The Night Nobody Wrote Down
If you were twenty-three years old and somebody handed you a key to a room at a Red Roof Inn off the South Cobb Parkway in Smyrna, and a man at the front desk took cash from the person who drove you there and did not ask for your ID, and the man who brought you came back with a different girl the next night, and the next, and the next, and that pattern repeated for weeks or months at the same motel, then one night years later a lawyer asked you to sit down and tell the truth about it — what you would say is not a story about a bad night. It is a story about a business that took your money and the money of the person who hurt you and watched what was happening and did nothing.
Eleven women did exactly that. They waited nearly five years to bring their case. They sat through a three-week trial in a federal courtroom in Atlanta. They watched a corporate defense team from a national motel chain argue that the chain should not be held responsible for what its franchisee’s employees saw, signed for, and looked past. They did not have to hear a verdict. On the eve of resolution, the corporation settled. Every one of those eleven women, according to the lawyers who tried the case, wanted their story heard in a public forum. They got that. They also got something else: a financial acknowledgment, on the record, from a company whose name hangs on a sign that thousands of drivers see every night along I-75 and I-285.
This page is written for the person who reads it at 2 a.m. and recognizes the pattern we just described. It is not a news summary. It is a legal analysis of what the Red Roof Inn settlement means under Georgia and federal law, what evidence matters, what an Atlanta survivor can actually do, and what our firm would do on day one if that survivor called us. If we are not the right firm for your case, we will tell you. If we are, we will explain why.
We are Attorney911 — The Manginello Law Firm, PLLC. Our trial team includes Ralph Manginello, our managing partner, who has been licensed in Texas since 1998 and admitted to federal court in the Southern District of Texas; he was a journalist before he became a lawyer, and he brings the same instinct to a case file — find the document, read the document, write down what it means. Our associate Lupe Peña, also male, is a former insurance-defense attorney who spent his early career inside the rooms where adjusters and their software decided how much a claim like yours was worth. He now uses that knowledge on the other side of the table. Lupe conducts full consultations in Spanish without an interpreter.
What Federal Law Says About a Hotel That Took the Money
The legal vehicle that makes a hotel answerable for sex trafficking on its property is 18 U.S.C. § 1595(a) — the civil-remedy section of the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, often called the TVPRA. The statute allows a victim of trafficking to sue not just the trafficker, but “whoever knowingly benefits, or attempts or conspires to benefit, financially or by receiving anything of value from participation in a venture which that person knew or should have known has engaged in an act in violation of this chapter.”
In plain English, that sentence does three things a survivor needs to understand. First, it lets the survivor sue the business, not just the person who directly harmed her. Second, it does not require the survivor to prove the company itself committed the trafficking — only that the company knowingly took money from a venture it should have seen for what it was. Third, the knowledge standard is “knew or should have known.” Constructive knowledge counts. A jury can find that the company had enough warning signs to put it on notice long before a single officer or employee admitted anything.
The four elements a plaintiff must establish, as courts have applied them to hotel defendants, are: the defendant (1) knowingly benefited financially, (2) from participation in a common undertaking or enterprise — the broad phrasing courts use for “venture” — (3) that violated the TVPRA as to the plaintiff, and (4) with actual or constructive knowledge that the venture violated the TVPRA. The hard fight lives in elements two and four. The Eleventh Circuit’s 2021 decision in Doe #1 v. Red Roof Inns, Inc., 21 F.4th 714, made clear that merely being a franchisor that observed signs of trafficking and collected franchise fees is not enough to establish “participation in a venture.” That ruling is the defense’s best appellate win in this area, and we will never present it as anything else. But it also left the door open: where the defendant did more than passively observe — where staff actively engaged with the trafficker, ignored repeated red flags, or otherwise assisted the operation — courts have allowed claims against hotels to proceed past motions to dismiss.
That is the legal ground on which eleven women stood in Atlanta.
In 2018, Congress enacted the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA), which carved a narrow hole in the broader immunity that online platforms have historically enjoyed under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Under 47 U.S.C. § 230(e)(5), FOSTA preserved the right of a victim to bring a § 1595 civil claim where the underlying conduct constitutes a violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1591 — the criminal sex-trafficking statute. FOSTA also created a new federal crime at 18 U.S.C. § 2421A for owning, managing, or operating an interactive computer service with the intent to promote or facilitate prostitution, with an aggravated version carrying up to twenty-five years where the actor promoted the prostitution of five or more persons or acted in reckless disregard of fact contributing to sex trafficking. FOSTA did not create the hotel liability theory — that lives in § 1595 — but it lowered the bar by expanding the universe of conduct that counts as trafficking and by clarifying that platforms that profit from trafficking venues are not shielded.
The most important thing the federal statutes do for a Georgia survivor is set the floor of what is actionable. Georgia law then layers on top.
Georgia Law on Trafficking and Premises Liability
Georgia codified its own anti-trafficking statute at O.C.G.A. § 16-5-46, which criminalizes trafficking persons for labor or sexual servitude and provides for enhanced penalties when the victim is a minor. On the civil side, the standard premises-liability framework under Georgia law, anchored in O.C.G.A. § 51-3-1, requires that owners and occupiers of land exercise ordinary care to keep their premises and approaches safe for invitees. Where the danger is not merely a slippery floor or a broken stair but the foreseeable criminal conduct of third parties using the property, the duty of ordinary care translates into a duty to take reasonable steps to prevent harm from criminal acts that the owner knew, or in the exercise of ordinary care should have known, were likely to occur.
O.C.G.A. § 51-3-1: “An owner or occupier of land is liable in damages to such person, member of his family, his guest, or his invitee for personal injuries caused by his failure to exercise ordinary care in keeping the land and approaches safe, including his failure to warn of an unsafe condition that is known to him but that is not known to such person and that could not be discovered by such person in the exercise of ordinary care.”
That statute is the foundation. On top of it, a Georgia survivor can build a claim for negligent security, negligent hiring and supervision of staff, premises liability for failure to warn of known dangers, and, where the corporate parent had direct knowledge of trafficking activity at its locations, the federal TVPRA beneficiary theory from § 1595.
Georgia also recognizes joint and several liability in many intentional-tort scenarios, particularly where the defendant’s conduct rises to the level of “willful blindness.” When a corporation operates a property where trafficking is visible and frequent and does nothing, a Georgia jury can be told to consider that willful blindness as it weighs the allocation of fault. The exact mechanics of apportionment and joint-and-several liability are not uniform across every civil claim type in Georgia — a careful lawyer reads the statute and the controlling appellate authority before promising a particular allocation.
Two things about Georgia law that survivors should understand up front. First, the statute of limitations is two years from the date the cause of action accrues, under O.C.G.A. § 9-3-33, the general personal-injury limitations statute. For trafficking specifically, however, O.C.G.A. § 9-3-33.1 tolls the limitations period for victims of certain crimes during any period in which the defendant was not publicly identified or the injury was not discoverable through reasonable diligence. Federal TVPRA law is more generous still — 18 U.S.C. § 1595(c) gives survivors ten years from the cause of action, and ten years from age eighteen if the survivor was a minor at the time. The federal clock does not preempt state law; it sits alongside it. If you are a Georgia survivor, the longest available clock controls.
The practical result is that a survivor who was trafficked at fifteen has until her twenty-eighth birthday to file a federal § 1595 claim. A survivor who was trafficked at twenty-five has ten years from the date of the trafficking. The state-law clock may run earlier. We always check both before telling a client how much time she has.
Second, Georgia’s civil discovery rule, codified at O.C.G.A. § 9-11-9 and the related accrual jurisprudence, treats the limitations clock as starting when the plaintiff knows or in the exercise of reasonable diligence should have known of the injury and its cause. For trafficking — a crime designed around concealment — the discovery rule often keeps the state clock alive longer than the bare two-year limitations period would suggest.
Why the Red Roof Case Took Five Years to Reach Trial
The eleven Atlanta-area survivors filed their lawsuit against Red Roof Inns, Inc. in approximately 2019, and the case resolved in June 2024 — just over five years later. That timeline is not unusual for a trafficking case against a national corporation, and the reasons are worth understanding if you are considering whether to file.
The first year is usually spent establishing the case file. A survivor often does not have documentary evidence in her possession. The hotel’s guest folios, the key-card logs, the housekeeping records, the incident reports from the police calls that came in during the period she was trafficked — all of those live with the hotel and the police department. Counsel has to obtain them through subpoenas or through the discovery process once the lawsuit is filed. Before the lawsuit is filed, counsel cannot issue subpoenas. So the first job is interviewing the survivor, identifying the locations and the dates with as much specificity as possible, and then filing suit to obtain the discovery tools that make the rest of the case possible.
The second and third years are typically spent in discovery. Corporate defendants produce millions of pages of records. They redact them. They produce them in non-searchable formats. They claim privilege over internal communications that are not privileged. Every document a corporation produces is a small battle. Every document it withholds is a larger battle fought through motion practice. Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26(b) gives parties broad discovery rights, but Rule 26(b)(1) limits those rights to matters relevant and proportional to the case. Corporate defense lawyers push that boundary hard.
The fourth and fifth years are typically spent on expert development and dispositive motions. The survivors need expert testimony on the medical and psychological consequences of trafficking, on the corporate hospitality industry’s training standards and recognition protocols, on the economics of human trafficking, and on the specific patterns of conduct the hotel allegedly ignored. The defense develops its own experts. Dispositive motions — typically motions for summary judgment seeking to dispose of the case before trial — are filed, briefed, and decided. Trial dates get continued.
In the Red Roof matter, the case survived those phases and reached a three-week trial. The fact that the case settled during trial rather than after a verdict is itself instructive. Juries in trafficking cases have, in the past, returned significant verdicts in favor of survivors — including a $40 million verdict returned by a federal jury in Atlanta in 2025 in J.G. v. Northbrook Industries, Inc., the operator of the United Inn & Suites on Memorial Drive in DeKalb County. The Red Roof settlement reflects a corporate decision that the risk of a similar outcome was high enough to warrant resolution rather than continued exposure.
For survivors thinking about filing: five years is long. But the case does not have to be perfect to file. It has to be good enough to survive the first motion to dismiss, which is what opens the door to discovery, which is what finds the documents that make the case strong.
What Evidence Built the Red Roof Case
The public reporting on the Red Roof case describes sex trafficking and prostitution that were “visible and frequent” at the Smyrna and Buckhead properties, with public documents detailing that the activity was occurring in plain sight. It describes hotel employees who “actively assisted traffickers or ignored the situation to maximize revenue from room bookings associated with sex trafficking.” It describes corporate testimony admitting awareness of minor sex trafficking at the hotels “for years.”
That is the language of corporate knowledge. It is the legal fulcrum of the entire case. If the corporation knew, it had a duty to act. If it knew and profited anyway, it knowingly benefited from a venture it should have known violated the TVPRA.
The evidence that proves corporate knowledge comes from several places. Guest folios and reservation records show the same rooms being rented by the same person on consecutive nights, often paid in cash, with a pattern of short stays. Key-card access logs show how many times the door to a particular room was opened — a pattern that does not match a single occupant. Housekeeping and maintenance logs show that staff entered those rooms and saw what they saw. Some of those rooms showed signs of frequent occupancy; some showed evidence of drug use, damage, or other indicators of commercial sexual activity. Police calls-for-service show how many times officers responded to that address during the relevant period. Incident reports generated by hotel staff capture what staff told their supervisors and what supervisors did or did not do about it.
The single most powerful piece of evidence in many trafficking cases is the email or internal memo in which a hotel supervisor or corporate officer acknowledges a problem. The corporate memo that says “we know what’s going on at this property and we’ve decided not to act” is the case. Federal litigation discovery rules are designed to find those documents. The corporate defendant’s first instinct when faced with discovery is to claim those communications are protected. Most of them are not.
The Red-Flag Pattern a Hotel Cannot Claim It Never Saw
Federal courts have repeatedly identified a recurring set of warning signs that the hospitality industry itself trains staff to recognize. When a hotel sees these signs and ignores them, the “should have known” element of a TVPRA claim is satisfied.
The pattern looks like this. Cash payment for rooms, especially multiple-night stays paid daily or weekly. Refusal of housekeeping service for days at a time — a room where no one is supposed to enter and no one is supposed to clean. Excessive foot traffic — a single room with a parade of different visitors at all hours. Requests for rooms near exits — traffickers often want a quick getaway. Used condoms, lubricant, or unusual trash in the room. Fearful or controlled-appearing guests — people who do not speak for themselves, who look to a companion for permission, who cannot produce identification. The same individual checking in repeatedly with different young companions.
The Red Roof case, as publicly described, includes employee conduct that goes beyond passive observation — staff who allegedly “actively assisted traffickers.” That is the case the corporation cannot win by saying it had a training program on the shelf. A training program on the shelf is not the same as a trained employee at the desk. When the corporation knew what was happening at the property and the property-level staff continued to assist, the corporation either knew and tolerated or deliberately chose not to know — and either of those is actionable.
What We Know About the Settlement
What has been publicly reported: eleven survivors reached settlements with Red Roof Inn during trial. Terms have not been publicly disclosed, and confidentiality is typical in trafficking settlements, particularly when survivors wish to control who knows their identities and what becomes part of the public record. What is publicly known is that the survivors wanted their stories told in a public forum, and the trial provided that forum, even though the financial resolution came through settlement rather than verdict.
For a survivor reading this and considering whether to file: the size and structure of any settlement in a trafficking case depends on facts that cannot be assessed without a confidential consultation. The corporate defendant’s exposure under the TVPRA is the full range of compensatory damages — medical and psychological care for the rest of the survivor’s life, lost earning capacity, pain and suffering, loss of dignity — plus the possibility of punitive damages where the conduct rises to the level of conscious disregard. The defense will try to keep the number low by arguing that the trafficker — not the hotel — is responsible for the harm. That argument almost always fails. Under § 1595, the hotel is liable for its own conduct in knowingly benefiting from the venture. The harm to the survivor is the harm to the survivor, no matter which defendant caused it.
What Your Case Might Be Worth
We will not give a number without knowing your case. What we can tell you is the framework.
The federal civil-recovery statute allows recovery of damages and reasonable attorneys’ fees. The categories of compensatory damages in a trafficking case are well established. Medical and psychological care includes the cost of trauma-focused therapy for the rest of the survivor’s life, treatment for substance-use disorders that frequently co-occur with trafficking victimization, treatment for sexually transmitted infections, reproductive health care, and treatment for the physical injuries sustained during the trafficking period. Lost earning capacity captures the wages the survivor would have earned but for the trafficking — a real number built by a forensic economist using the survivor’s age, education, work history, and the worklife tables the Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes. Pain and suffering and loss of dignity are the human losses with no receipt — the nightmares, the panic, the social withdrawal, the marriages that strained, the years that did not happen the way they should have. Punitive damages are available where the corporate defendant’s conduct shows conscious disregard for the survivor’s rights, and a hotel that continued to take money from a trafficking operation it should have known about meets that standard as a matter of common sense.
Our office builds these cases with a life-care planner for the medical and psychological cost stream and a forensic economist for the lost-earnings number. Both are retained experts who prepare formal reports that survive Daubert challenges and translate the survivor’s life into a number a jury can understand. We will tell you who we use and how the work gets done before you commit.
Evidence Preservation: What Records Exist and How Fast They Disappear
The single most important thing a survivor does in the first days after deciding to pursue a claim is preserve the records that prove the case. The records the hotel and its corporate parent control are the records the survivor needs. Most of those records are not preserved indefinitely. They are routinely purged, archived, or overwritten on rolling schedules that favor the corporation and punish delay.
Here is what exists and how fast it can die.
Hotel guest folios and reservation records show who paid for which room on which nights. Hotel retention policies vary; many purge folio records after a few years, and some purge them far sooner. The survivor cannot subpoena these records before filing suit, which is why filing early matters. Once suit is filed, counsel can subpoena them and the hotel has a legal duty to preserve them.
Key-card access logs show how many times the door to a particular room was opened. These logs are stored in the hotel’s property management system and are subject to the same retention pressures as folios.
CCTV footage from hotel corridors, lobbies, and parking lots is the single most perishable record. Many hotels operate on a rolling thirty- to ninety-day overwrite cycle. Some systems overwrite sooner. The video that shows the same man checking in night after night with a different girl, or the manager handing keys to a known trafficker, or staff laughing with traffickers at the front desk — that video is usually gone in thirty days unless a preservation letter has been sent. Our firm sends preservation letters within forty-eight hours of being retained.
Housekeeping and maintenance logs show which rooms staff entered, what they found, and what they reported. These are paper records in some hotels and digital records in others. They are subject to the hotel’s document retention policy, which the hotel sets. Once the hotel knows a claim exists, it cannot destroy records — that is spoliation. The first letter we send makes the legal duty to preserve clear.
Police calls-for-service and incident reports for the property are public records obtainable from the local police department through an open-records request. These records establish the foreseeability element of the case — how many times officers responded, what they were called for, and what the hotel reported (or failed to report). They are usually obtainable without filing suit.
Internal corporate communications — emails, memos, instant messages — are the smoking-gun evidence. These are controlled by the corporate defendant and are subject to discovery only after suit is filed. Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26(b) gives us broad discovery rights, and Rule 37(e) gives courts the power to sanction a party that destroys electronically stored information after a preservation duty has attached. The duty attaches the moment the corporation reasonably anticipates litigation. We make sure the corporation knows.
What the Insurance-Adjuster Playbook Looks Like
Trafficking cases against hotels are not typical insurance claims, but the insurance machinery the corporate defendant uses follows a familiar playbook. We want you to understand the plays before they are run on you.
Play one: the quick settlement before the lawyer is hired. Within days of the survivor identifying the hotel as a defendant, a corporate representative — sometimes the hotel’s general manager, sometimes an adjuster from the hotel’s insurance carrier, sometimes an outside “claims handler” — will contact the survivor and offer a quick payment in exchange for a release of all claims. The number will look meaningful to a survivor in crisis. The release will be broad — it will cover every claim she might have against every defendant she might name, including entities she has not yet identified. The adjuster is counting on the survivor not having counsel and not understanding what she is signing away. The counter: do not sign anything. Tell the adjuster you are not interested in settling without counsel. Refer the adjuster to your lawyer. Do not let urgency become pressure.
Play two: the recorded statement. The adjuster or a corporate investigator will ask the survivor to give a recorded statement about what happened. The statement will be used at trial. Statements taken within days of disclosure often include details the survivor has not yet fully processed, in language she has not had a chance to refine with counsel. The recorded statement becomes the anchor the defense uses to attack her trial testimony. The counter: do not give a recorded statement. Provide a written statement through counsel, reviewed and edited, after the survivor has had time to process and to consult with her lawyer.
Play three: the social-media and surveillance investigation. The defense will pull the survivor’s social media, her phone records, her credit reports, and her medical records. They will look for anything that can be used to impeach her credibility — a post from three years ago that contradicts a detail in her testimony, a prior mental-health diagnosis they can suggest explains her symptoms without trafficking, a romantic relationship they can suggest undermines her claim. The counter: stop posting about the case. Talk to your lawyer before you talk to anyone. Do not delete old posts — that looks like concealment and it can be used against you. Save everything. Let your lawyer handle the investigation and the discovery process.
Play four: the “you were a willing participant.” The defense will argue that the survivor consented to the conduct, that she was paid, that she had a choice. Trafficking cases involve conduct that, in isolation, looks like voluntary participation. The defense knows this and uses it. The counter: consent is legally unavailable as a defense in a § 1595 claim, and Georgia law recognizes that a person subjected to force, fraud, coercion, or commercial sexual exploitation is a victim, not a participant. The defense’s job is to make the survivor feel complicit so she drops the case. Your lawyer’s job is to make sure she understands the law and does not.
Play five: the venue fight. The defense will file motions to transfer venue, to dismiss for forum non conveniens, to compel arbitration if there is an arbitration clause buried in a terms-of-service agreement somewhere. The counter: file first in the right venue, know the corporate defendant’s corporate structure well enough to keep it in the venue where the harm occurred, and do not sign anything that contains an arbitration clause without understanding it.
Why the Brand Itself Is the Harder Target
The Red Roof case illustrates one of the central difficulties in hotel-trafficking litigation. Red Roof Inns, Inc. is the franchisor — the entity that licenses the brand name, sets the brand standards, and collects the franchise fees. The actual operators of the Smyrna and Buckhead properties are local franchisees. A survivor can sue the local franchisee, and that is the easier case, because the local franchisee’s employees are the ones who saw the trafficking at the front desk. Suing the franchisor requires proof that the franchisor did more than license a name — it requires proof of the franchisor’s direct participation in the venture, which is the element the Eleventh Circuit’s 2021 decision in Doe #1 v. Red Roof Inns, Inc. made the hardest.
That does not mean the franchisor is unreachable. It means the franchisor is reachable through different theories. Direct corporate negligence — the franchisor’s own training materials, its own internal communications about problem properties, its own audit reports — can establish that the franchisor knew and did nothing. Apparent agency can establish that the survivor reasonably believed she was dealing with the brand. The 2018 FOSTA amendments expanded the universe of conduct that supports federal trafficking claims and lowered some of the knowledge barriers.
The lesson for a survivor considering a claim: the property-level operator is the first defendant, but the corporate parent should not be left out. The corporate parent is the deep pocket. The corporate parent is the entity that issued the training standards. The corporate parent is the entity whose internal communications contain the memo about the property that should not be there. The corporate parent is, in many cases, the entity that profited most from the trafficking and the entity with the deepest insurance.
Damages: The Lifetime Cost of Trafficking
Trafficking causes lasting harm. The medical literature is unambiguous. Survivors of sex trafficking experience high rates of post-traumatic stress disorder, major depressive disorder, substance-use disorders, and suicidality. Many sustain physical injuries during the trafficking period that require ongoing care. Many acquire sexually transmitted infections, including HIV. Many lose years of education and years of work. The trauma of trafficking does not end when the trafficking ends; it echoes through every relationship the survivor tries to build for the rest of her life.
In a well-built trafficking case, the damages work is done by retained experts. A life-care planner builds the cost stream for medical and psychological care across the survivor’s life expectancy, accounting for the survivor’s specific diagnoses, the standard of care for each, and the realistic cost of providing that care in the survivor’s community. A forensic economist builds the lost-earnings projection, accounting for the survivor’s age, education, and the worklife tables the Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes. A vocational rehabilitation expert may assess whether the survivor can return to work in any capacity and, if so, in what field and at what wage. The total damages number is not a guess and not a number pulled from the air. It is a number built from the survivor’s actual life, projected across the years of that life that the trafficking took from her.
Punitive damages are available where the corporate defendant’s conduct shows conscious or reckless disregard. A hotel that took money from a trafficking operation it should have known about meets that standard. A jury that hears the corporate memos in which the property was discussed — memos in which the corporation knew, or should have known, and chose revenue — can return a punitive verdict designed to punish the corporation and deter the same conduct by other hotels.
What to Do in the First 72 Hours
If you are a survivor or a family member reading this and recognizing the pattern we have described, the first seventy-two hours matter. They are the window during which evidence can still be preserved, the window during which the survivor’s memory is freshest, and the window during which the corporate defendant has not yet had time to put its defense team in place.
The first call should be to a lawyer. Not the hotel, not the police, not the corporate defendant’s claims handler. A lawyer. Our intake line is 1-888-ATTY-911. We answer the phone twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The call is free. The consultation is confidential. We do not get paid unless we win your case.
In that first call, we will do three things. We will listen. We will ask the questions we need to ask to understand the basic outline of what happened — where, when, which property, which corporate entity, whether there were other survivors, whether there is any documentation. We will explain what comes next — what records we will subpoena, what timeline you should expect, what the realistic range of outcomes looks like for a case like yours.
If we are not the right firm for your case — if your case is in a state we cannot handle, or if the facts do not support a claim we can pursue — we will tell you that. We will not take your case and bill you for work we know is not productive. We do not get paid unless we win, and we have no interest in winning cases we cannot win.
How Our Firm Builds These Cases
We are a trial firm. We try cases. We do not handle every kind of case — we are not the right lawyers for every problem a person in crisis can have — but for the cases we do handle, we handle them with the resources and the commitment the case requires.
Ralph Manginello, our managing partner, has spent more than twenty-seven years in courtrooms, including federal court. He was a journalist before he became a lawyer, and the journalism shows in how we build a case — find the document, read the document, write down what it means, follow the document to the next one. Ralph is licensed in Texas and admitted to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, and we work with local counsel where a Georgia case requires it.
Lupe Peña is our associate. He spent the early part of his career inside a national insurance-defense firm — the rooms where adjusters, their software, and their defense lawyers decided how much a claim like yours was worth. He knows how the other side thinks. He knows what their software does with a recorded statement. He knows how reserves are set, how claims are valued internally, and how delay is used as a tactic. He now uses that knowledge on the other side of the table — for the survivor, not against her. Lupe conducts full consultations in Spanish, so if you prefer to tell your story in Spanish, you can. Hablamos Espanol.
For a case like the Red Roof matter, our process starts with intake. We listen. We obtain what records we can obtain without filing suit — police calls-for-service, public corporate filings, prior news coverage of the property. We file the lawsuit in the right venue, in the right court, against the right defendants. We send the preservation letter within forty-eight hours of filing. We issue the subpoenas for the records we cannot otherwise obtain. We develop the expert team — life-care planner, forensic economist, trafficking-specialist psychologist, hospitality-industry expert. We prepare the case for trial. We try the case if the corporate defendant does not settle.
We do contingency work. You do not pay us anything unless we win. The fee is a percentage of what we recover — typically thirty-three and a third percent before trial, forty percent if we go to trial. We advance the costs of the case — filing fees, expert fees, deposition transcripts, exhibit preparation. We are repaid those costs out of the recovery. If we do not recover, you owe us nothing.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does the Red Roof Inn settlement mean for other trafficking survivors?
It confirms that hotel defendants will settle rather than risk trial verdicts in serious trafficking cases, particularly in the Northern District of Georgia where federal juries have returned significant verdicts in similar cases. It does not mean every hotel case settles — some defendants will fight to verdict — but it reinforces that a well-built case with strong evidence of corporate knowledge can resolve in the survivor’s favor.
How long do I have to file a trafficking case in Georgia?
Under Georgia’s general personal-injury statute of limitations, O.C.G.A. § 9-3-33, you have two years from the date the cause of action accrues. For trafficking specifically, O.C.G.A. § 9-3-33.1 tolls the limitations period during any period in which the defendant was not publicly identified or the injury was not discoverable through reasonable diligence. Under the federal TVPRA, 18 U.S.C. § 1595(c), you have ten years from the cause of action, and ten years from age eighteen if you were a minor at the time of the trafficking. The longest available clock controls, but the specifics of your case matter and you should not delay.
Can I sue the hotel brand even if I was trafficked at a franchised property?
Yes, but it is harder than suing the local operator. Federal courts have held that merely being a franchisor and observing signs of trafficking is not enough to establish “participation in a venture” under the TVPRA. The brand becomes reachable where the evidence shows the brand did more — issued training standards that were ignored, received internal communications about the property that were not acted on, profited directly from rooms the trafficker rented, or otherwise participated in the operation. The Red Roof case itself illustrates both sides of this dynamic.
What damages can I recover in a trafficking case?
The full range of compensatory damages — past and future medical and psychological care, lost earnings and lost earning capacity, pain and suffering, loss of dignity, loss of consortium where applicable — plus punitive damages where the corporate defendant’s conduct shows conscious or reckless disregard. The federal statute also allows recovery of reasonable attorneys’ fees. The specific number depends on the facts of your case and the work of the retained experts we build the case with.
Will I have to testify in court?
Possibly. Many trafficking cases settle before trial, as the Red Roof case did. If your case goes to trial, you may be called to testify. Our job is to prepare you for that testimony so it is as clear, as dignified, and as credible as the truth you are telling. The defense will try to attack your credibility. Your lawyer’s job is to make sure the jury understands who you are and what you survived.
What if the trafficker threatened me or my family if I came forward?
That is a real and common fear. We take protective measures — we can seek protective orders limiting who has access to your identifying information, we can request that certain testimony be sealed, we can work with law enforcement to address ongoing threats. Your safety comes first. We will not pressure you to come forward in a way that puts you at risk, and we will work with you to develop a path forward that addresses the threat before it becomes the reason you cannot pursue the case.
What if I do not have documentation?
Most trafficking survivors do not have documentation in their possession. That is normal. The documentation we need lives with the hotel, the police, and the corporation. Once we file suit, we can subpoena those records. The case does not depend on what you have in your hand. It depends on what we can prove from the records the defendant controls.
What if I do not remember every detail?
Trafficking involves trauma, and trauma affects memory in ways that are well documented. You do not need to remember every detail. You need to remember the things you do remember — the property, the approximate period, the people involved, the patterns. Our job is to take what you remember and corroborate it with the records the defendant controls.
How much does it cost to hire your firm for a trafficking case?
Nothing up front. We work on contingency. The fee is thirty-three and a third percent of the recovery before trial and forty percent if the case goes to trial. Costs are advanced by the firm and repaid out of the recovery. If we do not recover, you owe us nothing. The consultation is free. The call is free.
What if my case is outside Georgia?
We work with local counsel in other states. The TVPRA is a federal statute, so a claim under 18 U.S.C. § 1595 can be filed in federal district court in the district where the trafficking occurred or where the defendant is located. We will tell you during the consultation whether we can handle your case directly or whether we will connect you with co-counsel.
Will my identity be public if I file suit?
Not necessarily. Trafficking cases routinely involve protective orders that limit who has access to identifying information. Sealing the docket, sealing exhibits, using pseudonyms in pleadings — these are tools the federal courts allow. Your privacy is part of how we protect you, and we will pursue every available protection.
What if I am still being trafficked or the trafficker is still operating?
Call law enforcement first. The civil case cannot help you if you are still in danger. Our intake team can also help connect you with survivor-services organizations that provide immediate shelter, medical care, and advocacy. Once you are safe, we can talk about the case.
How is a hotel-trafficking case different from other premises-liability cases?
The hotel-trafficking case is built on the corporate defendant’s own knowledge and its own conduct, not on a slippery floor or a broken stair. The federal TVPRA gives the survivor a tool that ordinary premises-liability law does not — the ability to hold the hotel liable for knowingly benefiting from a venture it should have known was trafficking. That tool, used correctly, is what makes the difference between a modest settlement and a meaningful recovery.
The Records We Will Subpoena
To be specific about what we will pursue in your case, the records we will work to obtain include: the hotel’s guest folios for the relevant rooms and dates; key-card access logs showing how often the room was entered; housekeeping and maintenance logs showing what staff saw when they entered; CCTV footage (if it can still be obtained); internal corporate communications about the property; corporate training materials and audit reports; police calls-for-service and incident reports; prior complaints about the property; corporate financial records showing revenue from the rooms at issue; and the deposition testimony of the corporate officers responsible for the property.
Each of these records has a different source. Each has a different retention schedule. Each is subject to a different argument from the defense about privilege or relevance. We know how to pursue them, and we know how to handle the arguments when they come.
What a Confidential Consultation Looks Like
You call 1-888-ATTY-911. A person answers — not an answering service, a person who works for our firm. We schedule a time that works for you. The consultation can happen by phone or video. If you prefer to come to one of our offices, we have offices in Houston, Austin, and the Golden Triangle, and we will travel to meet you where you are when the case requires it.
The consultation is free. It is confidential. It is protected by the attorney-client privilege the moment you start sharing information with us, even if you do not retain us at the end. We will not pressure you to retain us. We will not promise an outcome. We will tell you what we think your case is worth, what the realistic timeline looks like, what the defense is likely to do, and what we would do if you hired us. If you decide to hire us, we will send a written engagement letter that spells out exactly what we will do, what it will cost, and what you can expect.
If you decide not to hire us, we will give you a referral if we can, and we will not take a fee from the lawyer we refer you to.
The Bottom Line
The Red Roof Inn settlement is not a press release. It is the outcome of a five-year fight by eleven women who decided that what happened to them in Atlanta-area motel rooms was not their secret to carry and not their fault to absorb. They had lawyers who knew the law, who knew the evidence, and who knew how to use both. They had a court system that took their case seriously. They had the federal TVPRA, which gave them a legal weapon built for exactly this fight.
If you are reading this and recognizing your own story in the pattern we have described, the first step is the same. Call 1-888-ATTY-911. Tell us what happened. We will tell you what the law says about it. There is no fee for the consultation. There is no fee unless we win. Hablamos Espanol.
Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes. The cases discussed on this page — including the Red Roof Inn settlement — involved specific facts and procedural postures and do not predict the outcome of any other case. Every case is evaluated on its own facts.