Has Anyone Ever Have Sex With Cleaning Lady At Hotel

Sexual Affronts Are a Known Hotel Gamble

May 20, 2011

A lot of people were shocked past the charges that the head of the International monetary fund sexually assaulted a hotel housekeeper in New York last weekend.

Merely housekeepers and hotel security experts say that housekeepers take long had to deal with various sexual affronts from male guests, including explicit comments, groping, guests who expose themselves and even attempted rape.

"These issues happen with some regularity," said Anthony Roman, master executive of Roman & Associates, a Long Island company that advises hotels on security matters. "They're not rare, but they're not common either."

Hotels are reluctant to discuss such incidents, but security experts say the accusations against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the I.Yard.F. chief, volition prompt some hotel managers to review their security practices to ameliorate protect their housekeeping staff.

Zemina Cuturic, a refugee from Bosnia who works at the Tremont Chicago Hotel, said she remained frightened whenever she had to clean Room 410 because of what happened there a yr ago. She was vacuuming, she said, and the guest, who had left the room minutes earlier, of a sudden reappeared and "reached to try to kiss me behind my ear."

"I dropped my vacuum, and then he grabbed my body at the waist, and he was holding me close," Ms. Cuturic recalled. She persuaded the invitee to let her become, and she fled. "It was very scary," she said. Ms. Cuturic reported the incident to hotel management, but decided against going to the police. "I was kind of scared that he'd come up dorsum the adjacent day if I did," she said.

A Tremont official said the hotel, role of the Starwood chain, has a full-time security baby-sit whose just chore is to sentinel over the housekeeping staff. In the incident that Ms. Cuturic described, the official said that direction confronted the human being and insisted that he leave the hotel.

Housekeepers, most all of whom are women, talk of guests who offer them $100 or $200 for sex, apparently thinking that the maids, often low-paid immigrants, are desperate to earn more than money. Some women complain of episodes in which they were angle over to, say, clean a bathtub, and a guest sneaked upwards and stuck his hand upwardly their skirt.

Tom Whitlatch, president of Risk Services, a security consulting firm, said many hotel companies were taking a new look at safety after the accusations confronting Mr. Strauss-Kahn, who has resigned from the I.Grand.F. to focus on fighting the charges against him.

"I can assure you that the big hotel bondage are enlightened of this incident and are saying, 'We demand to make sure our housekeepers are trained virtually this and we're doing enough to prevent things like this from happening,' " he said.

Mr. Whitlatch said that in that location was little that hotels could do to prevent some of the incidents, but that grooming and good security procedures could reduce the risks to housekeepers.

Kathryn Carrington, a retired housekeeper who worked 30 years at the Grand Hyatt in Manhattan, recalled several occasions when she went into a room to make clean, only to take a male person guest sally from the shower in his bathrobe, which then of a sudden opened.

In one example, she said, a guest propositioned her, maxim, "I see a pretty night girl. Can yous do something for me?" Ms. Carrington best-selling that she used to carry a tin opener with her in case she e'er needed to defend herself from a invitee.

Andria Babbington, left, a union safety official, said at least five guests exposed themselves to her while she was a housekeeper. — Credit... Steve Payne for The New York Times

The Thou Hyatt'south direction was very supportive, she said. "They'd tell you lot, 'If any situation occurred, become to the nearest phone and call the supervisor and leave the room. Someone else will help you do the room,' " she said.

The Hyatt Corporation declined an interview asking, just said in a statement, "The rubber and security of guests and associates is 1 of our top concerns." It noted that its hotels employed many security measures and safety protocols. "Any time an acquaintance raises a concern, we take information technology very seriously, promptly investigate the situation and follow as appropriate," the company said.

Andria Babbington, a union condom official and a erstwhile room attendant at a major Toronto hotel, said at to the lowest degree five guests exposed themselves to her during her 17 years in housekeeping. She remembers once having to deliver a bathrobe to a guest who had called for one. "I knocked on the door. He said, 'Come in,' and I saw the invitee had no clothes on," she said. "He asked whether I could touch a certain part of his trunk."

Some safety experts recommend that hotels send a male employee to deliver bathrobes or blankets when guests telephone call for them, although they say that fifty-fifty male person hotel workers are occasionally grabbed or propositioned by female person guests.

There is also argue about whether an open up or airtight door is safer for a housekeeper cleaning a room.

Mr. Whitlatch recommends that housekeepers continue the door closed, saying that makes it harder for an outsider to enter to attack them or to steal the guest's belongings. If the guest enters with a cardinal, he said, the housekeeper should render later to terminate the room.

Simply some maids disagreed, saying an open up door can discourage a guest from misbehaving because another guest might be walking by outside.

"Keeping it wide open is the best option," Ms. Babbington said. "When the door is shut, no ane knows you're inside."

Ms. Carrington, the retired G Hyatt housekeeper, said the smartest approach was to keep the door open with the cart wedged in the doorway. "If someone comes into the room, they have to motion the cart, and y'all hear it," she said.

The Embassy Suites hotel in Irvine, Calif., mandates airtight doors during cleaning — a policy that bothers Argelia Rico, a housekeeper there. She recalled an incident in 2009 when she was cleaning a bathroom and the guest walked in. "He asked me to change the sheets, and he went to the living room," she said. "I was bending over tucking in the sheets, and all of a sudden he had come upwards right behind me. He was naked."

She said the man lay downwards on the bed, aroused, and asked her to leave. "I was very scared because he could accept just locked the door and raped me," she said.

Christopher Daly, a spokesman for HEI Hotels & Resorts, which manages the hotel in Irvine, said it had no record of such an incident. "If any such activity, including sexual assault, was brought to our attention, we at the hotel would contact government ourselves, whether or not the employee asked united states to or was planning to file charges," he said.

Guests are not the just threat to housekeepers. Police in the Washington area suspect that a still-unidentified attacker raped vii housekeepers in a serial of incidents several years agone.

Housekeepers and officials with the main hotel workers matrimony, Unite Here, said that housekeepers were often too embarrassed or scared to report incidents to direction or the police. Sometimes they fright that management, often embracing the motto "the customer is ever right," volition believe the customer over the housekeeper and that the worker may stop up getting fired.

Ms. Babbington said a co-worker one time encountered a naked invitee who chased her effectually the room. "She was just panicking," Ms. Babbington said. "She was very new in the state and she demanded to talk to the constabulary. Her managing director sat her downward to calm her down and told her not to call the constabulary, that it wouldn't be good for the hotel."