Sex Trafficking Lawsuit Claims Woman’s Abuse Was Ignored by Atlanta Hotel

Super 8 motel staff treated child sex trafficker like a V.I.P. guest, and alerted him when law enforcement was on the premises, survivor says.

Employees at a Super 8 in Atlanta took money to serve as “lookouts” at the front desk of the hotel, as men paid to repeatedly rape a 16-year-old girl, according to a recently filed sex trafficking lawsuit.

The survivor, identified only as N.N., filed the complaint (PDF) in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia on August 1, pursuing financial damages from Lincoln Bancorp LLC, which operated a Super 8 Motel in College Park, Georgia, just outside of Atlanta.

N.N.’s claim is one of dozens of similar lawsuits filed in the past few years, with many of the survivors indicating that they were also trafficked in the Atlanta suburbs.

However, the problem extends beyond that area. Dozens of motel sex trafficking lawsuits filed nationwide allege that employees at different hotels and motels knowingly allowed child sex trafficking to occur on their premises, sometimes actively participating in the sexual assault of young girls being held in rooms.

According to N.N.’s complaint, she was trafficked at the Super 8 starting in early 2021 when she was only 16 years old. Her trafficker forced her to have sex with about three men per day and made her have sex with him to earn the money to pay for the room.

N.N. indicates she was one of several other children and young women trafficked at the same motel, but at no time did the Super 8 employees or management try to come to their aid. In fact, they profited not just from renting the rooms, but in direct payments from child sex traffickers.

“Employees at the Super 8 were familiar with N.N.’s trafficker and actively participated in facilitating her trafficking. The trafficker paid employees to act as lookouts and notify him whenever law enforcement was present on the property. And the employees did so.”

–N.N. v. Lincoln Bancorp LLC

The lawsuit notes that the employees had a policy of not calling law enforcement when they became aware of sex trafficking on the premises. They also made sure to rent rooms to sex trafficking victims that were in the back of the motel, to help keep them out of public view, and one of them asked N.N.’s sex trafficker if he could purchase the child for sex.

Super 8 employees just watched when traffickers were violent with child sex trafficking victims, and prioritized her trafficker as a preferred customer, N.N.’s complaint states, reassigning his sex trafficking victims to different rooms if there was a problem and renting him rooms by the hour and half-hour.

The complaint indicates Super 8 motel staff knew N.N. and other children were being sexually trafficked at the hotel and profited from it, in violation of the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA), which requires motel staff take action to prevent sex trafficking on the premises, to report such incidents to law enforcement, and to try to help victims escape.

Law enforcement rescued N.N. from the Super 8 in March 2021, but the lawsuit notes that multiple women now say they were trafficked at the same hotel after N.N.’s rescue, some as young as 14.

N.N. presents claims of statutory liability: sex trafficking, negligence, nuisance, and violation of the federal anti-child sex trafficking law known as Masha’s Law. She seeks both compensatory and punitive damages.

Motel Sex Trafficking Lawsuits

N.N.’s motel sex trafficking lawsuit, like others, suggests that these problems are common and claim the motel and hotel operators, often in charge of national chains, placed profits before the safety of children being sexually exploited in their rooms and on their properties, by failing to enact and enforce procedures that would have prevented child sex trafficking. 

In April 2024, plaintiffs petitioned the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation (JPML) to consolidate more than 100 similar hotel sex trafficking lawsuits before one federal judge for coordinated pretrial proceedings. 

However, the JPML refused the petition, expressing doubt that consolidation would lead to efficient coordination, due to the wide variety of defendant hotel operators involved in the claims, specific facts relevant to each individual incident and other factors that made the cases more individualized.

The decision means the cases are continuing to proceed as individual motel sex trafficking lawsuits in various district courts nationwide.

In July 2025, what is believed to be one of the first claims to before a jury resulted in a $40M verdict for a motel sex trafficking survivor, who was held at United Inn & Suites in Decatur, Georgia for more than 40 days, where she was repeatedly raped for money more than 200 times, according to allegations presented at trial against the motel owner.