We Take the Call You Make After the Hotel Room
You do not need to start with a polished story. You do not need to have filed a police report. You do not need to have decided whether the person in your life is a “victim” or simply a sister, a daughter, a friend who came home wrong and will not say why. The only thing you need is the suspicion — the boyfriend who will not let her answer the door, the cash on the nightstand, the motel key she is not supposed to have, the pattern of late-night text messages from men whose names she will not give you. If any of that sounds like your kitchen table tonight, this page is for you. We take the call you make after the hotel room.
We are a trial firm that takes Indiana cases. We do not run ads on social media promising six-figure settlements, and we do not have a chat bot. When you call 1-888-ATTY-911, a real person on our staff picks up, day or night. The call is free, it is confidential, and you owe us nothing unless we recover for you. If we take your case, our fee is contingency — no fee unless we win. Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes.
In August 2025, Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department officers went to a Comfort Inn on the northwest side of Indianapolis — near Michigan Road and West 92nd Street — on what should have been a routine welfare check. A sixteen-year-old girl told the officers she was afraid. Within days, IMPD Vice and Human Trafficking detectives had located two hotel rooms connected to her situation, identified four suspects, and built the case that the Marion County Prosecutor’s Office is now pursuing. One man, found in a room with the girl, was holding keys to both rooms and a large amount of cash. A second person was identified the same day. A third came forward when another young woman walked in to tell detectives her story. A fourth was arrested on February 3, 2026, after a warrant issued in late January. The criminal case is moving. The civil case, which is what this page is about, is a different fight, with different rules, and it can start now.
What You Need to Know in the First Five Minutes
If you take only five things from this page, take these.
One. A survivor of sex trafficking in Indiana can sue not only the person who sold her, but also the business that took the money from the setup. Federal law opens that door. Indiana law opens a second one with a rare and punishing remedy — treble damages and attorney’s fees — against anyone who causes injury to a victim of certain crimes, including sex offenses against a minor.
Two. The clock for most Indiana personal-injury cases is two years. For a survivor who was a minor at the time, Indiana law gives special treatment to childhood sexual abuse claims — the time to sue can run well beyond two years, and the federal civil-rights claim under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act runs ten years, with an extra ten years beyond the survivor’s eighteenth birthday if she was a child when it happened. The point is: do not assume the door has closed.
Three. The hotel room and the brand on the sign are not the same legal animal. The franchisee that actually ran the Comfort Inn on Michigan Road is the first defendant. The company that licenses the name — Choice Hotels International, Inc., the franchisor — is a second defendant that the right facts can reach. The right facts usually come from the brand’s own standards, training, reservation system, and the red flags the brand trained the property to see.
Four. The proof in these cases is on a clock. Hotel video overwrites. Folio records and key-card logs cycle. Police call-for-service records get archived. The single most important thing a survivor or a family can do is call a lawyer who knows this regime before the proof walks out the door.
Five. You do not pay us to find out whether you have a case. We offer a free consultation, and no fee unless we win. If we cannot help, we will tell you that, and we will point you somewhere that can. The promise we will not make is the one that ends these pages in fine print: we will not promise a number, because no one who is honest about this work knows the number on the first call.
The Two Roads the Law Builds for a Survivor
A survivor of sex trafficking in Indianapolis has, in practical terms, three legal roads she can walk. They are not exclusive. Most cases of this kind pursue all three at once, because each one does different work and each one puts pressure on different people.
The first road is federal civil rights, under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, or TVPA. The relevant section is 18 U.S.C. § 1595(a), and the language matters:
“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.”
Read that carefully. The survivor does not have to prove the hotel trafficked her. She has to prove the hotel took money from a setup that it knew, or should have known, was being used to traffic her. That is a much lower bar than proving the company itself committed the crime, and it is the bar that turns a franchisee with a stack of cash and a set of room keys into a defendant.
The second road is Indiana state law, and Indiana has a statute that does something most states’ tort laws do not. The Indiana Crime Victim Relief Act, at Indiana Code § 34-24-3-1, allows a victim of certain crimes — including sex offenses against a minor — to bring a civil action for damages and to recover up to three times the actual damages, plus attorney’s fees. That treble-damages lever is one of the strongest victim-protection statutes in the country, and it is aimed at the very people the criminal system is built to punish.
Indiana Code § 34-24-3-1 enables a victim of certain crimes, including sex offenses, to bring a civil action against the perpetrator and to recover damages of up to three times the actual damages, plus attorney’s fees.
The third road is common-law negligence against the property and the people who ran it. This is the claim that the hotel owed the survivor a duty of reasonable care, that the duty was breached, and that the breach caused the harm. Negligent security, negligent hiring, negligent retention, negligent training, negligent supervision — these are not federal novelties. They are Indiana tort law, and a survivor is allowed to walk through that door in Indiana state court or in federal court under diversity jurisdiction.
What matters is that the three roads run in parallel. You do not pick one. You walk all three, and the same set of facts drives each one.
Why the Comfort Inn and the Brand Behind It Are Both on the Hook
The man arrested in the first hotel room had keys to two rooms and a large amount of cash. That single fact tells you almost everything you need to know about the civil case against the hotel. A guest does not hold keys to two rooms of a Comfort Inn on Michigan Road. A guest does not pay the kind of cash that becomes a trafficking operation’s daily working capital. The franchisee on the ground either knew, or had every red flag in the industry telling the front desk to know.
The industry has trained its own staff to see what was happening in those two rooms. The red flags are not subtle. They are the same list every brand trains its staff on. Cash payment for a room that should run on a credit card. A guest who pays the room rate but refuses daily housekeeping, because the workers would see the second and third and fourth occupant. A parade of different men coming and going from the same room, with a young woman who never comes to the front desk and never answers the door. Excessive towels and linens requested at odd hours. A girl who looks afraid and is never seen alone. These are the specific signs the hospitality industry has identified in its own training — and they are the very signs that any honest review of the facts in the IMPD case will find.
Indiana law treats that knowledge, or that failure to know, as the company’s own wrong. A hotel that charges a nightly rate for a room it knew, or should have known, was being used to traffic a minor is not a bystander. Under the TVPA, it is a beneficiary of the venture, and it is on the hook.
The brand on the sign — Choice Hotels International, Inc., the franchisor of the Comfort Inn family of brands — is a separate defendant, and reaching it is a separate fight. The legal theory is not that owning the trademark makes the company responsible for every local operator. The legal theory is that the franchisor does more than rent a name. It sets brand standards, requires franchisee compliance with those standards, runs a centralized reservation and loyalty system that brings the customer to the room, collects royalties on every stay, and trains franchisee staff on what red flags to look for. Federal courts in the 2020s have been open to exactly that argument. The most-watched case is the first bellwether in In re: Uber Technologies, Inc., Passenger Sexual Assault Litigation, a federal case in Arizona, where a jury in February 2026 returned an $8.5 million verdict against Uber on an apparent-agency theory. The verdict is being appealed and is not final, so we are careful about what we say about it — but the theory that worked in that case is the same theory that can reach a hotel franchisor: the company held the brand out as its own, the customer believed the customer was dealing with the company, and the company cannot now disown what happened behind its own name.
We are careful here, and the page reflects it. We do not promise verdicts. We are telling you what the law allows a careful civil-rights lawyer to argue. Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes.
What the Survivor Has to Prove — and What the Defense Will Try to Throw at Her
A TVPA case against a hotel has four elements, and they are the four elements a smart hotel defense lawyer will try to attack in order. First, the survivor has to show the company knowingly benefited from the venture. Second, the benefit has to come from participation in a venture that violated the TVPA — meaning the franchisee/operator’s conduct, not a stray independent actor. Third, the venture has to have violated the TVPA as to this survivor. Fourth, the company has to have known or should have known about the venture’s character. Constructive knowledge — “should have known” — is enough.
The hotel’s defense will try to attack each of those. The franchisee will say “we just rented a room and collected the rate” and try to treat an ordinary commercial transaction as a wall against the claim. The franchisor will say “we license a name; we do not run the property; we had no operational control.” The companies will both argue that the survivor was not a victim of sex trafficking but a willing participant, or that the injuries came from something other than the trafficking, or that the company had no notice. Some defenses are stronger than others, and some are weaker than they look. Indiana law, like federal law, has answers.
Indiana follows a modified comparative fault system with a fifty-one percent bar. A survivor who is found to be more than fifty-one percent at fault cannot recover at all. That sounds frightening until you read what Indiana law actually means by “comparative fault” in the context of a trafficking case. A person who is forced, coerced, drugged, threatened, or controlled by a trafficker is not, as a matter of law, exercising the kind of free choice that comparative fault is designed to measure. That is a fight the defense will pick, and it is a fight Indiana courts have tools to resolve in favor of the survivor when the facts support it.
The other defense move the industry will make is to attack the survivor’s credibility. A sixteen-year-old girl who has been trafficked may have inconsistent memories, may not remember dates, may have been using drugs, may have mixed feelings about the man who controlled her, and may have run away from help. None of that is proof she is not a victim. It is the predictable wreckage of what was done to her. A good civil-rights lawyer does not pretend those things away. A good civil-rights lawyer walks the jury through them and shows that they are the fingerprint of the crime, not evidence against the victim.
The Federal Clock Is Ten Years. The Indiana Clock Is Tighter, but It Does Not Run the Way You Think.
There are two clocks, and they are not the same. The federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act gives a survivor ten years to file her civil claim. If the survivor was a minor at the time, the ten years does not even start to run until her eighteenth birthday. A survivor who was trafficked at sixteen has until her twenty-eighth birthday to file the federal case.
Indiana’s general personal-injury statute of limitations is two years from the date of the incident. For most injury cases, that is the deadline. Childhood sexual abuse is treated differently under Indiana law, and the time a survivor has to bring a civil claim can extend well past the two-year mark, depending on the survivor’s age at the time of the abuse and the date the injury was or should have been discovered. We do not, in this page, rest any case on a guess about your specific deadline. The point of telling you about the clocks is to make you stop guessing and pick up the phone.
What we will say with confidence is this: every week that passes is a week in which evidence can be lost. Hotel video is the fastest-dying record in this kind of case. Key-card logs and folio records get archived on a schedule. Police records of calls for service get moved or purged. Witness memories degrade. The trafficking business leaves behind a specific set of paper and digital traces, and they each have a half-life. If you are reading this and you are not yet sure whether to call, the answer is to call. The consultation is free. The first act we will take — the same week you retain us — is to send preservation letters to the hotel, the franchisor, the police agency, and any other records holder, freezing what is left before more of it disappears.
What a Case Like This Is Worth
We are not going to give you a number on this page, because no honest lawyer does that. What we can tell you is what a case like this is built from, in Indiana, in 2026.
A civil case under the TVPA recovers the survivor’s actual damages — medical care, therapy, the cost of rebuilding a life that was taken, lost earnings if she was old enough to earn, and the human losses that no receipt can capture, like the years of fear, the loss of trust, the relationships that broke. Under the federal statute, attorney’s fees are recoverable, which is what makes a case like this economically viable for the survivor no matter how modest her income is.
Indiana’s Crime Victim Relief Act adds the treble-damages lever. A jury that finds the conduct of a defendant meets the statute’s standard can award up to three times the survivor’s actual damages, plus attorney’s fees. That is the statute’s answer to the worst kinds of predatory conduct, and the Indiana courts have applied it to the kinds of conduct that show up in trafficking cases.
The corporate component of a TVPA case is not capped by the same limits that cap, for example, a medical-malpractice case. A hotel franchisor is not a doctor. Its insurance tower is structured differently. We have handled cases that resolved in the seven-figure range, and the hotel-trafficking / negligent-security cases we have evaluated in the multi-state pipeline we work sit in the $1.5 million to $7.5 million-plus range on the facts, depending on the venue, the duration of the trafficking, the strength of the constructive-knowledge record, and the existence or absence of a corporate defendant that can pay a verdict. These figures are range, not promise. Your case is your case. The honest statement of value is the one a jury is willing to award on your specific facts, and that is what we go find.
What Records Exist, Who Holds Them, and How Fast They Disappear
This is the most important section on this page, and we want you to read it twice.
The proof of a trafficking case is not a single document. It is a pattern, built out of records that each prove one piece of the puzzle, and the records are held by parties who have different reasons to keep them or to lose them. The pattern is built from the following.
Hotel surveillance video. Most hotel CCTV is recorded over on a rolling cycle. The most common cycle is roughly thirty days, but the exact window is set by the property’s system and its brand standards, and it can be shorter or, in rare cases, longer. The video that would show the man going in and out of room after room, the parade of different men visiting, the young woman who never comes to the desk, the cash that changes hands at the front counter — that video is the single best corroboration of the survivor’s story, and it is the record most likely to be gone within weeks of the police call. A litigation hold, sent in writing the day you retain us, is the only thing that converts an automatic overwrite into a sanctionable destruction.
Key-card swipe logs and the property management system. Every modern hotel keeps an electronic record of every key card, the room it opened, and the time. Combined with the front-desk folio, the logs show who paid for a room, how, how often, when the room was entered, and who entered it. This is the documentary spine of the constructive-knowledge claim. The logs are kept on the property’s own schedule, sometimes for a year, sometimes for less. Preservation letters go out immediately.
Folio and reservation records. Cash payments, no-show reservations, third-party bookings, frequent extensions, payment by a name that does not match the guest — all of this lives in the folio. The hotel and the brand both hold pieces of it.
Housekeeping and maintenance logs. A room that was refused daily housekeeping for two weeks tells a different story than a room that was cleaned every morning. A maintenance request for a lock change tells a different story than a clean ticket history. These records exist, and they can be lost.
Police call-for-service and CAD records. IMPD’s computer-aided-dispatch records for the address are public records in Indiana and they show whether police had been called to the property before. They are the proof the hotel and the brand were on notice.
IMPD investigative file. The detective’s case file — victim statements, forensic downloads, surveillance, the photographic record of the rooms and the cash — is the spine of the criminal case and, in many respects, the spine of the civil case. It can be subpoenaed, but it takes a lawyer who knows the Indiana rules of criminal procedure to do it right.
Internal corporate records. The Comfort Inn’s own incident reports, the brand’s red-flag training materials, the franchisor’s brand standards manual, internal emails about this property, the property’s prior incident history — these are the records that prove the brand knew, or should have known, what was happening. They are controlled by the hotel and the franchisor. They are produced in litigation only when a federal court orders them produced. The sooner we are retained, the sooner we can begin the discovery fight.
The federal preservation framework. For records that come from the criminal side of the case, the federal preservation rules in cases involving sex trafficking give civil plaintiffs tools to demand the preservation of records that might otherwise be purged. We use them.
Here is the truth of evidence in these cases. The video and the logs that prove the hotel’s knowledge are dying on a clock. The police file is sealed but subpoenaable. The internal corporate records are the deepest proof, and they only come out under a federal order. The survivor’s memory and the survivor’s story are not “evidence” in the legal sense, but they are the centerpiece of the case, and the survivor’s contemporaneous statements to family, to counselors, to the IMPD officer who took the welfare check — those statements, made close in time to the events, are among the most powerful evidence in the case. Which is why the first week of the case is the most important week of the case.
The Insurance Adjuster Playbook — and What We Do About It
A hotel-trafficking case hits the insurance industry in three places: the hotel’s general liability policy, the franchisor’s excess tower, and the perpetrator’s personal coverage (which is usually worthless). The adjuster who picks up the file is going to be friendly, professional, and patient. He is also going to be working a playbook. We are going to name the plays, and we are going to tell you what we do about each one.
Play one. The friendly call. Within days of the call to the hotel, an adjuster — sometimes from the hotel’s own claims team, sometimes from a third-party administrator — will call the survivor or the family. The adjuster will introduce himself by his first name. He will say he is “just checking in” and that he wants to make sure the survivor is getting the help she needs. He will be sympathetic. He will then ask, on a recorded line, for the survivor to walk him through “what happened.” This is the recorded-statement play. We do not let the survivor give a recorded statement to the adjuster. We tell the adjuster, in writing, that all communication goes through counsel. We do not refuse to engage. We just do not let an untrained, traumatized teenager walk into a recorded statement designed to be quoted against her in deposition.
Play two. The fast check. The adjuster will offer a small settlement, often framed as “to help with immediate expenses,” and he will want it signed quickly. The release that comes with the check is broad. It releases every claim the survivor has, against every defendant, forever. We do not let the survivor sign a release. We tell the adjuster that we will be in touch when the case is ready to evaluate, and we do not let speed become a substitute for value.
Play three. The medical-records fishing expedition. The adjuster will ask for “all medical records” relating to the survivor, often in a tone that suggests cooperation. The right answer is not yes, and it is not no. It is “we will provide the records that are relevant to the claims we have asserted, after we have had a chance to review them ourselves.” The adjuster is not entitled to the survivor’s entire medical history. He is entitled to the records that are relevant to the case, and we get to decide what that means.
Play four. The social-media search. In the background, the adjuster and the defense team will be searching the survivor’s social media, the family’s social media, and the survivor’s friends’ social media. They are looking for anything that can be used to impeach the survivor or to suggest that the trafficking was consensual. This is not a play you can stop. It is a play you can prepare for, by helping the survivor and the family understand that anything posted publicly will be seen, and that the right response is not to delete or to hide, but to understand that the case will not be won or lost on Instagram.
Play five. The “we just rent rooms” defense. The adjuster will suggest, formally or informally, that the hotel is not responsible because the trafficking was the conduct of a guest, not the hotel. The answer is in the TVPA, and it is in the Indiana Crime Victim Relief Act, and it is in the case law we have already discussed. The hotel that took the money from the room is on the hook. The franchisee that ran the property is on the hook. The franchisor that licensed the name and trained the staff is potentially on the hook. “We just rent rooms” is the line the adjuster starts with, and it is not the line the case ends with.
If you want a fuller picture of what an insurance adjuster will and will not do, we have a video on the subject: What You Should Not Say to an Insurance Adjuster. Watch it before the adjuster calls. The conversation you have with us first is the conversation that protects you second.
The First 72 Hours — What We Do, In Order, the Day You Call
If you call 1-888-ATTY-911 today, this is what happens next, in order, before the week is out.
Within the first day, a member of our intake team speaks with you, gets the basic facts, and walks you through what the next weeks will look like. We do not push you to retain us. We answer the questions you have. If the case is one we can help with, we tell you so. If the case is one we cannot help with, we tell you that, and we tell you where to go.
Within the first two days, if you retain us, we send written litigation-hold and preservation letters to the hotel, the franchisor, the management company, the police agency, and any other party that holds records relevant to the case. The letters identify the records that exist, the records that must be preserved, and the consequences under federal and Indiana law of destroying records once a claim has been asserted. The letters are sent by certified mail and email. They are written in a tone that is professional and that puts every records holder on notice of their duty to preserve.
Within the first week, we open the federal case file in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Indiana, the state case file in the Marion County Superior Court, and the administrative record with the Indiana Department of Child Services and the Marion County Prosecutor’s Office. We obtain the IMPD case number, the prosecutor’s assigned deputy, the case status, and the next scheduled court date in the criminal proceeding. We retain a forensic psychologist to begin the diagnostic record for the survivor. We begin the medical-records collection. We obtain, through the prosecutor’s office and through proper Indiana procedure, the survivor’s rights as a crime victim under the Indiana Constitution and under the Indiana Crime Victim Relief Act.
We do not promise the survivor that we will file the civil case in the first week. In many cases, the better play is to let the criminal case develop, because the criminal discovery is the civil discovery, and the earlier the civil case is filed, the more it can interfere with the criminal case. The decision of when to file is a strategic decision we make with the survivor, not for the survivor. We tell her what we are doing and why.
Within the first month, we have completed the initial preservation work, the initial discovery, and the initial expert retention. We have a draft of the survivor’s full narrative. We have a draft of the case value, with both a floor and a ceiling. We have a draft of the litigation budget. We have a draft of the case timeline. The survivor knows what is happening and why. That is the only standard we hold ourselves to.
Who We Are
Our firm is Attorney911 — The Manginello Law Firm, PLLC. We are a trial firm that takes catastrophic-injury, wrongful-death, and civil-rights cases across state lines, including in Indiana. We have been in business since July 18, 2001. We have recovered $50 million or more across our firm’s lifetime of work (this is a marketing aggregate, not a guarantee). Our reviews average 4.9 stars.
Two names you should know.
Ralph Manginello is our managing partner. He has been a Texas-licensed trial lawyer since 1998, more than 27 years, and he is admitted to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas. Before he was a lawyer, he was a journalist. That background — the instinct to find the story the other side does not want told — is the engine of this firm. He represents the firm in federal court and in serious civil-rights cases, and he has tried and resolved cases across the firm’s practice areas, including brain injury, trucking, oilfield, and catastrophic injury. His full bio is on the website.
Lupe Peña is our associate attorney. He is also a Texas-licensed trial lawyer, since 2012, and he is admitted to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas. Before he joined us, he worked at a national insurance-defense firm. That is the part of his background that matters to you, and the part that will quietly change the way your case is handled. He has seen, from the inside, the rooms where claims like yours are priced. He has seen the software the adjusters use, the doctors they send people to, the surveillance they order, the delays they impose. He uses that knowledge for you now, not against you. He is fluent in Spanish, and we conduct full consultations in Spanish without an interpreter. His full bio is on the website.
We work on contingency. Our fee is 33.33 percent before trial and 40 percent if the case goes to trial. We do not get paid unless we win. We offer a free consultation. We have 24/7 live staff, not an answering service. Hablamos Español. If you would rather speak Spanish for the entire first call, that is a call we are ready to take. You can reach us at any time at 1-888-ATTY-911, or you can contact us through the website.
We also work cases that travel with the survivor, not the other way around. We have the relationships and the procedures to file a case in Indiana even if you moved away, even if the trafficking happened years ago, even if the survivor has settled in a different state. The criminal case in Marion County does not lock us out of the civil case. It sometimes helps us.
The Marion County Courtroom, and Why the Local Forum Matters
The criminal case is being prosecuted by the Marion County Prosecutor’s Office. The civil case will likely be filed either in the Marion County Superior Court (for the Indiana state claims) or in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Indiana (for the federal TVPA claim), or both. We will file where the law and the facts point.
Filing locally matters. The jury that decides what a trafficking case is worth, in a case like this, is twelve people from Marion County. The judge who decides what evidence the jury hears is a Marion County judge. The local forum is not a procedural detail. It is the difference between a case argued in front of a jury that has read the same Indianapolis Star stories you have and a case argued in front of a jury that has not. Our firm is comfortable in both venues. We do not file the case in a courtroom we cannot try in.
Frequently Asked Questions
If the trafficking happened years ago, is it too late?
Probably not. The federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act gives a survivor ten years from the date of the violation, with an extra ten years beyond the survivor’s eighteenth birthday if she was a minor when the trafficking happened. Indiana’s statute of limitations for personal injury is generally two years, but Indiana treats childhood sexual abuse claims differently, and the time to sue can extend well past the two-year mark depending on the survivor’s age and when the injury was or should have been discovered. The only honest answer to “is it too late” is the one we give you after a free consultation, when we know your dates. Call us.
Do I have to wait for the criminal case to finish before I sue the hotel?
No. The civil case and the criminal case run in parallel, and they are run by different parties with different interests. In many cases, the civil case benefits from the criminal discovery — the police file, the forensic downloads, the witnesses the prosecutors have already developed. In other cases, the criminal case benefits from the civil discovery, because civil discovery is broader than criminal discovery. We coordinate with the prosecutor’s office where coordination helps the survivor, and we stay out of the prosecutor’s way where it does not. We do not let the criminal case be an excuse to delay the civil case.
Who can I actually sue? The trafficker, the hotel, or the brand?
Yes. The trafficker is the first defendant and is usually judgment-proof, which is why the hotel and the franchisor are the meaningful targets. The franchisee that actually ran the Comfort Inn is the second defendant and is usually the first place the insurance money lives. The franchisor — Choice Hotels International, Inc. — is the third defendant, and the case against the franchisor is the case the right facts can make. The Indiana Crime Victim Relief Act gives a victim of certain crimes a right to sue the perpetrator for treble damages, and the TVPA gives the survivor a right to sue the perpetrator and any knowing beneficiary. We sue all of them, because the only way to find out who has the money is to sue all of them.
What if the hotel says it did not know?
The hotel’s knowledge does not have to be actual. Constructive knowledge is enough. The TVPA says “knew or should have known.” The hotel industry trains its own staff to recognize the specific red flags that show up in trafficking cases. A hotel that did not know when it should have known is, in the eyes of the law, a hotel that knew. The constructive-knowledge record is built from the franchisee’s own incident reports, the police call-for-service history at the property, the brand’s training materials, the brand’s red-flag checklist, the property’s prior violations, and the testimony of the staff who were on duty and did not raise the alarm. We have handled cases built on records exactly like these.
What if I was a minor when it happened?
The federal TVPA gives a minor survivor ten years from her eighteenth birthday, so a survivor trafficked at sixteen has until her twenty-eighth birthday to file the federal case. Indiana law treats childhood sexual abuse claims with longer statutes of limitations than ordinary personal-injury cases. The Indiana Crime Victim Relief Act applies to certain sex offenses against minors. The point is that being a minor at the time of the abuse is a legal advantage, not a legal disadvantage. It is one of the reasons the door does not close as fast as the standard two-year clock might suggest.
What evidence matters most in these cases?
Three categories. First, the records the hotel and the franchisor hold: video, key-card logs, folios, housekeeping records, internal incident reports, the brand’s training and standards. Second, the records the police hold: the IMPD case file, the 911 recordings, the CAD records, the forensic downloads from the phones and the computers, the photos. Third, the survivor’s own contemporaneous statements: the first person she told, the first counselor she saw, the first doctor who wrote down what she said. None of these categories is sufficient by itself. Together, they are the case.
How much is my case worth?
We do not put a number on a case before we have a file. What we can tell you is the range that cases like this have resolved in, in the venues we work, and the components that drive the number. The Indiana Crime Victim Relief Act’s treble-damages provision is one of the strongest victim-protection remedies in the country, and the federal TVPA’s fee-shifting provision is the reason a case like this is economically viable for the survivor no matter her income. The numbers we have seen in cases like this, in the multi-state pipeline we work, sit in the $1.5 million to $7.5 million-plus range on the facts, depending on venue, duration, the strength of the constructive-knowledge record, and the existence of a corporate defendant that can pay. Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes.
Will I have to testify?
Probably, in some form. In a deposition, the defense team will ask you detailed questions about what happened. At trial, if the case goes that far, you may have to take the stand in front of a jury. Both experiences are survivable, and the work we do in the first ninety days of the case is designed to make them survivable. The survivor is not alone in either setting. We sit next to you. We prepare you in advance. We object to questions that are improper. We do not let a defense attorney take advantage of a survivor’s trauma, and we do not let a survivor be ambushed on cross. The first deposition is the hardest. They get easier.
What if I was using drugs or alcohol at the time?
That is not a bar to recovery. Indiana law does not bar a trafficking survivor from a civil case because she was using drugs at the time of the trafficking. The drug use is often a part of the trafficking, not separate from it. The defense will try to use the drug use to attack the survivor’s credibility. A good civil-rights lawyer walks the jury through the drug use as a part of the picture, not something the survivor has to apologize for. The drug use is the crime’s fingerprint, not the survivor’s moral failing.
Do I have to pay anything up front?
No. Our fee is contingency. We get paid a percentage of what we recover, and if we do not recover, you do not owe us a fee. We advance the case costs — the filing fees, the expert fees, the deposition transcripts, the records requests. If we lose, you do not owe us those costs back. Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes. We tell every potential client the same thing: if you cannot afford a lawyer, you cannot afford to go without one in a case like this, and our fee structure is built so that the lawyer is free until you get paid.
How long will my case take?
It depends. The criminal case has its own schedule, set by the Marion County Prosecutor’s Office and the Marion County courts. The civil case is on its own schedule. A hotel-trafficking case can resolve in a year, in a settlement after the first wave of discovery, or it can take several years, if it has to be tried. We do not promise a date. We do promise that we will be in touch, that the survivor will know where the case is, and that we will not let a year pass without the survivor hearing from us.
What if I have already spoken to an insurance company?
Tell us. We can manage the consequences. The recorded statement you already gave can be used against you, but it is also the statement you gave before you had a lawyer, and the law gives us tools to limit how the defense can use it. We do not promise a magic eraser. We promise that the statement is not the end of the case, and we will tell you what we can do about it.
I am not a United States citizen. Does that matter?
The TVPA’s civil remedy does not require U.S. citizenship. The Indiana Crime Victim Relief Act does not require U.S. citizenship. A survivor’s immigration status is not a barrier to a civil case. We are not immigration lawyers, and we do not give immigration advice, but we do not let a survivor’s status be used against her in a civil case, and we will not let the case be slowed down by a question we can answer for the survivor with the right referral.
The Promise We Will Make and the One We Won’t
We will promise you this. We will investigate the case as if the survivor were our own daughter, sister, or friend. We will preserve the evidence before it disappears. We will sit next to her in every deposition and every courtroom. We will work every day until the case is resolved. We will not send the case to a junior associate and disappear. We will answer the phone. We will tell her the truth, including when the truth is that the case is harder than she thought. We will not let the case be settled for less than it is worth. We will not let the insurance company set the number. We will not let the brand hide behind a name.
We will not promise you a number. We will not promise you a date. We will not promise you a verdict. We will not promise you that the survivor will not have to relive what happened. We will not promise you that the criminal case will produce a conviction, or that the civil case will produce a verdict, or that the appeal will not be taken, or that the appeal will be won. Anyone who promises you those things is not the lawyer you want in a case like this. The lawyers you want are the ones who tell you what they cannot promise, and then do the work.
Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes. That is not a disclaimer. It is the truth of this work. Every case is a person. Every person deserves a lawyer who treats the case that way.
The First Call Is the Hardest Call
If you have read this far, the first call is the next step. It is free. It is confidential. It is in English or in Spanish — Hablamos Español, and we mean it. A real person on our staff picks up, day or night, at 1-888-ATTY-911. If you would rather send a message, you can reach us through the website. If you want to understand more about the kinds of cases we handle, our practice areas explain the work. If you want to read about the long-term effects of what you are going through, our page on brain injuries and the hidden wounds of trauma is a place to start.
We are not the right firm for every case. If we are not, we will tell you, and we will help you find the firm that is. We are the right firm for cases like this — for the sixteen-year-old who told the IMPD officer she was afraid, for the young woman who walked into the detective’s office the next day, for the survivor who has not yet told anyone. We are the firm for the case that starts with a phone call and ends, eventually, with a hotel that is held to account, a brand that is held to account, a recovery that lets a survivor rebuild.
The door is open. The clock is running. Call us.
