Who here would allow a guy, creepy enough to stalk you for a year, film you naked in a random city without your consent?
That's the question you should ask.
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There's literally no way to objectively say you'd be ok to wake up tomorrow and there be an email in all your friends, families, co-workers, etc. inbox with a video of you hanging out naked in a hotel room where you expected privacy. You'd be creeped the **** out and feel violated. Now imagine being a somewhat famous attractive female that probably gets contacted on social media by creepers hourly and likely doesn't cover a sporting event without some cool guy yelling about how hot she is or how much he wants to screw her or something creepy, then waking up to find that video is the biggest thing on the Internet and millions of people are watching. That's absolutely humiliating and embarrassing.
This thread is absolutely useless without pics...
Too much for some pictures of Boobies.
I seriously doubt the franchisee is insured for $26M. I don't know what the standard practice is with hotels, but I'm guessing it's more like $10M.
Doesn't matter though. They're going to settle within insurance limits or slightly above or the verdict is likely going to get reduced on a remittitur motion or on appeal. Economic damages are likely minimal to non-existent, so without punitive damages (which as far as I know nothing has been reported about teh hotel doing anything to merit punitive damages), I don't think the judge or an appellate court is going to be able to justify anywhere close to $50M in emotional distress.
I'll never understand why people with attitudes like this aren't in business for themselves. You think hotel franchisees roll in enough money that they won't take corrective actions to prevent even a $1M loss? That's just 17ing insane. If you think a group franchising hotels can ignore a multimillion dollar loss, why in the 17 would you not be a hotel franchisee? I mean for 17s sake, all you have to do is raise a few million in capital, get a loan, and then you'll rake in so much money that you won't even bother to adjust your security policies when you suffer a $2M loss (plus attorneys fees) because it will be so minimal compared to your profits. If you believe this, why aren't you out knocking on doors trying to raise money to open a 17ing hotel?
But in the real world, not only are hotel franchises not insanely profitable, their insurance carrier is likely going to require their security measures to be fixed, or they are going to increase their premiums to where it doesn't make sense not to fix it.
While this is true, punitive damages are typically gauged by how egregious the intent of the wrongdoing. In this case, I haven't seen anything that lends to believe the hotel employees were involved in a conspiracy to assist in the heinous act.
Certainly poor policy and/or training employees, but the intent of the hotel was not egregious imo.
The insurance companies will pressure them to correct the issues, because the insurance companies just paid out millions for them.
That said, auto makers regularly do cost-benefit analysis on parts recalls. The estimate how much they'll pay out in lawsuits/attorney's fees for the part failing, and they'll compare that to the cost of replacing the part. If they don't expect many lawsuits or big payouts to cost more than the recall replacement, they don't issue a recall. In this case, of the hotel only owed $2M in damages, maybe the estimate this is a once in a lifetime occurrence and it's not worth spending the money on a new phone system, more security, etc. but $26M gets their attention and if it happens again for the same reasons and they don't take any new measures to prevent it from happening, they'd owe a lot more the next time around. Suddenly now the updated system and new security costs less than the estimated cost of a future incident.
I can see both sides. That amount of money for a grainy video that hasn't harmed her career is a little over the top BUT the hotel needs to understand how serious this was. With this particular case it was a sports personality's privacy and dignity that was violated but what if the guy had been out to do her real physical harm? I mean apparently the guy got access to the room somehow. What if his intentions had been to rape or even kill her? No doubt, the hotel security thing is a VERY serious matter.
This is the point. Thank You