Three Philadelphia hotels agree to $17.5 million settlement in human trafficking cases
The three women, who were trafficked from the ages of 14 to 17, sued Motel 6, Days Inn, and North American Motor Inn.
Three Philadelphia hotels agreed to pay a $17.5 million settlement to resolve human trafficking lawsuits brought by women who were sold for sex on their premises as teenage girls, their attorneys said.
The victims accused the Motel 6 and the Days Inn on Roosevelt Boulevard and a North American Motors Inn on City Avenue of lax security that allowed for them to be trafficked as 14- to 17-year-olds between May 2015 and January 2017.
The lawsuits say that the hotels had reason to suspect they were hubs for human trafficking but still did not take measures to protect potential victims.
For example, the Days Inn hired a security guard who had a past federal felony conviction and was later arrested for human trafficking after years of employment at the hotel, said Emily Marks, a Kline & Specter attorney who represented the victims. The Motel 6 had only one monitor for its security-camera system, which was in the owner’s locked office, she said.
But despite continued calls to police, Marks said, the hotels did not enhance security or train their employees to recognize signs of human trafficking.
“They felt that police were responding to criminal activity, but it wasn’t their problem to deal with,” the attorney said.
Two of the victims were trafficked at the Motel 6 and the Days Inn, and a third was trafficked at the Motel 6 and the North American Motor Inn. Their names are not included in court documents to protect their identities. They filed lawsuits between 2022 and 2024 in Common Pleas Court in Philadelphia.
The settlement involves the three victims, hotels, and a slew of corporate entities that owned and managed the locations. Attorneys for the hotels did not respond to requests for comment.
Kline & Specter attorneys did not provide a breakdown of how the $17.5 million is divided among the victims, or what portion of the settlement each corporate entity is liable for, and the information is not available from court records.
This is not the first human trafficking settlement that the Days Inn has entered in recent years. The hotel’s owners agreed in 2023 to pay $24 million to eight women who were forced as teenagers to have sex with paying men.
The cases are a reminder that human trafficking is not a distant reality, happening across borders by faraway criminal enterprises, said Nadeem Bezar, a Kline & Specter attorney who also represented the victims.
“It’s happening right in our city, and it’s happening to children,” Bezar said.
Even though the trafficking occurred nearly a decade ago, lawsuits and settlements offer victims a way forward from the horror they endured, Marks said.
“The reality is that they feel a lot of guilt and shame about what happened to them, although this was not their fault,” she said. “So bringing these claims, telling what happened to them, I think gives them hope that people are listening out there and things will change.”