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(I have to admit that when I first heard about DSK's sexual assault on a
housekeeper, I had a hard time imagining such a thing taking place. The
guy was certainly a predator but the described encounter seemed at
variance with his standard modus operandi which was using his official
power to take advantage of women he worked with. But this article
reminded me that the hotel encounter is a staple of pornographic movies.
There's a "Curb Your Enthusiasm" episode that plays it for laughs. A
male hotel detective goes to a room occupied by two women to investigate
some problem and is "forced" into bed by them. DSK sounds exactly the
kind of guy who might have had a big porn stash that would have had
scenes where a man takes advantage of a housekeeper. Of course, in porn
the women are always willing. The scumbag DSK confused his own sexual
fantasy with reality.)
NY Times May 20, 2011
Sexual Affronts a Known Hotel Hazard
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
A lot of people were shocked by the charges that the head of the
International Monetary Fund sexually assaulted a hotel housekeeper in
New York last weekend.
But housekeepers and hotel security experts say that housekeepers have
long had to deal with various sexual affronts from male guests,
including explicit comments, groping, guests who expose themselves and
even attempted rape.
“These problems happen with some regularity,” said Anthony Roman, chief
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.M.F. chief, will
prompt some hotel managers to review their security practices to better
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 year ago. She was vacuuming, she said,
and the guest, who had left the room minutes earlier, suddenly
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 guest to
let her go, 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 back the next day if I
did,” she said.
A Tremont official said the hotel, part of the Starwood chain, has a
full-time security guard whose only job is to watch over the
housekeeping staff. In the incident that Ms. Cuturic described, the
official said that management confronted the man and insisted that he
leave the hotel.
Housekeepers, nearly 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 money. Some women
complain of episodes in which they were bending over to, say, clean a
bathtub, and a guest sneaked up and stuck his hand up 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 against Mr. Strauss-Kahn, who has resigned from the I.M.F.
to focus on fighting the charges against him.
“I can assure you that the big hotel chains are aware of this incident
and are saying, ‘We need to make sure our housekeepers are trained about
this and we’re doing enough to prevent things like this from happening,’
” he said.
Mr. Whitlatch said that there was little that hotels could do to prevent
some of the incidents, but that training 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 clean, only to have a male guest emerge from the shower in his
bathrobe, which then suddenly opened.
In one case, she said, a guest propositioned her, saying, “I see a
pretty dark girl. Can you do something for me?” Ms. Carrington
acknowledged that she used to carry a can opener with her in case she
ever needed to defend herself from a guest.
The Grand Hyatt’s management was very supportive, she said. “They’d tell
you, ‘If any situation occurred, get 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 request, but said in a
statement, “The safety and security of guests and associates is one of
our top concerns.” It noted that its hotels employed many security
measures and safety protocols. “Any time an associate raises a concern,
we take it very seriously, promptly investigate the situation and follow
as appropriate,” the company said.
Andria Babbington, a union safety official and a former room attendant
at a major Toronto hotel, said at least 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 guest had no clothes on,” she
said. “He asked whether I could touch a certain part of his body.”
Some safety experts recommend that hotels send a male employee to
deliver bathrobes or blankets when guests call for them, although they
say that even male hotel workers are occasionally grabbed or
propositioned by female guests.
There is also debate about whether an open or closed door is safer for a
housekeeper cleaning a room.
Mr. Whitlatch recommends that housekeepers keep 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 key, he said, the
housekeeper should return later to finish the room.
But some maids disagreed, saying an open 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 one knows you’re inside.”
Ms. Carrington, the retired Grand 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 move the cart, and you
hear it,” she said.
The Embassy Suites hotel in Irvine, Calif., mandates closed 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
suddenly he had come up right behind me. He was naked.”
She said the man lay down on the bed, aroused, and asked her to leave.
“I was very scared because he could have 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 authorities ourselves, whether or not the
employee asked us to or was planning to file charges,” he said.
Guests are not the only threat to housekeepers. Police in the Washington
area suspect that a still-unidentified attacker raped seven housekeepers
in a series of incidents several years ago.
Housekeepers and officials with the main hotel workers union, Unite
Here, said that housekeepers were often too embarrassed or scared to
report incidents to management or the police. Sometimes they fear that
management, often embracing the motto “the customer is always right,”
will believe the customer over the housekeeper and that the worker may
end up getting fired.
Ms. Babbington said a co-worker once encountered a naked guest who
chased her around the room. “She was just panicking,” Ms. Babbington
said. “She was very new in the country and she demanded to talk to the
police. Her manager sat her down to calm her down and told her not to
call the police, that it wouldn’t be good for the hotel.”
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