In July 2025, a federal jury in Atlanta returned a $40 million verdict against the owners of the United Inn and Suites in DeKalb County, Georgia. A young woman identified in court filings as J.G. had been trafficked at the hotel as a minor for roughly 40 days while staff did nothing, even after law enforcement sent the property a be-on-the-lookout alert with her name and photo. It was the first civil jury verdict anywhere in the country against a hotel under the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act.

That verdict reflects how civil law is evolving. Hotels are the most publicized third-party defendants in sex trafficking civil cases, but they are far from the only ones. Survivors and their attorneys are now pursuing the same federal law against rideshare platforms, trucking networks, online advertising sites, social media companies, and payment processors. The number of civil trafficking filings nationwide rose from 6 in 2004 to 280 in 2024, and the range of corporate defendants keeps widening.

The Fundamentals of the Law

The federal civil remedy for trafficking survivors lives in 18 U.S.C. section 1595, part of the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA). It may allow a survivor to sue anyone who knowingly benefited financially from participation in a venture that the person knew or should have known engaged in trafficking.

The “knew or should have known” standard is the engine. A business does not have to be the trafficker. It does not even have to know for certain that trafficking was happening. If the warning signs were present and the company looked the other way while taking the money, courts have generally found that sufficient to survive a motion to dismiss and proceed to discovery. Willful blindness is not a defense.

This is why the field of corporate defendants has expanded so quickly. The law was written to reach the people who profit from trafficking, not just the people who commit it.

Rideshare Companies

The U.S. Department of Transportation has reported that defendants used rideshares in 13.7 percent of federal sex trafficking cases filed in 2023, and rental cars in another 5.3 percent. Traffickers do not own fleets. They use the same apps everyone else uses.

The structural problem is straightforward. Rideshare companies screen drivers. They do not screen the people who book rides. A trafficker can use an adult account to order a ride that picks up a child, and the platform has no way to know who is actually getting into the car.

In April 2026, Atlanta attorney Michael Neff publicly described a case he is litigating in Gwinnett County, Georgia. According to Neff, a ride was ordered just after midnight on Halloween 2024 from a Clayton County account to pick up a passenger in Butts County, a 36-mile trip. The passenger was a child who was held for four days and repeatedly assaulted. Neff has argued that the platform should have flagged the ride and verified the passenger’s identity.

There is also a larger procedural development worth knowing about. Hundreds of passenger sexual assault lawsuits against Uber Technologies have been consolidated into a single federal proceeding before Judge Charles Breyer in the Northern District of California, MDL No. 3084. A parallel state-court proceeding in California, JCCP 5188, handles hundreds more. These cases involve allegations against drivers, not third parties using rideshares to transport victims. The discovery being produced in those proceedings is, however, creating a public record of what rideshare companies knew about safety risks and when they knew it, a record that may inform future trafficking-specific cases.

Trucking Networks and Truck Stops

Truck stops have been documented locations of trafficking activity for years. The nonprofit Truckers Against Trafficking has trained nearly one million transportation industry members to recognize the signs, and that work has also created a paper trail of what the industry has known and for how long.

The legal template for naming truck stops as civil defendants was established in 2018, when a survivor known as Jane Doe filed suit in Harris County, Texas, naming 15 hotel chains and five truck stop chains, including Love’s Travel Stops, Pilot Travel Centers, and TravelCenters of America, alongside Backpage.com. She alleged the businesses profited from her exploitation as a teenager while ignoring clear signs.

Two failure modes create civil exposure at truck stops. The first is failure to train: if a chain can train staff to recognize trafficking, plaintiffs can argue the company should have known when a venue becomes a repeated site of exploitation. The second is failure to act: when warning signs are visible, including a third party speaking for someone who cannot answer for themselves, repeated short-stay visits, cash-only transactions, or a person who appears to be under another person’s control, and the business keeps cashing the receipts, courts have been willing to let TVPRA cases move forward.

A development worth attention is that in 2025, a federal court in the Eastern District of Virginia declined to let commercial general liability insurers walk away from defending a TVPRA-defendant business in Peerless Indemnity Insurance Co. v. Tilma, Inc. That ruling indicates that corporate defendants may not be able to count on their carriers to disappear from these cases, which may mean more cases get funded and more get tried.

Online Platforms and the Vendors Behind Them

For years, online platforms have relied on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the federal law that shields websites from liability for content their users post. That shield is real, but it is narrower than it used to be, and two rulings handed down eight months apart illustrate where the line currently sits.

In December 2024, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit held in A.B. v. Salesforce, Inc. that Section 230 does not protect a software vendor that knowingly provided operational tools to a trafficking platform. The plaintiffs had been trafficked through advertisements on Backpage.com between 2013 and 2018. They alleged that Salesforce sold Backpage the customer relationship management software that helped the site operate, even after Backpage was publicly under investigation for facilitating sex trafficking. The Fifth Circuit declined to dismiss Salesforce, finding that the claims did not treat Salesforce as a publisher or speaker of third-party content. The case is ongoing.

In Doe v. Twitter, Inc., decided August 1, 2025, the Ninth Circuit reached a more mixed result. Two minor plaintiffs alleged that a trafficker had coerced them into producing explicit material that was then posted to Twitter, which slow-walked removal requests for nine days, during which the content was viewed more than 150,000 times, until a Department of Homeland Security official intervened. The court held that Section 230 still shields Twitter from the TVPRA claim itself, because that claim would require the platform to be treated as a publisher of third-party content. However, the same opinion allowed two separate claims to proceed – one based on Twitter’s allegedly defective abuse-reporting infrastructure, and one based on its failure to report known child sexual abuse material to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children as required by federal law. Section 230 did not protect those claims because they did not arise from Twitter’s role as a publisher.

The doctrinal line is not gone. It is thinner, and it is moving.

Payment Processors

The payment layer is one of the most contested frontiers in TVPRA civil law right now, and one case illustrates both why and how complicated it is.

In Fleites v. MindGeek, plaintiff Serena Fleites alleged that she was 13 years old when an explicit video of her was uploaded to Pornhub, that MindGeek repeatedly monetized it, and that Visa knowingly processed those payments while aware that the platform hosted child sexual abuse material. In July 2022, then-presiding Judge Carney declined to dismiss all of Visa’s claims, finding that at the motion-to-dismiss stage, Fleites had adequately alleged that Visa was aware of substantial child sexual abuse material on the platform and was processing its monetization.

The corporate response to that 2022 ruling was swift. Within days, both Visa and Mastercard suspended payment processing for MindGeek’s advertising arm. The case, however, has continued. In September 2025, a new judge granted Visa’s motion to dismiss all remaining TVPRA claims with prejudice, finding that the pleadings did not establish the level of knowing participation required under the statute. The litigation continues against the MindGeek defendants.

The arc of this case reflects the state of the law: payment processor liability under the TVPRA is a live theory that has reached courts, produced real corporate responses, and remains actively litigated. Where it ultimately settles doctrinally is not yet resolved.

What This May Mean If This Happened to You

The person who harmed you was almost certainly not the only one who profited from what happened. A hotel may have rented the room. A truck stop may have hosted the activity. A rideshare may have moved you between locations. An online platform may have hosted the advertisement that brought a buyer. A payment processor may have moved the money.

Civil law does not require you to choose one defendant. It may allow survivors to pursue the full chain of corporate enablement, and each link in that chain often brings something a trafficker cannot: insurance, recoverable assets, and a corporate record that can be subpoenaed.

You also do not need a criminal conviction against the trafficker to bring a civil case. You do not need to have testified in any prior proceeding. The civil and criminal tracks are entirely separate.

How Constant Legal Group Can Help

Constant Legal Group represents human trafficking survivors nationwide under federal and state law. We pursue hotels, motels, transportation companies, online platforms, and any other corporate defendant whose role we can document. Every consultation is free, confidential, and carries no obligation. There is no upfront cost. We only get paid if we recover compensation for you.

Call us at 855-906-2561

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Contact Constant Legal Group for a confidential evaluation specific to your circumstances. Case outcomes vary significantly based on the specific facts of each case, jurisdiction, and applicable law.