A Contra Costa County woman who said she was a victim of sex trafficking has filed a federal lawsuit against five Bay Area hotels — two of which are in Richmond and San Pablo — alleging that hotel employees and management ignored signs she was being exploited while profiting from her abuse.
The lawsuit names five hotels where the woman says she was trafficked between 2012 and February 2017: The former Civic Center Motel (Richmond), Astro Motel (Santa Rosa), Welcome Inn (Oakland), Motel 6 Embarcadero (Oakland) and the former Sands Motel (San Pablo).
It also names G6 Hospitality LLC, the parent company of Motel 6, along with five of its subsidiaries as defendants, as well as Bay Area hotelier Jayesh Desai, who according to news reports bought the 52-room San Pablo motel with his brother Don Desai and his partners for almost $5 million in 2016.
According to the lawsuit, filed Monday in the U.S. District Court Northern District of California in San Francisco, employees at Richmond’s Civic Center Motel (now a Motel 6) and the former Sands Motel (now a Rodeway Inn) allegedly facilitated trafficking by turning a blind eye to the obvious criminal activity.
The lawsuit states that for five years the woman was drugged, tied up, beaten, starved and locked in cars at the motels, where she was allowed to wear only minimal clothing and had no other possessions. She was told she had to earn at least $1,000 a day from commercial sex acts or would be severely punished.
The suit alleges that a manager known as “Pops” accepted hush money and drugs from sex traffickers to allow them to rent rooms at Civic Center Motel, 425 24th St., which was converted into a Motel 6 in January of 2023.
The complaint also claims the manager would warn traffickers on how to avoid attracting law enforcement attention — such as giving traffickers tips on what clothing the plaintiff, identified as Jane Doe in the lawsuit, should wear — while continuing to rent them rooms despite numerous police calls to the property.
The lawsuit also alleges that, specifically for the Civic Center Motel, Richmond police were called multiple times to respond to the trafficking activity, but the alleged traffickers were allowed to remain at the motel.
The Richmond and San Pablo police departments as well as the Contra Costa County District Attorney’s Office were contacted for comment on the lawsuit but did not respond by publication time.
The former Civic Center Motel is the one that the city is in the process of purchasing using a $14.5 million Homekey Grant to convert it into housing for homeless people.
Additionally, the lawsuit states that the former Sands Motel in San Pablo had more than 150 police calls for service during the trafficking period, including reports of assaults, drug offenses and domestic violence. Despite heavy foot traffic at all hours and visible signs that the plaintiff was being abused, staff continued renting rooms to traffickers, according to the filing.
“Each stay at the named subject hotel locations resulted in several consistent red flags,” the lawsuit states, including cash payments, extended stays, and “visible signs of physical abuse.”
According to the National Human Trafficking Hotline, hotels are the most common venue for sex trafficking in the United States. The lawsuit calls hotel-supported trafficking the second most-profitable criminal activity in the country, stating:
“Due to the overall hospitality industry’s complacency, complicity, and reckless disregard in addressing the known issue of sex trafficking, hotels are the venue of choice for sex trafficking. Traffickers and buyers capitalize on the hotel industry’s general refusal to (1) adopt and enforce companywide anti-trafficking policies from the corporate to the property level, (2) train staff on what to look for and how to respond, and/or (3) establish safe and secure reporting mechanisms for those at the point of sale.”
