A woman from Chicago filed a lawsuit for $100 million against Hilton Hotels after she claimed a hotel employee filmed her with a hidden camera.
Jane Doe said she was filmed without her consent in her hotel shower while staying at the Hampton Inn and Suites in Albany, NY. The pervert attempted to blackmail and extort her using the footage, threatening to send to her colleagues. He also threatened to post it online using her full name and releasing her professional information.
Happening back in 2015, Doe said she had no idea she was being filmed until September of this year. She got a random email from an unknown source with a link to a video uploaded to a porn site with her full name. “I click on it and I see my face and profile in a bathroom and I start screaming,” Doe said. “It was devastating on kind of a cellular level because I didn’t know… I had no clue, I had no context for this. My initial reaction was, ‘Your life is absolutely ruined, people are going to see this, they are going to see you naked and they are going to assume things.’”
Things got scarier from there. The perpetrator continued to email her admitting his guilt but wanting more. “I’m a perv. I don’t hurt anyone. I like to watch,” the email said from October 1. “No need to worry about me. I just like to watch and then I move on to the next. Promise me my own show. That’s the hottest. No need to show your face. Then I disappear and remove the videos forever before they get copied on every website.” After she ignored the demands, emails continued to come in, trying to extort Doe out of her money. The lawsuit claims the suspect demanded an initial $2,000 payment, then wanting a monthly fee of $1,000 for the following year. She ignored those demands as well so the perp sent a video link to her friends and sent the video to over a dozen more pornographic websites.
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In an interview with Good Morning America, Doe says this horrific incident has taken over her life, spending hours on a daily basis checking to see if the video appears. When a link pops up, she is in a hurry to get it removed. “Every time this person posts this video, he posts my full name,” Doe said. “It’s sadistic, and it’s designed to terrorize me and force me into a place where I feel like I have to give in to his demands and give him more photos or give him money. He did this so that whenever someone Googles me, they’re going to see this.”
The lawsuit is against Hilton Worldwide and franchise partners, including Hampton Inn and Suites, for emotional distress and negligence. Although the suspect’s identity hasn’t been revealed yet or known that it was in fact an employee, Doe’s lawyer, Roland Christiansen, believes the evidence points to a hotel employee or someone free access to hotel rooms. He also says he believes there are other videos out there from this same hotel room.
The Hampton Inn and Suites released a statement, saying, “The safety and security of our guests is our highest priority. We will continue to work with the authorities to discover the perpetrator and see that s/he is held accountable.” Parent company Hilton Worldwide also said they have been alerted of the incident and are working the owners and management of the company through the investigation.
For Doe, this isn’t over. She is working diligently to protect herself through this ordeal, saying the hardest part about it is having to explain to her father that there are videos of her up on porn sites. “I don’t know if that’s something you ever truly recover from.”