A teen girl filed a lawsuit against Scores, claiming the strip club chain allowed sexual abuse and human trafficking.
The victim, identified as Jane Doe, was developmentally 13 years old when her trafficker brought her to the chain’s Tampa location in September 2017, the lawsuit alleges. Scores hired the girl within 30 minutes of her walking in and threw her on stage.
Doe met the trafficker while she was in a drug rehab clinic. Roberto Torres and his father, who was in charge of therapeutic treatment at the clinic, befriended Doe and invited her to live with the family. The father reportedly began grooming her by giving her money and telling her that she was beautiful and had a nice body.
Doe went back to live with her parents in August 2017. However, with Torres’ help, she ran away from home about a month later and met Torres in Tampa. He bought her $200 worth of stripper gear.
“The first couple of clubs they go to just basically [threw] her out the door,” Doe’s lawyer, Michael Dolce said. But when the two got to Scores, Doe was hired on the spot, according to the suit.
According to the lawsuit, the house mom took Doe’s fake ID and signed her on to work. The person on the ID was taller, had a different shaped face, eye color and ethnicity than Doe.
“You have a young person who comes in, they give you a cellphone number that has a different area code than the address on the ID, the address on the ID is over 70 miles from where you’re sitting. There’s a couple of red flags here to think about,” Dolce said.
During the several days Doe was illegally employed at Scores, she was regularly put in the position of performing sexually explicit acts and was encouraged to take illegal drugs.
“The Scores business model is directly to blame for the exploitation of my teenage daughter and has caused an already struggling girl an infinitely greater amount of suffering,” Doe’s mother said.
The suit accuses Scores of failing to confirm Doe’s age or follow other measures required by law to stop human trafficking.
The lawsuit seeks an unspecified amount of damages and argues the club should have done more to keep Doe safe and should have known she was being trafficked.
For information about personal injury claims, visit Cohen & Cohen.
