What Happened to You Was Not Your Fault, and the Law Gives You a Way Forward
If you are reading this, something terrible happened to you at a hotel in Omaha. Maybe you were brought to this city from somewhere else. Maybe you were held there against your will, or made to feel like you could not leave. Maybe a man at the front desk traded a room for what was done to you. Maybe you were told what to wear, what to say, and what would happen if you did not. Maybe you were hungry and afraid and under twenty, and the people who should have protected you treated you like merchandise instead.
Whatever the details of your story, the first thing we want you to know is this: federal prosecutors in Nebraska have already proven in a federal courtroom that exactly this kind of conduct happened at a hotel in this city, and the man who ran the operation is now serving a ten-year federal prison sentence. A federal jury in Omaha found a hotel worker guilty on two counts of sex trafficking of a minor. The sentence was imposed on May 26, 2026 by Senior United States District Judge Joseph F. Bataillon. Five years of supervised release will follow the prison term. After that, because the perpetrator was in this country unlawfully, he will be deported. The criminal case is over.
Your case is different. Your case is not about locking him up. He is already locked up. Your case is about making the hotel that profited from what happened to you pay for what you lost, what you are still losing, and what you will lose for the rest of your life.
That is a civil case. It is brought by you, through us, under federal and Nebraska law. You do not have to be a U.S. citizen to bring it. You do not have to testify again. You do not even have to leave your home. And we do not get paid unless we win.
This page is going to tell you exactly how that works, what your rights are, what the hotel’s defenses are and why they will fail, how much money is realistically on the table, what evidence has to be preserved before it disappears, and what you should do in the next seventy-two hours. We have written it as long as it needs to be, because your questions are not simple and your answers should not be.
The Federal Law That Lets You Sue the Hotel: The Trafficking Victims Protection Act
The civil case runs on a statute called the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, or TVPRA. The specific provision is 18 U.S.C. § 1595(a), and it says something very important that most people never hear about:
“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. You do not have to prove the hotel trafficked you. You only have to prove the hotel knowingly benefited from a venture it knew or should have known was trafficking you. The room revenue. The franchise royalty. The avoided loss of booking fees on rooms that would otherwise be empty on a Tuesday night. Every dollar the hotel pocketed from the rooms where this happened is money the hotel took from a venture it should have seen for what it was.
This is why these cases win. The law does not require you to prove the hotel management sat in a dark room and plotted with the trafficker. It only requires you to prove the hotel took the money while the warning signs piled up at the front desk. That is a much lower bar, and it is exactly what the AmericInn facts show.
The TVPRA also gives you time. Under 18 U.S.C. § 1595(c), you have ten years from the date the cause of action arose to file. If you were a minor when it happened – and the federal case in Omaha involved girls aged fifteen and sixteen – you have ten years from your eighteenth birthday. That means if you were trafficked at fifteen, your window stretches until you are twenty-eight. Most survivors do not even begin to understand what was done to them, or that they have rights, until years later. The federal clock was written for that reality.
And if the hotel or its insurer tries to use the website or app where the trafficking was advertised as a shield, that shield has already been removed. The Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA), signed into law on April 11, 2018, amended 47 U.S.C. § 230(e)(5) to strip the federal immunity for any platform that knowingly facilitates sex trafficking. The room, the booking system, the online ad, the loyalty app – none of those platforms get to hide behind an old internet-speech law when the conduct is sex trafficking.
The Hotel Will Say It Did Not Know. Here Is Why That Argument Fails.
Every hotel and every hotel brand we have ever sued in a trafficking case starts with the same defense: we did not know. We are a responsible operator. We have policies. We train our staff. We would never knowingly allow this. The argument sounds reasonable. It is also, almost always, a lie – or at best, a willful blindness that the law treats exactly the same as knowledge.
The law does not require you to prove the hotel signed a contract with the trafficker or sent a memo saying “we approve of trafficking in room 214.” The law only requires you to prove the hotel should have known. And in the hotel industry, the warning signs are well-known, well-documented, and well-trained-for. The industry itself has spent decades teaching its staff what to look for, because hotels were the ground zero of sex trafficking long before the AmericInn case in Omaha.
Here are the warning signs the hotel industry itself trains its employees to spot:
- Cash payments, often for short stays, sometimes by the hour
- Third-party payment – one person renting the room for another who never appears at the front desk
- Refusal of housekeeping – the “do not disturb” sign hung for days, sometimes with towels and food passed under the door
- Heavy foot traffic – a steady stream of different men visiting the same room
- Minimal luggage – the victim appears with almost nothing
- Excessive requests – extra towels, extra sheets, unusual items
- Victims who appear frightened, controlled, or unable to speak for themselves
- The same individual checking in repeatedly with different young companions
These are not subtle. They are not hidden. They are the textbook indicators that hotel chains have spent millions of dollars teaching their staff to recognize. When a hotel sits in the middle of this pattern and keeps handing over the keys, it has not been fooled. It has decided the room revenue is worth more than the warning signs. The law calls that “knowing or should have known,” and it is enough.
In the AmericInn case, federal prosecutors presented evidence that the trafficking took place over a period of days, that the victims were held at the property, that hotel employees were involved in the commercial sex acts in exchange for reduced room rates, and that the victims were threatened with removal if they did not comply. A federal jury convicted on two counts. The same evidence that convicted the trafficker is evidence that the hotel was on notice, and the same jury that found the trafficker guilty beyond a reasonable doubt has already accepted the factual picture. That is not the only evidence we will use, but it is powerful corroboration that the hotel’s “we did not know” story does not hold up.
The Evidence That Proves Your Case – and How Fast It Disappears
Evidence is the difference between a case you win and a case you lose. In a hotel trafficking case, the evidence you need exists – but it is perishable. Hotels do not keep their records forever. Some of the records that matter most can be automatically overwritten in a matter of days. This is why the seventy-two hours after you first contact us are the most important seventy-two hours in your case.
Hotel Surveillance Video
Most hotels operate closed-circuit television systems that record the lobby, the hallways, the parking lot, the front desk, and sometimes the elevator banks. This footage is exactly what you need – it shows the trafficker coming and going, it shows the parade of men, it shows the victim arriving with almost nothing and looking afraid, it shows the front-desk clerk handing over key cards, it shows the housekeeping staff being turned away. A jury watching that video sees your story in a way no witness testimony can match.
But here is the problem: most hotel surveillance systems operate on a rolling overwrite loop, commonly around thirty days. After thirty days, the system records over the old footage automatically, and it is gone forever – legally, not just practically. If you wait six months to call us, the video of what happened to you has almost certainly been taped over and is no longer recoverable.
The law gives us a tool to fight this. Once a defendant is on notice that evidence is relevant to a claim, the destruction of that evidence can be punished by a court – up to and including an instruction to the jury that they should assume the missing evidence would have been unfavorable to the defendant. That instruction, called an adverse inference, can be case-winning. But it only works if we can prove the defendant destroyed the evidence after it was told to preserve it. The preservation letter has to go out fast.
Key-Card Access Logs and Electronic Door Locks
Every modern hotel room uses electronic key cards. The system records who opened which door and when. Those logs show a precise timeline of who came and went from the room where you were held. Combined with the surveillance video, they let us reconstruct the entire operation in granular detail. These logs are also subject to routine purging, but on a different schedule than video – typically longer, sometimes months. Either way, the sooner we demand them, the better.
Guest Folios, Reservation Records, and Payment Logs
The hotel’s own billing system records every reservation, every payment, every room assignment, every charge. This is where we prove the pattern – the same individual checking in again and again, cash payments, the reduced or waived room rates that were the trafficker’s payment for the sex acts. These records are governed by the hotel’s own data-retention policy, which varies by chain and by system. Some are kept for years; some are archived in ways that make them harder to retrieve. We demand them immediately.
Housekeeping and Maintenance Logs
When housekeeping knocks on a door and gets no answer, that is logged. When a “do not disturb” sign stays up for three days, that is a record. When maintenance is called to a room, that is logged. These seemingly mundane records are exactly the evidence that proves the hotel had actual notice of what was happening inside the room. They are often retained for a limited time and then destroyed.
Police Call-for-Service and Incident Reports
Before the federal case began in January 2025, there may have been other incidents at this hotel – calls to police, noise complaints, disturbance reports, prior theft or drug reports. Under Nebraska’s public records law, we can obtain the Omaha Police Department’s call-for-service history for the address. If there were prior incidents, that is powerful evidence that the hotel was on notice that this property was a problem, and it did nothing about it. These records have their own retention schedule, but they are generally obtainable.
Federal Investigation Materials
The federal Homeland Security Task Force that investigated this case produced reports, interview transcripts, photographs, and forensic analysis. Some of those materials are or will become available through the federal court process. Your civil case runs alongside the criminal case, and we have tools to obtain what the government collected.
The Preservation Letter – and Why It Has to Go Out Today
The moment you contact us, we send a litigation hold letter to the hotel, the brand, the individual employees, and any other defendants. That letter identifies you, describes your claim in general terms, identifies the location and time period, and demands that every piece of evidence described above be preserved. Once that letter is received, any destruction of evidence becomes spoliation, and the consequences for the defendant are severe.
Do not wait. If you are even considering whether to call us, call us. The preservation letter is free. It costs you nothing. And it is the single most important step you can take to protect your case.
The Insurance Adjuster Playbook: Three Moves You Can Expect and How We Counter Each One
Within hours of a serious hotel incident, the hotel’s insurance company assigns a claims handler. That handler is not your friend. Their job is to pay you as little as possible, as quickly as possible, and to close the file. They have a playbook they have run hundreds of times. Here is what they will do and how we stop them.
Play One: The Quick Check With a Release Attached
The move: The adjuster calls or visits within days, expresses sympathy, says the hotel “wants to do the right thing,” and offers a small check – a few thousand dollars, maybe a few tens of thousands – to “cover your immediate expenses.” The check comes with a release, a legal document that forever bars you from suing for anything related to the incident. If you sign it and cash the check, your case is over, and the check is almost always a fraction of what the case is worth.
Our counter: Do not sign anything. Do not cash any check. Do not give a recorded statement. Forward the call or letter to us. We will respond in writing and tell the adjuster that any communication goes through counsel. The quick check is designed to work only if you are scared, alone, and do not know what your case is worth. Once you have a lawyer, the math changes overnight.
Play Two: The Recorded Statement Trap
The move: The adjuster asks for a recorded statement “so we can get your side of the story.” They tell you it is “just routine.” It is not routine. It is designed to get you to say things the adjuster can later use against you – that you are “doing fine now,” that you “don’t remember the details,” that you “went along with it.” In a trafficking case, the recorded statement is especially dangerous because the defense will try to use anything you say to argue you were a willing participant rather than a victim.
Our counter: You do not give a recorded statement. Period. Not before we have reviewed every piece of evidence, not before we have prepared you for every question they might ask, and not until we have filed the lawsuit and the rules of the game have changed. An adjuster who asks for a recorded statement without your lawyer present is not trying to help you.
Play Three: The Delay Until the Statute of Limitations Is Almost Up
The move: The adjuster “needs more time to investigate.” They call every few weeks with no offer. Months pass. A year passes. They are betting that you will get tired, that you will give up, that the statute of limitations will run before you find a lawyer, and that the hotel will walk away clean.
Our counter: The federal TVPRA gives you ten years. That is not an emergency. But evidence does disappear on a much shorter clock, and that is the real urgency. We do not let the adjuster’s delay become our delay. We send the preservation letter on day one. We file the lawsuit when the investigation is complete and the evidence is locked down. And we do not let the statute of limitations surprise us. The deadline is on our calendar from the first call.
A Fourth Move Worth Naming: The Independent Medical Examination
The move: Once a lawsuit is filed, the hotel’s lawyers will often demand that you submit to an independent medical examination – a “doctor of their choosing” who will examine you and produce a report. The phrase “independent” is a lie. The doctor is paid by the defense. The examination is designed to find something – a pre-existing condition, an inconsistency in your story, a reason to minimize your damages.
Our counter: Nebraska law (and federal civil procedure) allows independent medical examinations, but the scope is limited, the examiner must be a neutral professional, and the results are not the last word. We attend these examinations. We object when the examiner goes outside the proper scope. We make sure your treating providers – the therapist, the doctor, the counselor who actually knows you – are the ones telling your medical story, not a hired gun.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I really sue a hotel for what happened to me there?
Yes. Under the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1595, you can sue not only the person who trafficked you but also any business that “knowingly benefited” from a venture it knew or should have known was trafficking. A hotel that rented rooms, collected payment, and looked the other way while the warning signs piled up at the front desk fits that description. Nebraska’s Human Trafficking Victims Civil Remedy Act gives you a parallel claim under state law. You do not have to be a U.S. citizen to bring either claim.
How long do I have to file a lawsuit?
Under the federal TVPRA, you have ten years from the date the cause of action arose. If you were a minor when the trafficking happened, the clock does not start until your eighteenth birthday – so if you were trafficked at fifteen, you have until you are twenty-eight. Nebraska’s civil remedy act has its own limitations period, and it is also generous to survivors. But evidence disappears on a much shorter clock than either statute of limitations, which is why calling us sooner is always better than calling us later. We will tell you exactly how much time you have under both laws when you call.
What if I was a minor when it happened?
You were a child. Under federal and Nebraska law, a minor cannot consent to commercial sex. There is no comparative fault to assign to a child. There is no “she was a willing participant” defense available to the hotel. Your age at the time of the trafficking is one of the most powerful facts in your case, and it is the reason the TVPRA’s extended statute of limitations exists. The hotel’s lawyers will try everything they can to make the jury forget that you were fifteen or sixteen. We will make sure the jury never does.
Do I have to testify or go to court?
Most civil trafficking cases settle before trial. The defendants and their insurance companies generally prefer certainty over the risk of a jury verdict, and a well-prepared civil case with the kind of evidence available in the AmericInn matter is exactly the kind of case that pressures a defendant to settle. If your case does go to trial, you will likely need to testify, and we will spend many hours preparing you for that testimony before you ever take the stand. You will not be alone in that courtroom.
What if the hotel says they did not know what was happening?
That is the universal defense in every hotel trafficking case, and it almost always fails. The law does not require you to prove the hotel management sat down and approved the trafficking. It only requires you to prove the hotel knew or should have known. The hotel industry itself trains its staff to recognize the warning signs – cash payments, refused housekeeping, heavy short-stay foot traffic, frightened guests – and when a hotel ignores every one of those signs, the law treats that as knowledge. In the AmericInn case, federal prosecutors presented evidence that hotel employees were directly involved in the commercial sex acts in exchange for reduced room rates. That is not “did not know.” That is participation.
How much is my case worth?
We will not give you a number without knowing your specific facts, and we will not promise you a result. Based on our analysis of similar cases involving hotel-based trafficking of minors, comparable cases have produced recoveries in a range from roughly two and a half million dollars at the low end to ten million dollars or more at the high end, depending on the severity and duration of the trafficking, the evidence of the hotel’s knowledge, the age of the victims, the strength of the documentation, and the insurance available. Your case may be worth more or less than that range. We will tell you honestly where your case falls once we have investigated it.
What if I do not remember everything?
That is normal. Trauma affects memory. It is one of the most well-documented effects of prolonged sexual exploitation, and it is one of the things we will explain to a jury. You do not have to remember every date, every name, every detail. You have to be honest about what you remember and what you do not, and the physical evidence – the hotel records, the surveillance footage if it survives, the federal investigation files – will fill in the gaps.
Will my case become public?
A civil lawsuit is a public filing. The defendants and their lawyers will know your name. The court record will be accessible. That is the trade-off: you cannot recover millions without filing a case, and filing a case makes the case exist in the public record. We take every step available to protect your privacy within that constraint – sealing sensitive filings where the law allows, limiting discovery to what is necessary, objecting to defense requests that intrude on your personal life. The hotel’s lawyers will try to make the case about you rather than about them. We will not let them.
Do I have to pay anything up front?
No. Our fee in cases like this is contingency – you pay nothing up front, and we do not get paid unless we recover money for you. Our fee is either thirty-three and one-third percent of any recovery before trial, or forty percent if the case goes through trial. The federal TVPRA also provides for the defendant’s payment of your reasonable attorney’s fees if you prevail, which means the hotel’s insurance company ultimately bears the cost of our work on top of your recovery. You should also know that past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes.
What about the hotel brand, like Wyndham?
The AmericInn brand is part of the Wyndham Hotels and Resorts portfolio. We will pursue Wyndham where the evidence supports it. Hotel brands have had mixed results fighting these cases – some courts have accepted the “we are just a licensor” defense and dismissed the brand; others have allowed cases to proceed where the survivor can show the brand exercised enough operational control over the property to be treated as part of the venture. We will tell you honestly what we can prove against the brand and what your realistic recovery from each defendant in the stack looks like.
What if I am not in Nebraska anymore?
That does not matter. The Trafficking Victims Protection Act is a federal statute. Nebraska’s Human Trafficking Victims Civil Remedy Act allows cases to be filed in Nebraska where the trafficking occurred, even if the survivor has since moved. We represent trafficking survivors across the country in cases arising from events in other states. We can take your case from wherever you are. We have done it before. Your location is not a barrier.
How to Reach Us, and What Happens Next
Call 1-888-ATTY-911. That is our emergency hotline. A real person will answer, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The call is free. There is no obligation. If you reach out to us and we are not the right fit for your case, we will tell you, and we will try to point you toward someone who is. If we are the right fit, we will start working the same day.
You can also visit our website or send us a message through our contact page. We will respond within twenty-four hours. We serve clients across the country in cases arising from events in Nebraska and other states, working with local counsel where the rules require it.
Hablamos Español. If you or your family prefers to communicate in Spanish, we will conduct the full consultation, the full case preparation, and the full courtroom representation in Spanish. You will not need an interpreter, and you will not lose anything in translation.
There is no fee unless we win. Our representation in cases like this is on a contingency basis – thirty-three and one-third percent before trial, forty percent through trial. You pay nothing up front. The federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act provides for the defendant’s payment of your reasonable attorney’s fees on top of your recovery if you prevail, so the hotel’s insurance carrier ultimately bears the cost of our work. If we do not recover money for you, you owe us nothing.
Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes. We will tell you honestly what we think your case is worth and what your realistic path to recovery looks like. We will not promise you a number. We will not tell you what you want to hear in order to sign you up. We will tell you the truth, and then we will go to work.
One More Thing
We want to say one more thing, and it is not about the law.
What happened to you was a crime. A federal jury in Omaha has already said so, beyond a reasonable doubt, in a criminal case where the burden of proof was the highest our legal system imposes. The man who did this to you is in federal prison. He will be deported after he serves his sentence. The system has done what the criminal system can do.
But the criminal system does not pay for your therapy. It does not pay for the education you lost. It does not pay for the years of earnings you will not earn because the trauma follows you into every job interview, every relationship, every quiet moment when the memory surfaces. It does not pay the hotel back for the rooms it rented while you were held there. The civil system is the part that does that work, and that is the work we do.
You do not have to be brave to call us. You do not have to be ready to tell your whole story. You do not have to decide today whether to file a lawsuit. You just have to call, or write, and let us listen. From there, we will take the next step together, at whatever pace you are ready for.
1-888-ATTY-911. Free. Confidential. No fee unless we win. Attorney911 – The Manginello Law Firm, PLLC. We are ready when you are.