The Crowley Maritime Sex Trafficking Cases are Helping Survivors Get Their Day in Court

January 15, 2026

By: Maritime Legal Aid

Two women who sued Crowley Maritime Corporation alleging violations of the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPRA) weren’t trying to create new legal precedent. They were only seeking to have their cases heard and obtain their day in court. But the legal framework advanced in the Crowley litigation by maritime attorney Ryan Melogy and his co-counsel attorney Adria Notari is now being cited by federal judges in multiple jurisdictions across the United States as other plaintiffs pursue civil sex-trafficking claims.

In the two Crowley TVPRA cases (Treminio v. Crowley Maritime Corp. and its related case Jane Doe #1 v. Crowley Maritime Corp.), the complaints alleged that an employer may be subject to civil liability under the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA, 18 U.S.C. § 1595) for “knowingly benefiting from a sex-trafficking venture,” even where the employer was not alleged to have directly engaged in the alleged abuse. That framework from the Crowley cases is now being relied upon in civil TVPRA litigation involving hotels, employment relationships, and, more recently, an au pair placement dispute.

As TradeWinds reported at the time of the original Crowley litigation, the Jane Doe #1 case “reveals what lawyers described as an industrywide culture of impunity toward sexual predators” and was a significant test of civil anti-trafficking law in a workplace setting. According to TradeWinds, the suit “alleges Crowley Maritime’s corporate officials and management ignored repeated complaints and failed to take action to stop sexual predation.”

TradeWinds further reported that “a US judge earlier this year ruled that Treminio had a plausible argument that she was trafficked and forced to make the trip to Florida under pressure to keep her job,” allowing her civil trafficking claim to proceed. Crowley, for its part, denied the allegations, stating that the sex-trafficking claim was “false and without merit,” and said it has “zero tolerance for sexual misconduct” and is committed to creating a “safe and respectful work environment.”

Ryan Melogy explained that the early procedural stages of civil trafficking cases are often decisive. “For most survivors, the fight isn’t about winning a verdict,” he said. “It’s about being allowed into court long enough for the facts to be heard.”

Notari emphasized that Congress designed the TVPRA’s civil remedy to account for the realities survivors face when deciding whether to come forward. “The TVPRA’s ten-year statute of limitations is critical,” she said. “It recognizes that trafficking and sexual abuse are often reported years later, and it gives survivors a meaningful opportunity to come forward when they are ready.” That extended limitations period, combined with clearer pleading standards, has made the TVPRA a viable civil remedy in cases that might otherwise never reach a courtroom.

Across these varied contexts of hotels, traditional employment relationships, and now au pair placements, the Treminio framework is being cited at the same critical procedural moment: when courts are asked to decide whether a civil trafficking claim is legally plausible under the TVPRA. In each instance, judges have turned to Treminio and Jane Doe v. Crowley not to resolve factual disputes or determine liability, but to answer threshold legal questions about pleading standards, statutory scope, and the availability of civil liability—questions that often determine whether a survivor’s case is dismissed at the pleading stage or allowed to proceed into discovery. By clarifying how the TVPRA’s civil remedy applies to modern workplace and institutional settings, the Crowley cases have provided courts with language and reasoning that lowers the risk of premature dismissal, giving survivors a chance to test their claims on evidence rather than pleadings alone.

In the hotel-trafficking context, courts have relied on the Crowley trafficking decisions when evaluating whether corporate defendants may face civil liability under the TVPRA through indirect or vicarious theories. In L.M.H. v. Red Roof Inns, Inc., the Southern District of Ohio expressly cited Treminio v. Crowley Maritime Corp. when rejecting the argument that § 1595 categorically bars vicarious or agency-based liability. The court explained that, because the TVPRA is silent on indirect liability, federal courts “routinely rely on common law to fill in the gaps,” and quoted Treminio for the proposition that “[u]pon review of the relevant authority, the Court declines to find that the TVPRA precludes vicarious liability.” Applying that reasoning, the court held that a survivor may satisfy § 1595’s beneficiary theory by imputing an agent’s acts and state of mind to the defendant.

In another hotel-trafficking case, R.T. v. RRI West Management LLC, U.S. District Judge John H. Chun of the Western District of Washington likewise relied on Treminio v. Crowley Maritime Corp. when analyzing whether TVPRA claims could proceed under a vicarious-liability theory. Addressing the defendant’s argument that § 1595 forecloses indirect liability, Judge Chun explained that “many district courts have recognized vicarious liability between a hotel and its employees under the TVPRA,” and quoted Treminio for the conclusion that “[u]pon review of the relevant authority, the Court declines to find that the TVPRA precludes vicarious liability.”

That same reasoning has now been applied outside the hotel context, including in an au pair trafficking case. In Monterroso Romero v. Agent Au Pair, Inc. and James Ray Franklin, U.S. Magistrate Judge Julie S. Sneed of the Middle District of Florida relied on Treminio v. Crowley Maritime Corp. when setting out the governing standard for civil perpetrator liability under the TVPRA. In analyzing the plaintiff’s § 1595 claim, the court quoted Treminio’s articulation of the statute’s elements, explaining that “[p]erpetrator liability requires that the defendant: ‘(1) knowingly recruited, enticed, harbored, transported, provided, obtained, advertised, maintained, patronized, or solicited, by any means a person; (2) knew or was in reckless disregard of the fact that force, threat, fraud, coercion, or a combination of such means was employed against a victim; (3) to cause the victim to engage in a commercial sex act.’” Applying that framework, the court concluded that the plaintiff’s allegations were sufficient at the pleading stage to allow her civil TVPRA claim to proceed.

What unites these cases is not a particular industry or set of facts, but the role the Crowley §1595 analysis now play at the most decisive point in civil trafficking litigation. Courts are not citing Treminio or Jane Doe #1 v. Crowley to decide whether trafficking occurred. They are citing them to decide whether a survivor’s allegations are legally sufficient to warrant discovery and further proceedings. As Melogy has put it, “Most civil trafficking cases rise or fall at the motion-to-dismiss stage. If a court never reaches the facts, the statute doesn’t do what Congress intended it to do.” In that sense, the influence of the Crowley cases lies not in outcomes, but in whether survivors are allowed to move past the pleadings and test their claims on evidence.

For survivors bringing civil claims under the TVPRA, whether they were exploited in the maritime industry, hotels, workplaces, or immigration-dependent employment arrangements, the Crowley TVPRA cases have become a shared reference point, cited not for who the defendants were, but for what the law allows. The cases now function as a kind of judicial permission slip, signaling that similar allegations deserve to be heard rather than dismissed out of hand. “Precedent doesn’t belong to the lawyers who argued it,” Melogy has said. “It belongs to the survivors who were willing to come forward, take the risk of being disbelieved, and push their cases past dismissal so others would have a chance to be heard.”