Virginia Personal Injury and Medical Malpractice Blog

Marriot Withdraws "blame the victime" defense in rape case

Kudos to the Marriott International corporation who firmly rejected a defense to a lawsuit which one of its defense attorney teams had asserted.

A Connecticut woman who was allegedly raped at gunpoint in front of her children in a hotel parking garage. The assailant went to jail.

Whether or not you believe that Marriott had any responsibility to prevent a criminal act (we don't know all the facts) the wizards on the defense team inserted typical boilerplate language in the defense of the case that asserted that this mom was herself resonsible for the criminal act because she "failed to exercise due care for her own safety."

As you can imagine, this boilerplate defense, inserted by lawyers paid by an insurance company, was NOT a good thing for Marriot's public relations. After all, why would you go to a hotel that thought so little of its customers?

Good of Marriott to say to its own defense team, in effect, you guys are morons.

Whether its a company that tells its customers that they need to go to another state to sue them or a health facility that says to the disabled, you aren't allowed to sue us...corporations must know that the defenses they assert in lawsuits have meaning beyond the current case.

As we see them, we will continue to expose them, as we expose those cases we deem frivolous.