I’ve been reading about the woman raped in her van at the Conn. hotel or motel. If I were traveling alone, I would rent a room at one of the motels where your parking spot is right in front of your door. I would never use a parking garage because they are not safe. If I could not do this, I wouldn’t travel alone.
I have never thought that suing a hotel for my own ignorance was an option.
What do you think?
I think it would be nice if you provided a cite to what you were talking about.
Well, sometimes you just don’t have that option. Sometimes you can’t bring anyone with you. Sometimes the place you’re going is in a big city that just doesn’t have hotels with parking spots like that. Sometimes your schedules, meetings, or whatever, won’t let you park far enough away to get that kind of place.
While I agree with you in theory, that more people should take more responsibility for themselves, I also believe that the parking structure owners have some responsibility to make the place reasonably well-lit and safe. In this particular case, it’s obvious that a crime was committed, but you haven’t provided enough evidence to say whether or not “reasonable” steps were taken by the owning party, and so I can’t say whether or not I’d say they were partly responsible.
But note that I say “partly”. One’s safety is ALWAYS one’s own responsibility, even if it is also someone else’s.
Rape is wrong, but in what way is the hotel responsible for her being raped?
Let me guess: they have money.
Don’t most people already take the largest share of responsibility for their own safety? Like not walking into roads with eyes closed. Not picking fights with rough people. Not drinking random liquids. etc… (To be less flippant, we are constantly subconsciously avoiding danger for 99% of our waking day)
The existence of services to take the remaining share is due to the existence of a minority of people who are dangerous to the majority. And due to the tendency of things to catch fire.
Is that necessarily safe? Women are also told to avoid hotel rooms on the ground floor (which this would be) because anyone could break the window and get in.
In the case the OP was referring to, the hotel had seen the suspect loitering on the grounds and did nothing to remove him. It wasn’t just a case of someone suing the nearest deep pockets.
Here’s a link to the story.
Upon reading that story, it looks like the perp was hanging around for some days. Maybe he was looking for someone to rape, maybe he was just looking for someone to mug and decided to rape his victim once he had her. In either case, I’d say that the hotel is at least partially responsible for not having secure (or at least more secure) parking, and for not being vigilant about who is hanging around the place for days. At the very least, the hotel’s employees should NOTICE that some guy is hanging around for that long, and that he’s not a guest.
I am not sure how the woman and her children were supposed to “mitigate their damages”, as the hotel insists they should have, short of the woman carrying a gun in her hand, ready to shoot anyone who gives her the stinkeye.
Yes, if only because you can’t trust the thin-stretched resources of anyone else to do it for you.
Exactly. I can’t see anything in the woman’s conduct to suggest that she could have done anything differently to avert the attack.
Sorry, but that’s wrong. I don’t know what country’s laws you’re familiar with, but here in the US, generally speaking, whether or not a defendant has money is irrelevant to that defendant’s legal liability. Here, the issue seems to be one of what responsibility a business owner has to maintain his property in a safe way. If, for example, rather than being raped, the woman tripped in a puddle of water in the hotel lobby, the hotel could be held liable for that, particularly if they knew the water was there and didn’t clean it up. Seems to me that there isn’t much difference between knowing about a slick of water and knowing about a suspicious fella hanging around.
To the OP: consider whether that “personal responsibility” pointer should be focused on the victim, or whether it should be focused on a business that was aware of a danger and didn’t take care of it.
Or sometimes you don’t have the money - when my mother was dying earlier this year and my father needed help desperately I hadn’t worked in 6 weeks I barely had the money for gas to get to my parents. When I started nodding off behind the wheel I didn’t have a choice, I had no money for a hotel. I pulled over and slept at a rest stop. By myself. In my car. Granted I had a tire iron in my hand while I slept, but the bitter truth was I had to travel for a family emergency, there simply was no money available, and I was too tired to keep going. I suppose there are some people who would feel that, had I been raped, I would have somehow “deserved” it for daring to be a poor woman traveling alone.
The fact of the matter is that one and only one party here is responsible for the rape - the rapist. I don’t see how the woman could have done anything different, and perhaps the hotel could have done something different, but the fact is that there really is just one criminal here.
I would think that if I were running a hotel, I would have a certain amount of responsibility for the safety of my guests: working fire alarms, doors that lock securely, safe wiring.
Now then, this particular case may fall into a gray area–which is why we have courts, for those gray area. But lets say that a man came into the woman’s hotel room with a key he got because the hotel policy was to leave labeled room keys in an unwatched drawer right behind the counter. Then would you hold the hotel accountable?
Why would this woman go to one of those fancy Marriots instead of a motel? There’s no way she would have gotten raped at a low-rent, park-in-front-of-your door motel. Everyone knows motels are safer places. You’d have to be an idiot to think otherwise.
I often have to stay at “parking garage” type hotels when I go to conferences, and thus don’t have a choice about where I’m staying. I guess I could squeeze a baseball bat in my luggage and carry it around with me whenever I venture to my car, but I should be able to trust that someone is monitoring the property enough so that that would be unnecessary.
WTF? You honestly think people don’t get attacked at low-rent motels of that nature? I agree, a low-price no-frills motel is MUCH safer than some people think (frankly, I’ve stayed at 5 star business hotels that had terrible security and worse door locks) but that doesn’t mean bad things never happen at such places.
It’s not wrong; it’s me being cynical.
My first whoosh! Yay.
To be fair, I probably should have added a rolly eye smilie.
It looks like the hotel is dropping the claimthat the victim had responsibility.
I could see how the later could be less clear. A puddle of water is obviously dangerous. “Suspicious fellas?” How suspicious? How dangerous? Could be much harder to judge.
Exactly. I’m completely mystified how this fact has eluded so many people. The rapist himself bears complete responsibility for his actions. The hotel did absolutely nothing wrong. Was this “suspicious fella hanging around” actually doing anything illegal before this? Then why should the hotel have any responsibility to get rid of him? Everywhere you go in the world today you are on someone else’s property. Do you really want them to be required to assess how “suspicious” you are and throw you out for no reason?