A woman who was trafficked as a child will receive $9.3 million from settlements with foster care agency and Days Inn hotel

A foster care agency has agreed to settle a lawsuit brought by a woman who was sexually abused and trafficked by a man she met through her Philadelphia foster home.

The woman, identified as D.P. in the lawsuit to protect her privacy, will now receive a total of $9.3 million from the settlement and another settlement reached earlier in the case.

D.P. was groomed into sex trafficking by the son of the woman with whom she was placed as a foster child in 2009, when she was 13-years-old, the lawsuit said. Craig Johnson, the son, was sentenced in 2013 to 24 years in prison for two counts of sex trafficking of minors. Much of the trafficking took place at the Days Inn hotel on Roosevelt Boulevard in Northeast Philadelphia, which previously reached a separate settlement with D.P. and other sex-trafficking victims, according to legal filings.

The lawsuit, filed in April 2022 by Kline and Specter in the Philadelphia Courts of Common Pleas, says the foster agency shouldn’t have placed D.P. in the house in which she met Johnson, which was already crowded with multiple children and where her needs couldn’t have been met.

“Only through conversations with our client we learned that she met her trafficker through her foster care placement,” said Emily Marks, one of the attorneys representing D.P.

Her attorneys would not share the name of the foster care agency that agreed to settle the case, but court records show that D.P. was placed at the foster home through First Home Care.

An attorney representing First Home Care did not respond to a request for comment. The Philadelphia Department of Human Services said the agency had a contract with the city for foster care between 2008 and 2018.

Shortly after D.P. was placed at the home in 2009, Johnson began grooming her and convinced her to leave the home, according to court records. He sexually abused her and recruited her into a sex trafficking ring, in which Johnson arranged for other men to sexually assault and rape minor girls in exchange for paying him $60 to $100.

Johnson was able to lure D.P. into his scheme because she didn’t have adequate care and supervision by her foster parent, her lawyers said in legal filings.

Home Care First argued in their court filings that D.P. wasn’t sexually abused during her six-week stay at the foster home, and that Johnson didn’t live at that house at the time.

In 2012, the Bensalem Township Police Department interviewed D.P., who she said was among minor girls who had sex with men at Johnson’s behest. The criminal investigation, which became a federal case, exposed a sex-trafficking ring out of the Days Inn, among other locations, that resulted in three convictions, including Johnson’s. He also pleaded guilty in 2013 to multiple state charges, including corruption and indecent assault of minors.

» READ MORE: Owners of a Days Inn in Northeast Philly will pay $24 million to women who were forced into prostitution there

In 2023, the Days Inn hotel on Roosevelt Boulevard agreed to pay $24 million to eight women, who were trafficked as minors, including D.P. The civil lawsuit, filed in the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas by the same lawyers representing D.P., claimed that at least one member of the hotel’s security staff was complicit in the abuse.

The breakdown of the amount of money that each woman received was not disclosed.

Nathan Heller, an attorney from DLA Piper who represented the hotel in D.P.’s case, said that Days Inn was not part of the new settlement with the foster agency, so the company had no comment.

The new settlement, reached with the foster agency on Tuesday, is for an undisclosed amount. But lawyers from Kline and Specter said that when combining her share of the hotel’s settlement with the new settlement, D.P., now in her late 20s, will receive $9.3 million.

“You can’t give her back her innocence, you can’t take her back in time,” said Nadeem Bezar, who also represented the woman. “The compensation means that she would be able to do things that she was derailed from.”