What Happened at Those Motel 6 Counters Was Not Invisible
You were trafficked through five different Motel 6 properties in California — San Luis Obispo, Modesto, Redding, Turlock, and Manteca. The same man paid for the rooms. The same room rate went onto the same brand’s nightly revenue report. And now your daughter has quadriplegic cerebral palsy because the abuse and the pressure and the violence you endured while pregnant reached her before she was born.
You are reading this because the people who ran those front desks did what the industry trains them to spot, and they spotted it, and they handed over the key anyway. Cash by the hour. The same man checking in week after week. Different young women in the room. No ID. No luggage. The kinds of patterns the hotel industry’s own training materials describe in writing. They saw the warning signs your case will put in front of a jury. They kept collecting the nightly rate.
We are the trial lawyers who take cases like yours against companies that size. Not a referral service. Not a settlement mill. A firm that sues the corporate parent, the operating entity, and the individual property owner, and that has spent more than two decades putting institutional defendants on the stand under oath when they would rather pay to make the case go away. When you call us, you are talking to the people who will try the case, not the people who will hand it to a paralegal.
This page is built for you. It explains what the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act actually says about a hotel that profits from your trafficking. It explains California’s own human trafficking statute, which lets you recover treble damages in addition to everything federal law gives you. It explains the corporate structure you are up against — G6 Hospitality, the franchisor, the operating partnership, the individual property owners — and the shell game they will run to keep the deepest pocket out of the case. It explains the evidence that exists right now, who holds it, and how fast it disappears. It explains what your daughter’s diagnosis means for the number on the verdict form, and what the first seventy-two hours after you call us look like.
Take your time. This is a long page because the topic is long. The next section is the single most important thing you will read today: the law that says the hotel that took the money is on the hook for what happened to you.
California Civil Code § 52.5(f): “A person who violates this section is liable to the victim for actual damages, punitive damages, and treble damages (in an amount equal to three times the actual damages), and is also liable to the victim for reasonable attorney’s fees and costs.”
The Federal Law That Makes the Hotel a Defendant, Not Just the Trafficker
There is a federal statute most people have never heard of called the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. Most people also do not know that one of its sections — 18 U.S.C. § 1595(a) — was written to reach the people who profit from trafficking, not just the person who does it.
The statute reads, in plain words: a victim of trafficking may bring a civil action against the person who committed the offense — or against anyone who “knowingly benefits, financially or by receiving anything of value, from participation in a venture” that the defendant “knew or should have known has engaged in” trafficking. You do not have to prove that the hotel brand itself trafficked you. You have to prove that the hotel took the money from the operation that did, and that it knew or should have known what was happening under its roof.
That is the door your case walks through. The door is federal. It was opened by Congress, and in 2018 Congress came back and stripped away the immunity that websites used to hide behind for trafficking content, by enacting the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act. The FOSTA amendment to 47 U.S.C. § 230 expressly carved out civil claims brought under § 1595 where the conduct is a sex trafficking violation. Congress decided that trafficking was too serious to be insulated by the general rule that platforms are not responsible for what users do. Your case is filed under the same federal framework Congress designed for exactly this kind of corporate exposure.
The four elements a federal court asks under § 1595(a) are these: (1) the defendant knowingly benefited from the operation; (2) by participating in a common undertaking or enterprise involving risk and potential profit; (3) that undertaking violated the TVPRA as to you; and (4) the defendant had constructive or actual knowledge of the violation. You do not need to have told the front desk your name and what was happening in the room. You do not need a recording. The law says the company can be on the hook if it should have known — and the industry itself has been writing training materials for years telling hotel staff exactly what trafficking looks like at the front desk.
In July 2025, a federal jury in Georgia returned a $40 million verdict in the first civil sex-trafficking case to reach a jury in this country — $10 million in compensatory damages and $30 million in punitive damages against a hotel operator where a teenage girl was trafficked for roughly forty days. The jury’s finding was that the operator had “knowingly benefited” from the venture. That is the law working as it is supposed to. Your case is filed under the same statute.
A second jury, in the same consolidated federal litigation, found the rideshare company Uber liable under a different theory — apparent agency — for $8.5 million in compensatory damages for a sexual assault on a rider. That jury found the company could be held responsible for its branded driver’s conduct even though Uber calls its drivers independent contractors. The rideshare verdict is not a hotel-trafficking case and the theory is different, but the lesson is the same: when a company presents the experience as its own, it cannot then disown the harm. That principle cuts directly at a hotel chain that puts its name on the building and collects a fee for every room.
18 U.S.C. § 1595(a): “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.”
The rideshare reference is to Garcia-style apparent-agency principles applied in a different industry. We do not present it as a comparable verdict for your case. We present it for one narrow point: a jury in 2026 held a company answerable for the conduct of a person the company claimed was not its employee. Your case has a different theory, but the principle — that the company behind the brand owns the harm — runs through both.
California’s Own Human Trafficking Statute: Treble Damages on Top of Everything Else
California is one of the most survivor-friendly venues in the country for a human trafficking case, and the reason is California Civil Code § 52.5. The federal TVPRA gives you the door and the basic remedies. California gives you a second, independent door, with remedies that go further.
Section 52.5 is California’s state-law human trafficking cause of action. It allows you to recover against anyone who deprives you of your liberty in violation of the California Trafficking Victims Protection Act or who, in this context, benefits from participating in such conduct. Critically, § 52.5(f) provides for actual damages, punitive damages, and treble damages in an amount equal to three times the actual damages, plus reasonable attorney’s fees and costs. That is on top of the federal TVPRA claim, not instead of it. The treble multiplier exists because the Legislature concluded that trafficking is so serious, and so often hidden, that the only way to make the defendant actually feel the weight of what it did is to multiply the verdict three times.
California’s comparative fault rule is also the survivor’s friend. California follows pure comparative negligence, which means that even if a defendant tries to argue that you bear some share of fault, that percentage reduces your recovery but cannot erase it. The pure comparative rule matters less in a trafficking case than in a car crash, because the defense cannot seriously argue that the victim is to blame for being trafficked, but it matters at the margins and the rule works in your favor.
California also passed one of the country’s strongest supply-chain transparency laws — the California Transparency in Supply Chains Act — which requires large retailers and hospitality companies to disclose their efforts to address human trafficking in their supply chains. G6 Hospitality is precisely the kind of large operator that this law was written about. Their public disclosures, or the absence of meaningful ones, are part of the record of what the company knew it was supposed to be doing.
For the statute of limitations, you have a long runway. The federal TVPRA gives you ten years from the cause of action, or if you were a minor when it happened, ten years from your eighteenth birthday — so until you turn 28. California’s own discovery rule and tolling for minors also protect your claim. The exact deadline depends on facts we will go through with you on the consultation, but the general principle is this: the law gives a survivor a real window, and your daughter’s window does not start running until she is an adult.
California Civil Code § 52.5(a): “Notwithstanding any other law, a person who deprives or violates the personal liberty of another, or who aids or abets in the deprivation or violation of personal liberty of another, is liable to the injured party.”
The treble-damages provision in subsection (f) is what makes a § 52.5 claim particularly powerful. When you stack it on top of the federal TVPRA claim and on top of California’s common-law negligence and premises-liability causes of action, you have a layered case that addresses every angle a defense team is going to attack.
The Corporate Architecture: Who You Are Actually Suing
“Motel 6” is not one company. It is a brand, and behind that brand is a layered corporate architecture designed, like every franchise system, to put the deepest pocket as far from the harm as possible. You need to understand the architecture because the entity you name in the caption is the entity that has to answer.
G6 Hospitality LLC is the parent company that owns the Motel 6 brand. It is the entity that wrote the brand standards, the housekeeping checklists, the training materials, the franchise agreements, the reservation systems, and the revenue reports. It is the entity that licensed the Motel 6 name to local operators and then collected a percentage of every room revenue that was booked. G6 Hospitality is the deep pocket.
Motel 6 Operating L.P. is one of the direct operating entities — the one that actually runs the branded properties, hires corporate-level staff, and is the direct employer of the people who manage the front desk at company-owned locations. Where G6 owns the property outright, Motel 6 Operating L.P. is the daily operator and the entity whose own employees’ conduct is at issue.
Then there are the individual franchise owners — separate LLCs that sign franchise agreements with G6 and then run the property at a specific address. They hold the deed, they sign the local payroll, they carry the property-level insurance, and they make the day-to-day decisions about staffing, training, and who works the night desk. Some of the Motel 6 properties in the five cities in your case are company-owned, and some are franchised. The answer to that question for each property is in the franchise records, and it matters because it determines who is the direct defendant at that address versus who is the brand on the hook.
The corporate structure is built to do one thing: when something goes wrong, each layer points at the next. The franchisee says “I just run the property — the brand set the standards.” The brand says “We don’t operate the property — the franchisee hires the staff.” The operating partnership says “We’re just a manager — talk to the property owner.” This is the shell game, and you do not have to fall for it. Federal civil rights law, agency principles, and the TVPRA’s “knowingly benefits” provision are all designed to reach the party that actually set the policy that produced the harm. The right pleading names all of the right entities, with the right theory against each, so the shell game does not work.
A note on one of the most important appellate decisions in this area: the Eleventh Circuit in Doe #1 v. Red Roof Inns, Inc., 21 F.4th 714 (11th Cir. 2021), affirmed the dismissal of franchisor defendants from a TVPRA case, holding that merely observing trafficking and providing ordinary lodging services was not enough to establish “participation in a venture” by the franchisor. That is a real decision, and a defense team will tell you about it. They will not tell you the equally important context: that case did not involve a brand that ran its own reservations, its own training programs, its own revenue management, and its own standards across a tightly-controlled national footprint the way G6 does. Your complaint can be built precisely to address the Doe case, pleading the specific operational control that distinguishes a Motel 6 franchisor from a brand that only licenses its name. We have read the case. We know what it allows and what it does not. We will build around it.
The Five Properties: What the Geography of Your Case Tells a Jury
The fact that you were trafficked through five different Motel 6 locations — San Luis Obispo on the central coast, Modesto, Turlock, and Manteca in the Stanislaus and San Joaquin valleys, and Redding up in Shasta County — is not a coincidence. It is a pattern, and the pattern is the kind of thing that makes a jury sit up.
The Highway 99 and Interstate 5 corridors through California’s Central Valley are recognized by law enforcement as primary transit routes for human trafficking in the state. Modesto, Turlock, and Manteca are high-density motel hubs. Transient populations move through them. They sit on the freight and logistics arteries that pull workers and travelers in and out at all hours. Redding serves a similar function on I-5 far to the north. San Luis Obispo is a key stop on the 101 coastal route. Each of these cities has documented high “calls for service” at budget lodging — domestic disturbances, vice-related reports, the kind of activity that shows up in police records at the addresses where trafficking occurs.
A jury understands this in their bones. They know that the Central Valley is a corridor. They know that budget motels at highway interchanges are where this happens. They do not need an expert to tell them that five different Motel 6 properties along the same trafficking corridor, trafficked by the same man, is not five random encounters. It is one operation that the brand was in a position to see, if the brand had been looking — and the brand’s own industry writes in its own training materials that this is exactly what to look for.
There is also a corporate subtext the jury will grasp without being told. Five different properties means five different front desks. Five different night managers. Five different sets of training records. Five different sets of housekeeping logs. The patterns the jury will see will not be the patterns of one rogue employee at one bad property. They will be the patterns of a system that was not looking — or that was looking and did not act — across an entire footprint of branded motels in the exact geography where trafficking has been documented for years.
California Transparency in Supply Chains Act (Cal. Civ. Code § 1714.43): A retail seller or manufacturer doing business in California with annual worldwide gross receipts exceeding $100 million must disclose efforts to eradicate slavery and human trafficking from its direct supply chain. The disclosures are a matter of public record and are part of the picture of what the company said it was doing about trafficking.
Your Daughter’s Case: What Quadriplegic Cerebral Palsy Means for the Verdict
Your daughter was born under emergency and life-threatening circumstances. She has quadriplegic cerebral palsy. That diagnosis is at the center of the damages part of this case, and we are going to walk you through it the same way a jury will walk through it — what it is, what it will cost over her lifetime, and what it is worth in the eyes of the law.
Cerebral palsy is a permanent disorder of movement and posture caused by damage to the developing brain. Quadriplegic cerebral palsy means the injury affects all four limbs and often the trunk. The brain injury is not progressive, but the disability it produces is lifelong. The child will need years of physical therapy, occupational therapy, and speech therapy. She may need assistive technology, communication devices, and adapted equipment for daily life. She will likely need surgery to release contractures as she grows. She will need equipment that has to be replaced as her body grows and as her needs change. She may need a wheelchair, possibly a powered wheelchair, and the home and vehicle modifications that go with it. She may need ongoing nursing care. The medical and therapeutic regimen does not end — it evolves across her childhood, her adolescence, and her adult life.
This is one of the most expensive diagnoses in medicine. The lifetime cost of caring for a person with severe cerebral palsy, including medical care, therapy, equipment, home modifications, and personal care assistance, can reach into the millions of dollars. Federal research on severe traumatic brain injury and spinal-cord injury consistently places lifetime care costs in the multi-million-dollar range, with the highest-need cases running higher. The numbers vary, but the order of magnitude is not in dispute. For a child with a severe motor impairment, lifetime care costs commonly exceed several million dollars, and for the most severe cases can climb into the range of $5 million to $10 million or more over the life of the child.
The damages for your daughter are her own claim. In California, she has her own cause of action through a guardian ad litem, and her damages are calculated separately from yours. Her economic damages are the lifetime care cost — the medical, therapeutic, equipment, and care costs across her expected lifetime. Her non-economic damages are the loss of the life she would otherwise have lived, the pain and suffering she will endure, the loss of enjoyment of life. Her parents have their own loss-of-consortium claim — the loss of the relationship with a child who would have been one way and is another. Under California Civil Code § 52.5, her damages are also subject to the trebling provision when the conduct underlying the claim is trafficking.
The medical proof in your daughter’s case is not difficult to establish. The diagnosis is medical. The lifelong nature of the injury is medical. The lifetime care needs are the subject of a life-care plan built by a certified life-care planner, who itemizes every category of future care, multiplies it across her life expectancy, and reduces it to present value. The defense will hire its own experts to challenge the numbers, and that is expected. The cost projection is not a guess; it is an actuarial exercise with medical foundations.
The causation proof — that the trafficking and the violence you endured while pregnant were a substantial factor in producing her injury — is also a medical question with medical evidence. The obstetric and neonatal record, the imaging, the timing of the birth, the nature of the emergency, and the literature on trauma during pregnancy all form the basis of that proof. We retain the right experts. The defense will retain theirs. That is how a serious birth-injury case works. The question is never whether the injury is real. The question is who pays for it.
California Civil Code § 1431.2 (Proposition 51): California’s modified joint-and-several rule for non-economic damages means that each defendant pays its proportionate share of non-economic damages, while remaining jointly liable for economic damages. In practical terms, the motel defendants are jointly on the hook for your daughter’s lifetime medical and care costs, and proportionately liable for her non-economic damages.
The Evidence That Wins the Case, and How Fast It Disappears
The single most important thing you do in the first seventy-two hours is freeze the evidence. This is not optional. The records that prove the Motel 6 system saw what was happening to you are exactly the records that the system has the strongest incentive to let cycle out. Every day you wait, the case loses proof.
The records that exist, who holds them, and how fast they can legally die:
Surveillance camera footage. Each Motel 6 property has surveillance video at the front desk, in the hallways, in the parking lot, and at exterior entries. There is no federal statute that dictates how long a hotel keeps its surveillance footage. Industry practice is a rolling overwrite on a loop — commonly about thirty days, sometimes less. The footage that captured the man checking in with cash, the same room being entered and exited by different individuals throughout the night, the absence of housekeeping for days, and the license plates in the lot — that footage is on a clock. It can be gone in thirty days. The single most important letter we send on the first day is a litigation-hold and preservation demand that names the footage specifically and orders it not to be overwritten. If the company lets the footage die after that letter, a federal court can impose an adverse-inference instruction — meaning the jury is told to assume the missing video would have proven your case.
Property management system records, key-card logs, and guest folios. These are the records that show who checked in, when, what they paid, how they paid, and how often. Cash transactions. No ID. Same room for days. Multiple keys issued. Different names on the same room. This is the documentary spine of the constructive-knowledge claim — the proof that the front desk and the brand’s own reservation system saw the patterns of trafficking in real time. Retention varies by property and by chain policy. Some systems archive quickly; some hold longer. The preservation letter must demand these records by name.
Housekeeping and maintenance logs. Housekeeping logs record when each room was serviced. A trafficked room is a room that gets refused housekeeping — the trafficker does not want staff in the room. A maintenance log captures work orders. A sustained refusal of housekeeping is itself a documented red flag. These records are typically kept for months, not years, and they can be “consolidated” or “archived” away.
Police call-for-service and CAD records. Police calls to the property establish prior notice to the operator. If there have been vice-related calls, domestic disturbance calls, or other indicators at the same address, that history is available through a public-records request to the local police department. These records carry their own retention schedules and need to be pulled early.
Employee training records and incident reports. The brand’s training materials, the property’s training records, and any internal incident reports at the affected properties establish what the company knew and what its own policies said about recognizing trafficking. The training materials are exactly the proof that the industry-standard knowledge existed — that the company cannot claim ignorance of what the warning signs were. Internal incident reports at the property are generated by the property’s own staff and are the most direct evidence of prior notice.
Reservation and brand-data systems. The Motel 6 reservation system, the loyalty program data, and the brand’s central revenue reporting pull together data across properties. The brand knows at the corporate level how often each property is being used for cash, by-the-night rentals. That information is held by G6 Hospitality and by its reservation and data vendors. The preservation letter must name these systems specifically.
The clock is the enemy. We do not wait to send the preservation letter. The day you call, the letter goes out — to G6 Hospitality, to the operating partnership, to each individual franchisee, and to the relevant property-level managers. The letter freezes the evidence. The moment after that letter, if a record disappears, the company has committed spoliation, and the law gives us a remedy.
Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 37(e): If electronically stored information that should have been preserved is lost because a party failed to take reasonable steps to preserve it, and it cannot be restored or replaced, the court may presume the lost information was unfavorable to that party, instruct the jury to so presume, or impose other sanctions.
What Motel 6 Will Argue, and How We Answer
The defense has a playbook. We have read it. Here is what you will hear, and here is what we say back.
Play 1: “The trafficker is the bad guy, not us.”
The argument will be that the criminal conduct is the trafficker’s, and the hotel is just where it happened. The law’s answer is § 1595(a) itself. The statute does not require you to prove the hotel committed the trafficking. It requires you to prove the hotel knowingly benefited from a venture it knew or should have known was trafficking. Cash in the till, rooms paid for, franchise fees paid — that is the benefit. The constructive knowledge element is met by the red flags. This is not a sympathetic argument. It is an argument the law has already answered.
Play 2: “The franchisee is not us.”
Motel 6’s brand will say that each property is independently owned and operated, and that the brand is not responsible for the local operator’s decisions. The answer is in the operational realities of the Motel 6 system. The brand sets the standards. The brand writes the training. The brand controls the reservation system, the brand requirements, and the inspection regime. The brand collects a percentage of every room. The Doe case in the Eleventh Circuit dismissed franchisors in a different fact pattern, but the court was clear that what saves a franchisor is the absence of operational entanglement. Motel 6 is operationally entangled with its franchisees in ways the complaint can specifically plead. The franchisee is a defendant. The brand is also a defendant. They cannot point at each other and walk.
Play 3: “You should have told us.”
The argument will be that the hotel cannot be on the hook for what it did not know. The answer is constructive knowledge. The law says “knew or should have known.” The industry writes, in its own training, exactly what the red flags are. A motel desk clerk who is trained to spot cash-paying, by-the-hour rentals with no ID and no luggage, and who nonetheless hands over the key, is not someone who lacked knowledge — they are someone who chose not to act on it. Juries understand that distinction. We will make it cleanly.
Play 4: “This is a slip-and-fall kind of premises case, not a federal trafficking case.”
The argument will be that your state-law claims should be limited to traditional premises-liability theories. The answer is that the TVPRA is a federal civil remedy, and § 52.5 is a California civil remedy, and you get to bring every theory the law supports. The federal claim is the spine. The state claims layer on top. The common-law negligence and premises claims layer on top of those. Each theory has its own standard, and you are entitled to all of them.
Play 5: “Your daughter’s injury is unrelated to our conduct.”
The argument will be that the birth injury is a medical question unrelated to the hotel’s conduct. The answer is the medical record. The literature on trauma during pregnancy. The obstetric timeline. The emergency circumstances of the birth. We retain the right experts — maternal-fetal medicine, neonatology, pediatric neurology — to walk the jury from the violence you endured to the injury your daughter was born with. Causation in a birth-injury case is built by experts, not improvised.
Play 6: “Sympathy is not damages.”
The argument will be that the verdict should reflect only documented economic loss, not the emotion of the case. The answer is that California law expressly allows for the full measure of damages — economic, non-economic, and treble. A jury’s assessment of non-economic damages in a trafficking case is a determination the law reserves for the jury, and California courts do not lightly disturb it.
Each play has a counter. We prepare for the playbook before the defense runs it. That is the difference between a lawyer who has tried these cases and a lawyer who has not.
What This Case Is Worth, and How That Number Is Built
There is no honest way to put a single dollar figure on a case like this at the intake stage. Anyone who quotes a number before the medical records are reviewed, before the economic loss is calculated, before the venue is set, and before the defense posture is known is guessing. We do not guess. We build the number the way the law requires, and we explain the build to you as we go.
The architecture of the damages looks like this:
Your economic damages are the wages and earning capacity you lost to the trafficking, the out-of-pocket medical and psychological care costs you have already incurred, the future care costs associated with the trauma you have and will continue to carry, and any household-services losses you have sustained. They are calculated with records — medical bills, pay stubs, tax returns, treatment records — and projected by a forensic economist across your worklife.
Your non-economic damages are the physical pain, the fear, the degradation, the nightmares, the depression, the post-traumatic stress, the loss of the life you would have lived, the loss of enjoyment of life. These are damages only a jury can value, and the law trusts juries to value them. In California, Proposition 51 limits joint-and-several liability for non-economic damages, but that limitation is itself a reason to name every defendant correctly. Each defendant is jointly liable for your economic damages regardless of fault percentage.
Your daughter’s economic damages are the lifetime cost of her care — every category of medical care, therapy, equipment, surgery, and personal assistance across her expected lifetime, reduced to present value by a life-care planner and a forensic economist. This is not a guess. It is a category-by-category projection with medical foundations.
Your daughter’s non-economic damages are the loss of the life she would have lived, the pain and suffering she will endure, the loss of enjoyment of life. These are jury questions.
Treble damages under California Civil Code § 52.5 are added to your actual damages in an amount equal to three times the actual damages. This is a statutory multiplier, not a jury discretion. It is the Legislature’s response to the seriousness of trafficking. Combined with the federal TVPRA claim, the case has multiple layers of statutory remedies.
Punitive damages are available under § 52.5 and under California’s common-law standards for conduct that is malicious, oppressive, or fraudulent. The conduct you allege — a hotel that takes money while ignoring the visible signs of trafficking — supports a punitive award.
When the architecture is built, the case is presented to the defense and, if the defense does not accept the full measure of what the law provides, to a jury. Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes. What we can tell you is that the law gives you the right to every layer of recovery, and that we have the experience to build and try the case if the defense does not pay it.
The Insurance Reality: Who Actually Pays
A case like this is not paid by the individual motel property. It is paid by insurance. The question of which insurance, in what order, and to what limit, is a structural question that the case has to be built to answer.
General liability and premises coverage at the property level provides the first layer. Each franchisee’s commercial general liability policy, and the additional-insured endorsement that names G6 Hospitality on the franchisee’s policy, is part of the coverage tower.
The brand’s own coverage sits above the property-level insurance. G6 Hospitality carries its own commercial general liability, its own umbrella and excess layers, and its own executive risk coverage. The brand’s coverage is what responds when the claim is for the brand’s own conduct — its training, its standards, its reservations, its brand-level decisions.
Media and reputational coverage can become relevant in a case that has drawn public attention, but it is not a fund for victims. It is a fund for the brand’s own legal defense and PR response.
The defense will tell you the case is worth only the policy limit. They will be wrong, and they will know they are wrong. The truth is that the brand’s exposure is not capped by the franchisee’s policy, and the franchisee’s exposure is not capped by the brand’s policy. Each defendant is responsible for its own conduct, and the full measure of your damages is the measure of what the law requires the responsible parties to pay. The discovery process is what reveals the actual coverage tower, and we pursue that discovery from day one.
The First Seventy-Two Hours After You Call
Here is what happens after you call 1-888-ATTY-911. We are available twenty-four hours a day. The call is free. The consultation is free. You do not pay us anything unless we recover for you.
Hour one. We take the call. We listen. We do not judge. We do not interrupt. We ask the questions we need to ask to understand what happened, where, and when, and we explain what the law does for you in language you can understand. If we are the right firm for your case, we tell you. If we are not, we tell you that too, and we point you toward the help that is. There is no pressure, and there is no charge for the call.
The same day. We send the litigation-hold and preservation demand. It names G6 Hospitality, the operating partnership, the franchisees at each of the five properties, and the relevant property-level managers. It names the specific records we need preserved: surveillance footage, key-card logs, folios, housekeeping logs, reservation and revenue data, training records, incident reports, and any internal communications about your case. The letter goes out by email and by overnight mail, so the clock on those records starts running in your favor from the moment it lands.
The first week. We begin the public-records pull on the five properties. We obtain the police call-for-service history for each address, the property records from the county recorder, the local business-license filings, and the corporate filings for the franchisee LLCs at each address. We retain a life-care-planning expert for your daughter’s case. We retain a forensic economist to begin the lifetime-cost projection. We retain a maternal-fetal medicine expert to review the medical record on causation. We map the defense team we are about to face.
The first month. We draft the complaint. We file it in the appropriate venue. We serve the defendants. We open formal discovery. We begin depositions. We preserve the record.
We do not tell you this is what we have already done. We tell you this is what we do. The difference matters.
Frequently Asked Questions
Am I too late to file?
The federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act gives you ten years from the cause of action, and if you were a minor when the trafficking began, ten years from your eighteenth birthday. California’s own law provides additional protections, including discovery rules that delay the start of the statute of limitations until you knew or reasonably should have known of the harm. For your daughter, the clock does not start running until she is an adult, and California’s childhood-injury rules provide additional protection. The specific deadline depends on the exact dates and the venue. We will calculate it for you on the consultation, but the general answer is that the law gives survivors of trafficking a real and protective window. Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes.
Do I have to have reported it at the time?
No. The law does not require a survivor to have reported the trafficking to law enforcement or to the hotel in order to bring a civil case. Late disclosure is the norm in trafficking cases, not the exception. The defense will try to use the absence of an immediate report against you. We use the medical and contemporaneous records, and the medical literature on trauma memory, to explain why. A jury that understands the science of trauma understands that delayed disclosure is the rule, not the exception.
What if I do not remember every detail?
That is common and expected. We do not need a perfect memory to file and prove the case. We need the records — medical, hotel, police, reservation, financial — and we need your honest account of what you do remember. The medical and documentary record does the heavy lifting, and the jury is permitted to draw reasonable inferences from the pattern.
Can I sue the brand on the sign, or only the local owner?
Both. The brand is a defendant under the TVPRA’s “knowingly benefits” provision, under California § 52.5, and under common-law agency and negligent-entrustment theories. The local franchisee is a defendant under premises-liability and negligent-hiring theories. The brand’s argument that the franchisee is independent is the defense’s problem, not yours, and the law is designed to prevent that argument from succeeding where the brand’s own conduct produced the harm. We name the right entities for the right theories so the defense cannot point at one and walk away from the other.
What about my daughter? Does she have her own case?
Yes. Your daughter has her own cause of action through a guardian ad litem, with her own economic damages (lifetime care), her own non-economic damages, and her own access to the treble-damages provision under § 52.5. Her case is a separate claim with separate damages and separate proof, even though it is filed in the same action. Her recovery is hers, not yours. The structure exists specifically to protect a child who has been injured by trafficking, and we pursue the full measure of what she is entitled to under California and federal law.
How long does a case like this take?
The honest answer is that a case of this size and complexity takes one to three years to resolve, sometimes longer. Federal trafficking cases have bellwether procedures, and the courts managing the consolidated dockets move methodically. We are not going to tell you it will be over in three months. We are going to tell you we will move the case as quickly as the law and the court allow, and that the longer the case takes the more thoroughly we can build it. We keep you informed at every stage. There is no version of this where you sit in the dark.
Will the case settle?
Many of these cases do settle, after discovery has built the proof. A defense team that sees the surveillance footage it cannot suppress, the reservation data that documents the pattern, the police-call history that establishes prior notice, and the medical record that ties the trafficking to the birth injury, will often conclude that settlement is the rational choice. We do not settle a case to settle it. We settle a case when the settlement reflects the full measure of what the law provides, and we try the case when it does not. The decision is yours, not ours.
What will it cost me to hire you?
Nothing up front. Our fee is contingency — we do not get paid unless we win. The exact percentage is set out in a written retainer that you review, that you understand, and that you sign. We do not charge for the consultation. We do not charge for the preservation letter. We do not charge for the records pull. We front the cost of experts, depositions, and filing fees. Our recovery comes from the result. No fee unless we win. Free consultation.
Will I have to testify?
Possibly, at a deposition and potentially at trial. We prepare you for both. You are not alone in the room. We are with you. We will not ask you to do something you are not ready to do. The decision to go to trial is yours, and we will tell you honestly when we believe your testimony is the strongest part of the case and when we believe the documents and the experts can carry it.
Is my identity protected?
Yes. Trafficking cases are filed as “Jane Doe” cases when appropriate, and the courts have a strong tradition of protecting the identity of survivors. We file motions to seal identifying information when needed, and we work with you to make sure the public record reflects your privacy. Your name is not a piece of the case we put in front of a jury.
Why This Firm
You are hiring Ralph Manginello. He is the managing partner of The Manginello Law Firm, PLLC, doing business as Attorney911 — Legal Emergency Lawyers. He has been a Texas-licensed trial attorney for more than twenty-seven years, in federal and state court, and he has tried the kinds of cases that end up in front of juries that have to decide who pays. Before he was a lawyer he was a journalist, and the instinct to find the story and tell it cleanly is the same instinct he brings to a courtroom. He was born in New York, raised in Houston, and is the product of an Italian-American family that taught him to fight for the people who cannot fight for themselves. He is bilingual. He has spent his career in the room with the corporate defense teams you are about to face, and he has been the one asking the questions.
You are also hiring Lupe Peña. Lupe is an associate attorney with the firm. He was born and raised in Sugar Land, Texas, in a third-generation Texas family with roots to the King Ranch. He graduated from South Texas College of Law Houston and practiced for years on the other side of these cases — as a defense attorney at a national insurance-defense firm. He knows the playbook the defense is going to run on your case, because he used to run it. He knows how the software values the claim, how the adjuster sets the reserve, how the IME doctor is chosen, and how the company tries to delay and devalue people exactly like you. He is now on your side, and the knowledge he brings from the other side is the most valuable knowledge in the room. He is fluent in Spanish. Hablamos Español. The case will be built in the language you speak and in the language the law speaks, and you will understand every step of it.
Attorney911 takes cases like yours against companies that size, against defendants that fight, and against insurance teams that deny and delay. We are not the firm for a quick settlement. We are the firm for a case that has to be built, that has to be proved, and that has to be tried if the defense will not pay it. We are the firm that picks up the phone at two in the morning. We are the firm that writes the preservation letter the day you call. We are the firm that does the work. No fee unless we win. Free consultation. 1-888-ATTY-911.
A Note on the Money
We are not going to quote you a number on a first call. The number depends on the medical record, the venue, the defense, the coverage, the expert projections, and a dozen other things that are not knowable at intake. We will tell you what the law gives you, we will tell you what we expect the architecture of the damages to look like, and we will tell you what the defense is going to argue. We will not promise a result. Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes. What we will promise is that we will work the case the way the law requires, and that we will not stop until we have done everything the law gives you the right to do.
The Call
If you are reading this, you are the survivor of a trafficking case that the law was written for. The Trafficking Victims Protection Act was passed because Congress concluded that trafficking is a serious federal crime and that the people who profit from it should be held accountable. California’s Civil Code § 52.5 was passed because the Legislature of California concluded the same thing, and added treble damages because the harm is so often hidden that the only way to make the defendant feel the weight of what it did is to multiply the verdict three times. The case is yours. The law is on your side. The evidence exists, and we know how to freeze it. Your daughter has her own claim and her own damages. The defendants have names, addresses, and insurance. The clock is real, and we know how to use it.
Call 1-888-ATTY-911 (1-888-288-9911). The line is answered twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The call is free. The consultation is free. We will not charge you anything unless we win. We will tell you, in plain language, what your case is worth, what it will take to get it there, and how long the road is. If we are the right firm for you, we will say so. If we are not, we will say that too. Hablamos Español. Llámenos — hablamos su idioma.
The first move is the call. The second move is the preservation letter. The third move is the case. We are ready when you are.
Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes.
1-888-ATTY-911 — Attorney911 — Legal Emergency Lawyers™