Blaming Buildings for Sex Trafficking

Can a building be a sex trafficker? Some lawyers seem to be hoping so. Apartment buildings, nightclubs, and hotels have been coming under fire for facilitating interactions that some say should have been tip-offs to sex trafficking or sexual violence taking place.

Victims in these lawsuits describe some heinous actions by their alleged abusers. I’m not trying to minimize any such harm or suggest actual perpetrators of violence shouldn’t be punished. But in the push to hold more entities legally accountable for alleged sex crimes against women, these suits are setting up a system in which women are increasingly watched and their sex lives increasingly subject to questioning.

The end result here isn’t likely to be a world in which women are safer but one in which they’re more surveilled.

One recent example of this comes from California, where a woman is suing two high-end apartment buildings for failing to stop prostitution that allegedly took place in their units.

In a federal lawsuit, a woman going by A.V. alleges that she was coerced into prostitution in San Francisco by a man identified in her complaint as Tom Roe. He “and his associates trafficked Plaintiff, starting as a minor, in October 2018 through 2019,” the complaint states. When A.V. “failed to make enough money or disobeyed Tom Roe, he would withhold drugs from [her]” and “threaten [her] with violence.”

Roe rented an expensive apartment at the Avalon at Mission Bay apartment building and, later, at the South Beach Marina Apartments, according to the complaint. And these apartment companies “were instrumental, if not necessary, participants in a sex-trafficking venture” led by Roe, A.V. alleges, in a complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in January.

It asks the court to find the apartment companies guilty of sex trafficking and negligence.

There’s one concrete allegation of collusion with Roe in the complaint: that “Roe would…pay the front doormen and security personnel to keep his trafficking venture running.”

If true, that’s perhaps grounds for charges or civil claims against these staffers, depending on what they knew. But it does not follow that building management had any idea what was going on. If staff were taking bribes to overlook illegal activity, it’s unlikely that they shared this fact with their bosses.

The rest of the allegations suffer from a similar defect—creating a conspiracy out of the actions of lower-level staffers—while offering damning interpretations of activity that’s highly open to interpretation.

For instance, A.V. alleges that “occasionally, the maintenance staff … would witness the commercial sex acts or exchange of payments while working inside the unit.” But someone in a unit to fix a dishwasher isn’t generally expected report back to management about tenants’ sex lives. And occasionally seeing evidence of sexual activity, or even of men giving money to women, wouldn’t necessarily suggest sex trafficking with any certainty. Even if maintenance staff saw this, they may not have seen it as anything worth reporting.

A.V. ‘s complaint also states that “men would walk into the apartment building without being stopped by the doormen or security, despite these men not living in the apartment building,” and “Roe would later come by every couple of days to collect the cash payments….Therefore, the Apartment Defendants had knowledge of sex trafficking at their respective locations.”

But there’s no reason why Roe visiting would be suspicious—he seems to be the one who rented the apartments (though this part isn’t entirely clear)—and there’s no way for building staff to know he was there to collect sex fees. As for staff not scrutinizing visitors intensely, perhaps that’s simply building policy. I’ve been to many buildings with doormen and security where all you have to do is say whom you’re visiting.

And male customers would, by A.V.’s own account, often use a side door. The complaint says these side-door visitors would have been visible through the security camera, and therefore, staff should have known something. But if they were let in by a resident, why would security staff have any reason to be suspicious? And even if they were, what were they supposed to do—confront residents of this $5,000- to $10,000-a-month building about how they were having over too many friends?

Other reasons A.V. says the apartment should have been suspicious: She was very thin, “she was dressed provocatively,” and she was on drugs. She was only 17-years-old for a few months of her time there. And the maintenance team may have seen “drug and sex paraphernalia, condoms, and lube throughout the apartment” that she shared with two other women.

But think about all this from the point of view of the apartment staff. Are they supposed to intervene whenever they see a resident appear intoxicated, or perhaps just acting unusual? Are they supposed to intervene whenever they see a woman dressed provocatively? Are they supposed to somehow know if someone is 17 and three-quarters vs. 18 or 20? Should they check the IDs of any female who looks young? And then what? There’s no law against teen girls visiting apartment buildings on their own.

We should not expect maintenance staff to report people for having too much lube. We should not want apartment buildings to keep close tabs on their residents’ relationships, visitors, and clothing choices. We should not look to front desk employees to decide when too many men have visited a woman’s apartment.

A world in which all of that happens is not a world without sexual exploitation or violence, but it is a world in which all sorts of people get harassed and questioned over benign activity.

It’s a world that will wind up especially harming sex workers, immigrants, people with mental health issues, transgender or gender nonconforming people, and members of other marginalized groups. But it’s also a world that will lead to increased surveillance and badgering of all sorts of people, including all sorts of women. (Remember when Marriott said it was monitoring single women in its hotels? I do.)

A.V.’s case is the first I’ve seen targeting an apartment complex over sex trafficking allegations. And I recently came across another novel (to me, at least) lawsuit, this one targeting a nightclub along with Marriott International and a Miami Beach hotel it operates.

That nightclub case involves Oren and Alon Alexander, who—along with their brother Tal—are currently on trial in New York, facing federal charges that include sex trafficking and conspiracy to commit sex trafficking.

In a separate, civil case—filed in federal court in Florida in late January—Tiffany Marina Rodriguez accuses Oren and Alon of sexual assault and sex trafficking and the businesses of participating in this alleged sex trafficking venture.

The details of this alleged attack are horrible, and, if true, the brothers should be held accountable. So should any club promoters if they knowingly facilitated attacks. But the idea that the hotel and/or the nightclub are to blame here seems to be on very shaky ground.

Rodriguez accuses the businesses of helping “cultivate the Alexander Brothers’ image of lavishness, wealth, and exclusivity, hosting events that facilitated access to victims, [and] supplying women with alcohol and/or drugs.” But there’s no evidence provided that the businesses provided any drugs. And the rest is just standard hospitality business stuff. What were they supposed to do—not serve women alcohol? Have subpar events?

The suit suggests club staff should have kept women away from the Alexander brothers, since several women had allegedly alerted a nightclub manager in the past that the brothers had assaulted them. But can you imagine if nightclub staff had started flinging around allegations of rape based on unproven allegations? That would be asking for a defamation lawsuit.

As for the hotel or its parent company, it’s unclear what they could have done outside of demanding that women be denied alcohol in their buildings or that women be closely scrutinized if they leave the club with men.

There have been myriad sex trafficking suits filed against hotels in recent years. And when you follow suits like these to their logical conclusions, things always start to get confusing.

In the hotel cases, people who say they were coerced into prostitution or that they suffered violence at the hands of their pimps blame the hotels where this allegedly took place. The particulars vary, but the gist is generally the same: Hotel staff should have seen women who were skimpily dressed, had many male visitors, had a lot of condoms in their rooms, etc., and somehow intervened—called the police, stopped renting rooms to those involved, and so on.

That might sound reasonable at first blush, but imagine if hotels were expected to call the cops, or refuse service, every time a woman dressed provocatively or seemed to be having a lot of sex. Not only would this screw over women choosing to do sex work—leading to arrests, or forcing them to work in less public and more risky places—but potentially any woman who doesn’t dress modestly, or entertains a lover, or doesn’t speak English, or has condoms in her room’s trash can.

It would likely result in increased surveillance, harassment, and discrimination for a lot of women, and for what? Sexual abusers and “traffickers” can simply move to more underground or more private locales.

In many sex trafficking cases, what prevents victims from getting help isn’t literally being trapped and unable to access the outside world. They could theoretically go to the police, or tell someone else to contact the police. But they don’t for myriad reasons—the threat of harm when the perpetrator is released, the threat of other sorts of retaliation (like harm to their families or reputational harm), drug dependence, fear they will wind up arrested on prostitution or drug charges, complex feelings about their abuser, etc.

We need more and better services for people looking to leave the sex trade or looking to leave abusive partners, not a surveillance network of hotel maids and apartment-building doormen ready to call the cops on women in short skirts.

Colorado and Washington are considering very different approaches to prostitution. A Colorado measure introduced this month (Senate Bill 26-097) would repeal state laws against prostitution, soliciting for prostitution, keeping a place of prostitution, and patronizing a prostitute, along with some forms of pandering. It would also strike language banning sex acts from statutes related to escort services and massage businesses.

“Although the sixteen-page bill is a little light on regulatory details right now, there would also be restrictions on locations where sex work solicitation could occur,” reports Westword. “If lawmakers approve SB 097, people charged or convicted of prostitution before its implementation in July 2026 could apply to have their records sealed.”

Meanwhile, Washington is considering ramping up prostitution penalties. Washington state legislation that “would have made it a Class C felony, punishable by up to five years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000, to pay another person for sex” was changed before it passed out of a House committee, PubliCola reports. “First, it raises the crime of patronizing a sex worker to a gross misdemeanor for the first two offenses, rather than a felony; the third time, it becomes a felony, as in the original version.” A proposal to simultaneously decriminalize selling sex—a.k.a. the Nordic Model of prostitution regulation—was also rejected.

“According to many politicians and pundits, the human race is doing reproduction wrong,” notes Anders Ingemarson of the Think Right or Wrong, Not Left or Right newsletter. “The proposed solutions vary—tax credits, subsidies, penalties (for example, the disastrous and immoral Chinese one child policy)—but the premise never changes: your reproductive choices are now a matter of public concern.” Ingemarson rejects this premise:

Under capitalism—properly defined as the social system that protects individual rights—birthrates are not a problem to solve, a target to hit, or a lever for policymakers to pull. They are irrelevant. The idea that a country can have the “wrong” number of children is not an economic insight—it’s a notion put forth by collectivists that put the nation, “society,” “the common good,” or some other grouping above the individual.

Having a child is not a civic duty or a patriotic act. It is a personal decision with lifelong consequences for the people directly involved. If you want kids and are willing to take on the responsibility, great. If you don’t, also great. No one else gets a vote.

The moment someone asks “But what does society need?”, the conversation has already gone off the rails. Societies do not reproduce. Individuals do. “The economy” does not have children. People do. Framing reproduction as a national concern treats human beings as cogs in a societal wheel—future workers, taxpayers, or caregivers—rather than as individuals with lives of their own. That framing is not neutral. It implicitly assumes that people exist to serve collectivist goals.

The Discord age verification discourse focuses on adults losing access to communities they have a right to access. That’s important. I’m also worried, though, about the kids. They seem to be an afterthought in these conversations. They have much to lose too. ???? www.theverge.com/tech/875309/…

— Jess Miers ???????? (@jmiers230.bsky.social) 2026-02-10T15:38:41.814Z

• The Sex Workers Outreach Project (SWOP) has launched a sex worker gun club in Minneapolis. “In the middle of the ICE surge in Minneapolis, we kept coming back to one question through our work at SWOP: what does real community safety look like for sex workers?” SWOP Minneapolis posted on Instagram. “Instead of waiting to be included in conversations about protection, we built something ourselves.”

• Workers at Sheri’s Ranch brothel in Nevada “submitted a petition to unionize with the National Labor Relations Board last week under the name United Brothel Workers, represented by the Communications Workers of America,” the Associated Press reports.

• Can “a 200-year-old insight from a French economist” change the way we think about AI disruption?

• “If the strong claims that are sometimes made about the harms of social media are true, it is remarkable how difficult it is to find consistent evidence to support them,” Sam Bowman, editor of Works in Progress magazine, writes in a Washington Post piece about efforts to ban teenagers from social media. More:

Advocates of bans compare social media to alcohol or tobacco, where the harms are indisputable and the benefits are minimal. But the internet, including social media, is more analogous to books, magazines or television. I may not want my sons watching “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” or reading “Fifty Shades of Grey,” but it would be crazy to ban books and films for kids altogether.

• In King County, Washington, sex worker rights activists have been speaking out against the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office’s “dehumanizing language and comments about women who engage in the sex trade” and presentation to Seattle City Council members “that featured unredacted, identifiable images of brutalized, bloodied, and tortured women.”