The Door You Believed Was Safe: Holding the Rodeway Inn in Huntington Station Accountable for Trafficking
We know what happened to you. Maybe you were told the room was safe. Maybe the man who brought you there said it was just for a few days, just until things calmed down, just until he could get you somewhere better. Maybe you did not even know what was happening until it had been happening for so long that leaving felt impossible. Maybe you are still in it, reading this on a phone you are not supposed to have, and you need to know whether anyone can help before you do the next thing you are told to do. Or maybe you have been out for weeks or months or years, and you are trying to understand whether what was done to you had a name and whether the people who let it happen inside a hotel on Jericho Turnpike can be made to answer for it.
Yes. They can.
We represent survivors of sex trafficking, and we have spent decades building the cases that hold hotels and the brands that license their names responsible for profiting from the abuse. The February 2026 arrest of Erick Acevedo in the Bronx, after an investigation that began in 2022 at the Rodeway Inn in Huntington Station, is the kind of case we know how to fight — and it is exactly the kind of case the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA) and New York law were written to address. We are going to walk you through what just happened in Suffolk County, what the law says, who can be held accountable, what evidence is most at risk of disappearing, and what your rights are right now — whether you are reading this from a room you cannot leave, or from the apartment you finally got to on your own.
We do this work. We have done it for over two decades. Ralph Manginello has spent 27+ years trying injury and trafficking cases in federal and state courtrooms across New York and Texas, and Lupe Peña spent years inside a national insurance-defense firm before he came to our side of the table — so we know exactly how the hotel’s lawyers and the brand’s lawyers and the insurance carrier’s lawyers will try to push back, and we know how to beat each of those plays. We do not get paid unless we win your case. The consultation is free, in English or in Spanish, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
The Federal Law That Lets You Sue the Hotel — Not Just the Trafficker
This is the part of the law that most people do not know exists. The Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, specifically 18 U.S.C. § 1595(a), gives a trafficking survivor a private civil action against more than just the person who trafficked her. The statute reads:
“An individual who is a victim of a violation of this chapter may bring a civil action against the perpetrator (or 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 an appropriate district court of the United States and may recover damages and reasonable attorneys fees.”
— 18 U.S.C. § 1595(a).
In plain English: a survivor can sue the hotel that took the room money, the franchise brand that took the royalty, and any other business that financially benefited from the venture — as long as that business knew, or should have known, what was happening. You do not have to prove the hotel chain personally locked the door behind you. You have to prove the hotel took money from a venture it knew or should have known was trafficking you.
This is a deliberate departure from ordinary criminal-law thinking. The drafters of the TVPRA recognized that trafficking could not survive without a commercial ecosystem that tolerated it — the hotels that rent rooms week after week without questions, the brands that license their flag to properties that should never have that flag, the booking platforms that process the reservations. The civil remedy was written to reach that ecosystem directly.
The statute also gives you a generous window to file. Under 18 U.S.C. § 1595(c), you generally have ten years from the date the cause of action arose, and if you were a minor at the time, you have ten years after you turn eighteen. That means if you were trafficked at the Rodeway Inn at age sixteen, the clock does not start running until your eighteenth birthday, and you have until you are twenty-eight to file. That is not a typo — the federal law explicitly extends the statute of limitations for childhood victims of trafficking precisely because we know survivors often need years before they can come forward.
Now let us address New York law on top of the federal statute, because you have more than one set of rights.
Who We Sue: The Hotel, the Brand, the Parent Company, and Anyone Else in the Web
The corporate shell game is one of the most powerful weapons hotels use to escape accountability, and it is one of the first fights we win in any trafficking case. Let us lift the veil.
The Rodeway Inn on West Jericho Turnpike in Huntington Station is, on the ground, a property in Suffolk County with rooms, a front desk, a general manager, and housekeeping staff. Whatever entity holds the local operating license and the lease is the entity that was on the hook, every single day, to keep that property safe and to refuse to facilitate trafficking on its premises.
Rodeway Inn is a brand owned by Choice Hotels International, Inc. (NYSE: CHH), one of the largest franchisors in the country. Choice licenses the Rodeway Inn name to property owners, sets brand standards that each property must follow, charges franchise and royalty fees that produce revenue for Choice out of every room rented, and markets the Rodeway Inn brand to the public as a place to stay. When a guest books a Rodeway Inn, she is booking a Choice-branded experience — and Choice makes money on that booking regardless of who actually owns the building. Under the TVPRA, Choice can be held liable as a participant in the venture that trafficked you, if Choice knew or should have known that the venture was a trafficking operation and continued to collect fees from it. We can also pursue Choice under New York common-law theories of negligent entrustment, apparent agency (you booked “Rodeway Inn” — not a stranger’s LLC), and direct negligence in brand-standard design and training.
The franchisee — the LLC or individual that holds the local operating agreement with Choice — is a separate defendant. It is the entity that hired the front-desk staff, set the housekeeping schedules, accepted the cash payments, issued the key cards, and watched the same men come and go. Under New York law, the franchisee’s direct negligence in operation of the premises is straightforward.
The property owner, if different from the franchisee, may also be a defendant. If the building is owned by a separate LLC that leased it to the franchisee, the owner can face liability in some circumstances — especially where the owner had knowledge of, or control over, conditions on the property.
Booking platforms, payment processors, and any third parties that facilitated the venture can also be reachable under both federal law (including FOSTA’s carve-out of Section 230 immunity for sex-trafficking claims) and New York law, where appropriate.
The individual traffickers and the local facilitators — people like Erick Acevedo and anyone working with him, plus the men who were paying for commercial sex — are also defendants. They can be sued civilly under the TVPRA, in addition to any criminal prosecution they face. We coordinate with law enforcement on these cases where appropriate; civil and criminal remedies proceed on parallel tracks and do not interfere with one another.
The insurance carriers behind all of these entities are not defendants in your lawsuit, but they are the ones who will pay any judgment or settlement. We pursue every layer — primary commercial general liability, excess and umbrella coverage, the franchisee’s policy that names Choice as an additional insured, and any specialty coverage — to make sure that a recovery, when achieved, is actually collectible. Do not let anyone tell you “they have no insurance” until we have pulled every policy in the tower.
You may be asking why this matters. It matters because the deeper-pocket defendant (the brand, the franchisee parent, the insurance tower) is the one with the resources to pay for what was done to you — and the law is built to reach those pockets precisely because the local trafficker alone could not pay for a lifetime of medical care, mental-health treatment, lost earning capacity, and pain and suffering. The TVPRA’s beneficiary-liability theory was designed for exactly this situation.
The Evidence That Disappears Fastest — And What We Do About It
This is the part of a trafficking case that most survivors never hear about, and it is the part that decides whether the case survives or dies on the merits. The proof that the hotel knew — and the proof that the trafficking was happening at all — exists in records that are routinely purged, overwritten, or “lost” on short cycles. Every day you wait, some of the most important evidence in your case is at risk.
Hotel surveillance video. The camera footage from the Rodeway Inn’s lobby, hallways, parking lot, and exterior is typically stored on a rolling loop that overwrites itself within thirty to ninety days. The exact retention period is set by the hotel’s own policy and the brand’s standards — it is not set by any state or federal statute that requires indefinite retention. If you have not yet sent a preservation letter demanding that the footage from your dates at the hotel be preserved, that footage is on a clock. We send preservation letters the day we are retained. We also send them to the brand, to any third-party camera or alarm vendor, and to any company that provides remote video monitoring services.
Reservation and Property Management System (PMS) records. The hotel’s PMS holds your name (or the alias you were forced to use), your dates of stay, your room number, your method of payment, your billing history, your check-in and check-out times, and any notes added by front-desk staff. Cash payments, no-shows, room changes, and incident-note flags all live in this system. The retention is set by the hotel’s policy and the chain’s standards — typically months to a few years for active records, after which they may be archived or purged. We demand preservation immediately.
Key-card access logs. Every time the key card was used to enter your room, that data point was captured. The pattern of key-card activity — frequent entries by the trafficker, late-night entries by different men — is one of the most powerful exhibits in a trafficking case. Key-card logs are often retained only for a limited window (sometimes as short as sixty to ninety days).
Housekeeping and maintenance logs. If housekeeping was refused or delayed, that note is in the housekeeping log. If maintenance was called for damage, that work order exists. If towels or linens were replenished on a schedule that doesn’t match normal occupancy, that pattern is recorded.
Police call-for-service and CAD history. Suffolk County Police and other local agencies maintain records of calls to the Rodeway Inn on West Jericho Turnpike. These public records establish the prior-incident history of the property — the very proof that makes the danger foreseeable and the hotel’s claim of surprise untenable. We pull these records through New York’s Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) and through formal discovery once suit is filed. The longer you wait, the greater the risk that an agency has archived older records beyond easy reach.
Phone and electronic records from the trafficker and facilitators. If any phone was used to book the room, communicate about the operation, or accept payment, those records exist with the carrier and may be obtainable. Text messages, social media communications, and email threads can all be subpoenaed once suit is filed, but they are also at risk of being deleted from personal devices.
Internal hotel communications. Front-desk shift logs, incident reports, communications between the hotel and the brand about anything that happened on property, training records showing whether the staff was taught to recognize trafficking indicators, and corporate communications between Choice and the franchisee about anything that happened — all of these are discoverable in litigation but exist only if a preservation demand reaches them in time.
The Suffolk County Police investigation file. This is not technically discoverable in your civil case (the District Attorney controls access to it), but it often becomes available as the criminal case progresses. If the District Attorney’s office secures a conviction, restitution order, or other resolution, those documents become part of the public record. We coordinate with law enforcement on the timing of these disclosures to ensure they happen in a way that strengthens, rather than complicates, your civil case.
The bottom line on evidence. Every day between today and the day we send a comprehensive preservation letter is a day the most important evidence in your case might legally disappear. We send the letter the day we are retained. If you are reading this and you have not yet contacted a lawyer, the single most important thing you can do right now — before you decide whether to file a lawsuit — is to call us so we can freeze the evidence. The consultation is free and confidential.
What Your Case May Be Worth — Honestly Framed
You have probably read headlines about large jury verdicts and settlements in sex-trafficking cases against hotels, and you may be wondering what your case is worth. We will give you the honest framework, not the marketing number.
Economic damages. These are the objectively calculable money losses: past and future medical care (including the long-term mental-health treatment that trafficking survivors typically require), lost wages and lost earning capacity if the trafficking interrupted your education or career, the cost of any therapy or recovery services you have paid for out of pocket, and, in some cases, the cost of protective services you have required since escaping the situation. We retain forensic economists and life-care planners to build the documented number.
Non-economic damages. These are the human losses with no receipt: pain and suffering, mental anguish, loss of enjoyment of life, loss of consortium if you have a spouse or partner, the lasting impact on your relationships and your sense of self. These are real, they are compensable under New York law, and a Suffolk County jury will take them seriously. There is no statutory cap on non-economic damages in New York for claims like yours.
Punitive damages. Where the hotel or the brand acted with gross negligence, willful blindness, or actual knowledge of the trafficking — which is exactly what the TVPRA’s “knew or should have known” framework is designed to reach — punitive damages may be available to punish that conduct and deter its repetition. New York recognizes punitive damages in appropriate cases, and the Suffolk County legislative record, the FBI involvement, and the four-year investigation are all evidence that goes to the kind of egregious conduct that supports a punitive award.
A framework, not a number. A reasonable range in a hotel trafficking case of this scale, against a brand with insurance coverage, can range from the high six figures into the eight-figure range, depending on the severity and duration of the trafficking, the documented evidence of the hotel’s knowledge, the available insurance coverage, and the venue. Cases with severe physical or psychological injury, multiple victims identified, evidence of brand-level awareness, and substantial insurance coverage have resulted in verdicts and settlements in the tens of millions of dollars. We cannot tell you what your specific case is worth until we have reviewed the facts, the medical records, and the available insurance — but we will tell you honestly. No case value is ever guaranteed; the outcome depends on the specific facts, the evidence, the venue, and the jury.
Who You Will Be Working With
Ralph Manginello leads our firm. He has been a trial attorney for 27+ years, admitted to practice in Texas state courts and the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, with extensive federal-court experience. He earned his J.D. from South Texas College of Law Houston in 1998 and his undergraduate degree from the University of Texas at Austin, where he studied journalism and public relations. Before becoming a lawyer he worked as a journalist — which is why his writing in your case file reads like an investigation, not a database. He has tried the kinds of cases that define a career: catastrophic injury, wrongful death, commercial-vehicle collisions, and civil-rights claims. He is a member of the State Bar of Texas, the Houston Bar Association, the Harris County Criminal Lawyers Association, the Texas Trial Lawyers Association, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, and the Pro Bono College of the State Bar of Texas. When you call our firm, Ralph is one of the people who will understand what you are telling us.
Lupe Peña is our associate attorney. Before he joined us, Lupe spent years as an insurance-defense attorney at a national defense firm — meaning he sat in the rooms where adjusters, defense counsel, and corporate defendants priced cases like yours and decided how to fight them. He knows Colossus-style claim valuation, IME-doctor selection, surveillance tactics, and the delay-and-devalue playbook from the inside. He now uses that knowledge for injured clients. Lupe is fluent in Spanish and conducts full client consultations in Spanish without an interpreter — a meaningful detail when your first language is Spanish and the trauma of what happened makes it hard to explain in a second language. He earned his J.D. from South Texas College of Law Houston in 2012 and his B.B.A. in International Business from Saint Mary’s University in San Antonio. He is admitted to practice in Texas and the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas. When we say we know how the other side thinks, Lupe is part of why we mean it.
We do not get paid unless we win your case. The consultation is free, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, in English or in Spanish. We will not promise you an outcome; we will tell you honestly what the law allows, what the evidence supports, and what we believe your case is worth. Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes. We have built our practice by being honest with people in crisis, and we will be honest with you.
What We Need From You (and What We Do Not)
To evaluate your case, we need to understand what happened to you, when, where, and who was involved. We need to know what hotel(s) you were trafficked from, whether the Rodeway Inn in Huntington Station was one of them, what dates you were there, what you observed about the staff and the property, what men came and went, how you were paid (or not), how you escaped or were freed, and what injuries — physical and psychological — you have suffered. We need to know about any law-enforcement contact you have had and any services you have received.
We do not need you to be perfect. We do not need you to remember every date. We do not need you to have reported immediately. We do not need you to have done everything right. You survived something that was designed to break you, and the fact that you are reading this page is itself proof that it did not. We meet you where you are. We do not judge. We do not pressure. We build the case around your truth, and we let the evidence — the hotel’s records, the police investigation file, the brand’s own standards — do the work that your testimony alone cannot be expected to do.
We also do not need you to have decided today. We do need you to know that the evidence clock is running, and that the consultation is free, and that we are available twenty-four hours a day. If you call us at three in the morning because you cannot sleep and you need to talk to someone who will believe you, we will answer.
What to Do Right Now
If you have read this far, you already know whether this page applies to you. The next step is yours, and you can take it at your pace. But the evidence clock does not wait for your pace.
If you are in immediate danger, call 911 first.
If you are safe and ready to talk, call us at 1-888-ATTY-911. The line is answered twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The consultation is free. There is no obligation. You do not have to decide today whether you want to file a lawsuit. You only have to decide that you want to talk to someone who will believe you and who knows what to do next.
If you would prefer to write first, you can reach us through our contact page at https://attorney911.com/contact/. You can also learn more about our practice areas, including our work on wrongful death claims, brain injuries, and other catastrophic injury cases, at https://attorney911.com/law-practice-areas/. Ralph Manginello’s background is at https://attorney911.com/attorneys/ralph-manginello/, and Lupe Peña’s is at https://attorney911.com/attorneys/lupe-pena/. If you would like to understand more about how we approach cases like yours, our general firm page explains who we are and how we work.
We do not get paid unless we win. The consultation is free. Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes. We will not promise you an outcome — we will tell you honestly what the law allows, what the evidence supports, and what we can do. We have been doing this work for over two decades, and we know how to hold the hotels and the brands accountable. We know how to freeze the evidence before it disappears. We know how to take on the insurance carrier. We know how to take a case to verdict if that is what it takes.
And we know how to do it without losing you in the process. Your healing and your case are not in conflict — they are part of the same fight. We build the case around your truth, your pace, and your dignity. You bring the truth. We bring the courtroom.
1-888-ATTY-911. Hablamos Español. Free consultation. No fee unless we win.