An East Bay woman who claims she was forced into prostitution has sued the owners of five Bay Area motels, alleging their managers and staff knew she was being trafficked for sex.
The Contra Costa County woman identified only as Jane Doe alleges in a lawsuit she was trafficked between 2012 and 2017 at the motels in Richmond, Santa Rosa, Oakland and San Pablo, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
The unidentified plaintiff sued the parent companies of the former Civic Center Motel in Richmond, the Astro Motel in Santa Rosa, the Welcome Inn and the Motel 6 Embarcadero in Oakland and the former Sands Motel in San Pablo.
The plaintiff alleges her traffickers moved her between the Civic Center Motel and at least four others during a five-year period where she was held hostage, subject to routine beatings, given sex quotas and abused in other ways, according to her complaint
Her alleged traffickers weren’t named because the lawsuit concerns only the motels, according to the Chronicle. She alleges they wouldn’t allow her to eat or drink water for long periods, locked her in hot vehicles, took her belongings and controlled her every movement, according to the complaint.
Despite numerous warning signs, the motel managers allegedly ceded to the requests of the traffickers, allowing them to pay for extended stays, requesting certain rooms away from other guests and placing the victim in rooms where no phone was present, the lawsuit says.
“In this specific lawsuit we have a number of motels, their owners and parent companies who all knew what was going on,” Katie Llamas, an attorney representing the plaintiff, told the newspaper. “But they were choosing to profit off of it and not do anything to protect” her.
Most of the owners of the motels said they either hadn’t seen the complaint or couldn’t comment on the allegations. The parent companies include Civic Center Hospitality Group, Greenleaf Boutique Collection, Shiv Partnership and G6.
Nilesh Patel, who with a family member ran the former Civic Center Motel under the Civic Center Hospitality Group before they sold it to another company in 2017, said he hadn’t seen the complaint. Last year, the motel became a Motel 6.
“It’s unfair,” Patel told the Chronicle. “There’s nothing there. Nothing happened, because if something happened like that, why did they wait for 10 years? If something happened, we would have called the police right away. While we were there, we didn’t have any problems.”
Operators of the Motel 6 and the former Sands Motel said they either hadn’t seen the complaint or couldn’t comment on the lawsuit. Former owners for the Astro Motel and the Welcome Inn didn’t return requests for comment from the Chronicle.
The alleged trafficking at the Astro Motel took place before the property was sold to its current owners, according to the complaint. At the time of the alleged trafficking, the motel was owned and run by Greenleaf Boutique Collection. Texts and calls to the company were not returned.
An attempt by the Chronicle to reach Jayesh Desai, named among the owners of the Sands Motel, resulted in a man answering the phone who identified himself as “Don.” He said he was Desai’s business partner and had been part of the motel management since the end of 2015.
He said he knew of no lawsuit concerning the Sands Motel.
At the Welcome Inn, the plaintiff allegedly ran to the front desk and “frantically” asked its staff to call the police, but her pleas were refused, the complaint said. She was allegedly beaten afterward by one of her traffickers. Calls and emails to motel owner Shiv Partnership were not returned.
The Chronicle named G6 hospitality in connection with the lawsuit, but didn’t name a corresponding motel. The Texas-based hospitality firm, a unit of Blackstone, owns Motel 6.
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An unidentified spokesperson for G6 Hospitality said in an email to the Chronicle that the company wasn’t able to provide specific commentary on the lawsuit, but that G6 “condemns all forms of human trafficking.”
“G6 takes a proactive, zero-tolerance stance on human trafficking,” the spokesperson wrote. “There is nothing more important to us than the safety and well-being of our guests, our team members and the communities in which we operate.”