The proposed “tort reform” legislation will hurt sex trafficking survivors in Georgia and encourage bad actors. Not all businesses are unfortunate victims of random acts of violence. Some businesses know crime pays. Tort reform will ensure it pays more.
We filed the first civil sex trafficking cases in Georgia in 2019. Since then, we have solely represented sex trafficking survivors against businesses that we believe knew or should have known they were profiting from our clients’ trafficking. The vast majority were violently sold for sex as teenagers. Nearly all were trafficked in the same few dozen hotels in the metro area.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
Credit: handout
Credit: handout
Most of our cases are in federal court because Georgia’s civil laws are already worse for sex trafficking survivors than federal laws. For example, Georgia doesn’t have a rape shield law for civil cases. A sex trafficking survivor in Georgia runs the risk of her sexual history being used against her. And Georgia’s civil sex trafficking statute only became effective in 2021. Anyone trafficked before that has no trafficking claim in Georgia. Still, we bring Georgia negligence and nuisance claims in our federal cases. “Tort reform” would end that.
Let me tell you about a few hotels we have sued. These are businesses that would be protected by “tort reform.”
Consider a hotel off Fulton Industrial, where several of our clients were trafficked for sex as children. A simple YouTube search shows multiple videos of women who were sold for sex saying they know the owner, condoms strewed in the hallway, and people smoking crack in the rooms. As teenagers, our clients had to stand right in front of the hotel so men could pick them out and walk them inside by the front desk to buy them for sex. Atlanta television stations use one such scene as stock footage for their sex trafficking reports.
At one motel in Tucker, a police officer testified the hotel “wouldn’t be able to stay afloat as a business, you know, if — if they didn’t let these, you know, nefarious acts going on and who were paying cash every day for five or six rooms.... So there’s no way I don’t think they can keep that massive hotel afloat if they didn’t allow this to happen. . . . We would have undercover officers there, and they would actually watch this security guard actually yelling out ‘12′, which means, hey, police are coming.”
At a motel in Cartersville, after the local government shut down the hotel for rampant crime, the hotel reopened with a new manager who quickly began exploiting women at the hotel for labor and violent sex. The manager pleaded guilty to sex and labor trafficking in 2023.
Our clients were also sold at apartment complexes. Every time, it is one of the “Dangerous Dwellings” in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s list of the most dangerous apartments in the metro area, often owned by corporate and absentee landlords who do little to make their highly profitable investments safe. If your child were one of the 13,000 who live in these dangerous apartments, and God forbid they were the victim of a violent crime, would it ease your mind to know that your right to hold the out-of-state owners accountable was traded to lower their insurance premiums?
We have repeatedly heard testimony about hotel staff and owners allowing sex trafficking, being paid for it, having sex with victims at the hotel and other vile acts of participating in selling children for sex. We have represented more than 20 survivors coincidentally trafficked at the same two hotels.
Civil suits provide justice, healing and, yes, compensation to people who were seriously injured. But they also act as a deterrent. Since 2019, five of the worst hotels we sued in Atlanta have shut down. This is not only because of the lawsuits, but where government resources are inadequate, civil suits bring change. That’s why cars are safer and why companies hire security guards. How will less liability make us more safe?
Supporters of tort reform compare insurance settlements to winning the lottery. Many of our clients have settled cases for more than $1 million. After spending their childhoods being raped by adults for money, while other adults and businesses profited and looked the other way, after being sold for sex hundreds or thousands of times when they should have been in middle or high school, we can assure you that not one of our clients feels as if she won the lottery in life. Meanwhile, Liberty Mutual — a single insurance company — reported $3.4 billion in profits in just the first nine months of 2024.
Instead of rushing to shield bad actors from liability, the legislature should focus on preventing children from being sold for sex at the same businesses, over and over again. If you would like to make Georgia safer, we encourage you to contact your representatives and tell them to vote no on “tort reform.”
Pat McDonough and Jonathan Tonge are partners at Andersen, Tate & Carr in Duluth, where they lead the firm’s anti-sex trafficking division.
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