multiple hotel and motel chains, sometimes for months at each, across California, including a Ramada Inn in Anaheim, a Wyndham Garden hotel in San Diego and a Hilton Homewood Suites in San Jose.
In a motion to dismiss her claims, the defendants argued that the plaintiff failed to plausibly claim that they actively participated or knew that sex trafficking was going on in their hotels.
A federal judge did not buy that argument.
“The court finds these factual allegations support the reasonable inference that there was an ongoing business relationship between plaintiff’s traffickers and franchisee defendants such that, when plaintiff was trafficked at the subject hotels, hotel staff rented a room to her traffickers with at least constructive knowledge that they were engaged in sex trafficking,” wrote U.S. District Judge Janis Sammartino.
The George W. Bush appointee also agreed with the plaintiff’s arguments that the hotels received a financial benefit from participating in a business-like venture with the plaintiff’s traffickers.
The plaintiff also claimed that her traffickers didn’t attempt to hide their abuse or coercion because Ramada franchisors and Super8 and Wyndham had an implicit understanding between staff and traffickers that allowed them to operate in their businesses, making them also beneficiaries of her suffering.
She says in her suit that employees ignored signs of her abuse, like men who weren’t hotel guests entering and leaving for brief periods at odd hours, traffickers escorting her and monitoring her movements around the hotel, her nervousness and fear when checking into the hotels.
Employees, franchisees and the corporate owners themselves know that sex trafficking is a problem and know how to look for signs of sex trafficking, but they failed to intervene on her behalf, she claims.
Because the franchisors purportedly controlled and oversaw all of the details of the reservation process and directly rented rooms to the plaintiff’s traffickers, and the plaintiff claims they were notified of her traffickers’ activities, she sufficiently claimed they have “a continuous business relationship between the traffickers and the franchisors,” Sammartino wrote.
In her complaint, the plaintiff claims the hotels and their franchisees violated the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, which allows victims of sex trafficking to hold liable the people or companies who financially benefited from participation in human trafficking, or participated in something they knew or should have known engages in sex trafficking, not just the people or companies that might be criminally liable.
The defendants argued that the plaintiff hasn’t sufficiently claimed enough facts to hold them liable either directly or indirectly as perpetrators for her trafficking.
While the plaintiff has sufficiently proved the franchises, franchisors and hotel staff did have “constructive knowledge” that she was being trafficked, she hadn’t yet claimed that they had “actual knowledge,” Sammartino said in dismissing the indirect and direct perpetrator claims against them.
The plaintiff, Sammartino added, could amend her complaint and cure her argument’s deficiencies to bring those claims back.
The plaintiff is asking the court to grant her damages after a jury trial.
Attorneys for both the plaintiff nor the defendants immediately responded to requests for comment.