After powerful testimony from trafficking survivor, motel settles lawsuit.

Byline: Kris Olson

Having been lured from Maine to Massachusetts by a registered sex offender and then drugged, beaten and repeatedly raped with the goal of forcing her into prostitution, Lisa Ricchio had already endured more than most people could bear.

Yet she managed to take the stand in a federal courtroom in Boston on Dec. 2 and give a powerful account of her harrowing ordeal, which led the next day to the settlement of the first civil suit brought against a motel under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act.

Thus came to an abrupt end a four-year-long legal battle against not just her assailant, Clark McLean, who pretended to be her boyfriend and lied about a cancer diagnosis to engender her sympathies, but also the proprietors of the Shangri-La Motel in Seekonk.

Ricchio alleged those proprietors had gone beyond turning a blind eye to the sex trafficking happening in their establishment and exchanged high-fives in the motel's parking lot with McLean and spoke approvingly about "getting this thing going again."

While the terms of the settlement are confidential, they are very favorable, according to her pro bono attorney, Cynthia D. Vreeland of Boston.

But beyond what that settlement will mean for Ricchio individually, Vreeland and her colleagues at WilmerHale are also gratified to have defined law along the way, which has already begun to be cited in cases popping up against some of the nation's biggest hotel chains, for which Ricchio was a pioneer.

The first such precedent came after Vreeland and her team convinced former U.S. Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter and his fellow members of a panel of the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to reverse the District Court's dismissal of Ricchio's claims.

Souter's opinion clarified that receipt of a room fee is a sufficient "knowing benefit" to open up motel proprietors to liability under 18 U.S.C. 1595(a).

The 1st Circuit's decision has since been cited by a federal judge in the Southern District of Ohio in a case brought by a plaintiff who alleges she was trafficked for sex for a year and a half at several Columbus hotels.

In turn, that Ohio judge's Oct. 7 decision denying the defendant's motions to dismiss in M.A. v. Wyndham Hotels & Resorts, Inc., et al., was cited by U.S. District Court Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV in Boston when he denied the summary judgment motion of intervenor-plaintiff Peerless Indemnity Insurance Co., which was seeking a declaration that it had no duty to defend or...