The owners of the Days Inn on Roosevelt Boulevard in Northeast Philadelphia have agreed to pay $24 million to eight women who were forced into prostitution at the hotel when they were teenagers.
The women, who were between 14 and 17 at the time, were held against their will — and sometimes beaten — by sex traffickers who arranged for them to have sex for money, then kept the profits, according to a civil suit filed in Common Pleas Court and recently settled. The traffickers rented rooms at the hotel for days and weeks at a time, the suit said, and the criminal activity they engaged in over three years was “open, obvious and notorious.
At least one staff member at the hotel, a security guard, was complicit in the abuse, and helped shield the illegal activity from law enforcement, according to the lawsuit.Most of the victims had been in the child-welfare and foster-care system, said Nadeem Bezar, an attorney with the Center City law firm Kline & Specter who handled the case with his colleague Emily Marks.
The operation was eventually shut down by federal agents who had been investigating human trafficking at short-term hotels along the Roosevelt Boulevard corridor.
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