"Sex-trafficking survivors are increasingly suing to hold hotel chains liable for abuse on their properties, new investigation finds", 1 August 2023

Some of the United States’ best-known hotel franchises have served as the backdrop to sex-trafficking crimes for decades, a new investigation by The New Yorker and Berkeley Journalism’s Investigative Reporting Program found. Now, a novel legal strategy is seeking to help survivors hold hotel corporations legally accountable for crimes committed on their premises.

In a 2018 Polaris Survivor Survey cited in the article, more than 60% of sex-trafficking victims said they were forced to sell sex from hotels.

“We focus not enough on how human trafficking intersects with the legitimate economy,” Louise Shelley, director of George Mason University’s Terrorism, Transnational Crime, and Corruption Center, said. “This is one of the key points in the supply chain where it does.”...

“Thinking about it as who is in the position to most affect what’s happening and who’s benefiting the most from it — all signs point to these corporations,” [lawyer Steven] Babin, who has filed a third of human-trafficking lawsuits against hotel corporations in the U.S., told Yeung.

The lawsuits fall under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, which was expanded in 2008 to allow survivors to sue anyone who benefits from an enterprise they knew — or could have known — was enabling trafficking.

The hotel industry has broadly taken a public stance against trafficking. But, as Yeung explains, the franchise model makes it difficult to take a proactive approach against trafficking.

Franchises have historically emphasized the independent ownership of their hotels to insulate corporations from liability issues related to safety issues or crime. Disclosure documents reviewed by Yeung from 10 major franchisers showed none had updated their contracts to explicitly cite trafficking as a basis for terminating a franchise agreement.

The first sex-trafficking case lodged again​​st an individual hotel came in 2015. Since then, more than 110 sex-trafficking lawsuits have been filed against hotel franchisers, according to data the article cited from the Human Trafficking Legal Center.

Many of the key legal questions they raise have yet to be answered. None of the trafficking lawsuits against franchisers have gone to trial, though several have ended in settlements and about half are ongoing...