Apparently this is the week to boycott big businesses. First there was the Whole Foods boycott for health care reform.
And now this lovely story about the Marriott blaming a mom for being raped in front of her little kids in one of their parking garages. The Marriott is arguing in court that this woman “failed to exercise due care for her own safety and the safety of her children and proper use of her senses and facilities.” What did she do that they consider negligent? She walked into a Marriott parking garage and attempted to buckle her kids into their car seats when a man placed a gun at her back, raped her at gunpoint, then moved on to threaten her children.
Take home message: The Marriott believes that no woman or child is safe in their hotels, and that anyone in their right mind would avoid them. I have to say I’m inclined to agree. They certainly won’t be seeing any more dollars from me.
I’m a rape survivor. A few years after I was raped, I had the pleasure of being run over in a crosswalk by a reckless driver. As a part-time grad student, I had no health insurance, so I was left with little choice but to sue for damages to pay my $15,000 in medical bills.
You know what is almost as much fun as being raped? Having an insurance company lawyer bring up your rape at all in an unrelated case, suggest that the rape was probably your fault, that as the kind of woman who gets raped the car accident was also your fault, and you probably threw yourself in front of that car because of your post-traumatic stress disorder. Oh, and you shouldn’t have your medical bills paid, because you failed to properly “mitigate your damages” by not having health insurance in the first place.
Which is to say, I have a small, painful inkling of what it must be like to be the woman at the center of this maelstrom, and it is no fun at all. I feel not just politically outraged but personally insulted at the Marriott’s position.
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