Karla: My gut was telling me from the very beginning when I walked in the hotel that something was off. I called my coworker and said, “Hey, I think something that’s really bad has happened, and I don’t know what to do.”
Tara: The consequences of drinking four cosmos is a hangover. The consequences of having four cosmos is not having a security guard get access to your room, acting as a maintenance man to fix a fan, and raping you while you are unable to consent.
Jackie: What did they do? What are they doing to make sure that this doesn’t happen to people? Because when you are a business and your whole sole of income is inviting strangers to stay the night on your premises, you have to keep them safe.
Marcie: Every minute of every day, a life is changed forever. Regular people like you and me going into work, heading home on the bus, grabbing a drink with a friend after work, find themselves in unexpected and life-altering situations. This is the story of one of those people. From the Chicago land law firm of Salvi, Schostock & Pritchard, this is “Beating Goliath: A Plaintiff’s Pursuit of Justice.” I’m your host, Marcie Mangan. Case Number 2, part 1, Karla Gress.
In October of 2013, 49-year-old businesswoman and mother of three, Karla Gress, was traveling to the Chicago area on business for her job as a medical transcription software trainer. Karla, who is from the Dallas, Texas, area, booked a room at the Holiday Inn North Shore in the suburb of Skokie, Illinois. One evening after work, Karla returned to the hotel and stopped at the restaurant on-site to grab a drink and a bite to eat while she wrapped up paperwork. Sometime after 9:00 PM, Karla paid her tab and returned to her room. That’s when her nightmare began. Karla was sexually assaulted that evening by the hotel’s on-duty security guard. This is the story of Karla’s pursuit of justice against the hotel that should have protected her and other guests from harm.
Karla Gress grew up in the small town of Springville, Missouri. She moved to Kansas City as an adult where she met her future husband, Dean, on a blind date.
Karla: I’d invite him to a hockey game. I worked with his friend’s best friend.
Marcie: That blind date ended up being their last first date ever. And the couple eventually got married, had three children, and moved to Texas in 2012.
Karla: We were living in a very small town in Missouri, like population of 500. Our school was graduating around 35 students a year. So it was very rural and very small, and we just wanted something more for the kids, more opportunities and stuff like that.
Marcie: Karla and Dean, who have been together for more than three decades now, chose to live in Texas because of the warm weather and the fresh start it offered their family. Since they both worked from home, the move also offered them the opportunity to focus more on their hobbies and stretch their creative muscles.
Karla: We like to, like, work on the house a lot. We’re very artsy, kind of construction kind of people. I have a little antique booth, like a DIY supply warehouse booth in a store in McKinney, Texas, and I do that just for fun.
Marcie: Over the course of their relationship, Karla and Dean realized they had more than just a shared interest in artistic things. They also had a shared passion for traveling.
Karla: I’ve been traveling since I was, like, 18. I remember me and my girlfriend, just out of the blue, got a ticket and went to Cancun for a week. I’d never been on a plane. So, I’ve been traveling for a long time. Dean and I, we like to travel. We used to travel a lot until this happened.
Marcie: Karla enjoyed traveling so much that she ended up taking a “dream job” as a senior application consultant with a nationally recognized transcription company that allowed her to travel 100% of the time.
Karla: I never dreamed I could get a job doing what I loved. Working in the hospital with doctors and administrators and helping them with the workflows and all this stuff that I’ve learned over the past 30 years. It was like we’ve won the lottery. Like I just couldn’t believe that I could travel and do what I loved and, you know, make a good living for my family.
Marcie: For Karla and her family, it seemed like life couldn’t get any better.
Karla: It was just like all these signs are telling us that this is what we were supposed to do, and we did the right thing and, you know, we were gonna be okay.
Marcie: But that honeymoon stage didn’t last long. Karla started her job in March of 2013, but just a few months later, in October of 2013, Karla embarked on a work trip that would change the course of her life forever. And as fate would have it, it was a trip Karla wasn’t even supposed to be on.
Karla: I did have to fly in early on Sunday just to get settled in just because of last-minute schedule change on the company’s side. I was supposed to be going to Kansas City that week and the client had changed their mind or pushed the schedule back. So then they said, “Can you be to Chicago by Monday at noon?” And I’m like, “Yeah, sure.” So I hopped on a Sunday plane and got in early.
Marcie: When Karla arrived in Chicago, she checked into her hotel, the Holiday Inn, North Shore Skokie. Once she checked in, she followed her usual routine of getting settled and working on paperwork before she headed off to an area hospital Monday afternoon. But not long into her trip, Karla noticed a few things off about this particular hotel.
Karla: My gut was telling me from the very beginning when I walked in the hotel that something was off or it wasn’t like the normal “regular” Holiday Inn that I had stayed in.
Marcie: When Karla asked the person working the front desk how long it would take her to get to the hospital she was supposed to work at the next day, the hotel employee had no idea.
Karla: I mean, you’ve gotta know where the nearest hospital is, right?
Marcie: But Karla being the determined, hardworking woman she is, pushed through that uneasiness she felt in her gut and reported to work the next day. Monday and Tuesday went by without a hitch. But Wednesday evening, things took a horrific turn. Karla, who typically liked to take advantage of exploring the city she was working in, had a particularly long and stressful day at work. To decompress a bit, Karla decided to just order a cosmopolitan and some nachos at the hotel’s lobby restaurant, Bar Louie.
Karla: I remember eating my nachos, and I remember talking to my girlfriend on the phone, and then at some point, there was nothing there.
Marcie: The next thing Karla remembers is waking up the following morning knowing something horrible had happened.
Karla: I was literally sore from head to toe. I had bruises on my upper arms, and I called my coworker and said, “Hey, I think something that’s really bad has happened, and I don’t know what to do.”
Tara: My name is Tara Devine, and I am a partner here at Salvi, Schostok & Pritchard.
Marcie: Karla eventually hired Chicago-based attorney, Tara Devine, to represent her in a premises liability lawsuit against the hotel. But before we get there, Tara’s going to help us fill in some of the details that are unfortunately fuzzy for Karla.
Tara: An employee, a security guard of the hotel, rapes her. She flies back ultimately to Texas and reports it. And as a result, after that, there’s a criminal investigation done by the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office, which results in them not charging the defendant. And she believed and still to this day strongly believes that she was drugged.
Marcie: As we mentioned, Karla’s memory of that night is a little fuzzy. After waking up with a pit in her stomach, Karla powered through the workday and then flew home to Texas that evening and reported the rape to local authorities.
Karla: I was driving, and there was no cars, and I thought to myself, I’m like, “You know what? If I drive my car off one of these bridges, I’ll never have to tell anybody this, and it’ll just be over, and my kids will think it was an accident, nobody’ll ever know.” And at some point, I reached back out to Rape Crisis, and it was like halfway back to its whole way. And they, thank goodness, got me in touch. She goes, “What’s the nearest hospital near you? Go there. We’ll have an officer waiting for you.” And after then, it all just started unfolding.
Marcie: The report resulted in a criminal investigation by the Cook County State’s Attorney. As you will learn, the case against the hotel’s security guard didn’t stand up for a number of reasons that still anger Karla and her attorneys. One issue with the case was Karla’s inconsistent memory from the evening of the attack. Karla maintains she had one, maybe two cosmos on the evening of the attack, but a receipt from the bar that was uncovered during the investigation showed four cosmos were purchased. On top of that, Karla was on a number of medications. Nevertheless, Attorney Tara Devine maintains the assault never should have happened.
Tara: It doesn’t matter if you put something in your cosmos or not or if you drank all four, which we have… Let’s go with the evidence we do have. We have a receipt that says you drank four cosmos. At the end of the day, a working woman, any woman for that matter, is allowed to go back to your hotel. You are allowed to over-serve yourself at the hotel bar and/or restaurant, right? And your intoxicated self has every right to go back to your room and pass out.
Marcie: That notion is one of the main reasons Tara remained committed to Karla’s case despite a number of legal hiccups over the course of eight years.
Tara: The consequences of drinking four cosmos is a hangover. The consequences of having four cosmos is not having a security guard get access to your room acting as a maintenance man to fix a fan, and raping you while you are unable to consent.
Marcie: Unfortunately for Karla, too much time had passed between the evening of the attack and when the rape kit was done to determine her blood alcohol level, further complicating Karla’s case. All investigators could see in her system was a mixture of over-the-counter medications. But luckily, one huge piece of evidence was quickly discovered on Karla’s phone. Attorney Jackie Kurth, who Tara brought on to assist her with the case, explains how it was eventually revealed that the hotel’s on-duty security guard was to blame for the assault.
Jackie: We had photographs on her phone, which showed a torso of an African-American male wearing a badge, and that was really all that was in the photo, was this badge. And then, we also had a few missed calls on her phone. She didn’t remember calling anybody or receiving any calls from anybody. So, very quickly, they were able to match the description of this African American male who was a security guard in the middle of the night with this badge, in addition to matching the phone number of the missed call in her phone to this person.
Marcie: For Karla, discovering the photo that ultimately identified her assailant was chilling.
Karla: But it was just like…like it was like a threat. Like don’t tell anybody or my kids were on there, my family was on there, where I lived was on there. It was all on my phone. And I don’t know how he had access to it or how long he had it or what he did with it or any of that.
Marcie: So very early on, authorities focused their investigation on hotel security guard, Alhagie Singhateh, whose statements to police left something to be desired.
Jackie: Karla had undergone a rape kit within 24 hours after the sexual assault. And so we knew that semen was present in her vagina. So we had that DNA. They would ask for a statement, he would say no. They eventually went to the hotel and actually were able to locate and interview him at the hotel because he was still working there. They collected his DNA and found that it was a match, but as many criminal assailants do, he had a story of his own to tell.
Marcie: That story was that the encounter between Al and Karla had been consensual. He alleged it was initiated by Karla, and it was brief, but Al had many versions of his story, and it was only after police confronted him with the fact that his DNA matched the semen found inside Karla that he admitted to having sex with her. So what police had as evidence was a statement by a woman who didn’t have a clear memory of the night and a statement by a hotel employee who claimed the encounter was consensual. Otherwise, all investigators had to work with was a mountain of circumstantial evidence to suggest a sexual assault had happened.
Jackie: Because of this mountain of circumstantial evidence versus direct evidence, the state’s attorney and the police made the decision that they likely would not be able to prove that the encounter was, in fact, non-consensual. And so the conclusion of the criminal investigation was that they were not going to charge Alhagie Singhateh.
Marcie: But anyone who has met Karla agrees that even when faced with adversity, she does not back down and is her own biggest advocate.
Jackie: She recognized that as a guest of a hotel, nobody should ever be at risk the way that she was, let alone by one of their own employees.
Karla: Doesn’t matter if I was drugged or if I had just had that drink, and he came to my room and raped me. It wasn’t my fault.
Marcie: So Karla took it upon herself to seek all avenues of justice, which led her to contacting the Chicago-based law firm of Salvi, Schostok & Pritchard in 2014, where she was soon connected with Attorney Tara Devine.
Karla: The thing I really liked about Salvi that really caught me was that there’s a little popup thing that you get on the website. And so I went to their website, and they had a little popup thing, and it said, “Hey, we’re here if you need us.”
Tara: My first conversation with her, she gave me a lot of information, which led me to believe that there was something there, but at the same time, it almost sounded as if it was too lock solid of a case that I questioned then why she would be reaching out to an attorney to represent her. Doing this for close to 20 years, there’s almost no perfect case. There are very few cases where you have a perfect “victim” or plaintiff.
Marcie: As Tara explains, in civil cases, attorneys did not have subpoena power, meaning they can’t obtain certain records until a lawsuit is filed. This case was no different, and the hotel would not just hand over Alhagie’s employee files. Once Tara had a chance to review the police report, she knew there was something there to explore.
Tara: His story changed, and it was all within, you know, the police report. And so right away, you have to think to yourself, “Well, if you didn’t do anything wrong, why are you lying?” Just based on what I reviewed in the police report, it suggested to me, one, that the defendant was lying about some or all of what he believed transpired. And two, it became pretty clear to me as well that the hotel had absolutely no interest in trying to help the victim in this case, not gonna go as far to say that they weren’t compliant and didn’t do whatever the police asked of them. What I would say, it was very obvious, though, that they themselves were deliberately choosing not to do their own investigation into this employee, which I would find shocking if someone made a claim in any company, you know, that you visit or you frequent, and there’s an allegation made by a customer or a client, a patron of a sexual assault by your employee, like, wouldn’t that prompt some type of internal investigation? Or, you know, place ’em on paid leave until you can figure out what happened or do your own interviews. And the hotel was so hands-off in doing anything on their own that it also sparked my curiosity as to, like, what the heck is their involvement in this?
Marcie: So Tara signed up the case and pursued a premises liability lawsuit against the hotel on Karla’s behalf. And while it would be far from a smooth road ahead, Tara knew she had at least a chance at achieving some sort of justice for Karla with a civil case.
Tara: Our goal is monetary compensation. We cannot impose any type of jail or prison or anything of that nature. Our burden, though, is also different. It’s less than what it is in a criminal case. In our civil cases, it’s the preponderance of the evidence or more likely true than not true. It’s known as 51%. If our evidence sways you to 51%, you know, to believe what we need to prove, we’ve won our case as compared to the criminal, you know, when they’re sending people to jail and determining people’s lives and what goes on their record, they have a much higher burden.
Jackie: As her attorneys, we wholeheartedly believed and felt that there was evidence to support that Karla was sexually assaulted, was victimized, didn’t remember it, and could not consent to it. Even in the face of the fact that the state’s attorney declined to press charges because of lack of evidence of consensual sexual activity. Even with that fact, it’s important as attorneys and as advocates that when a woman steps up and says that I’ve been sexually assaulted, that we believe her.
Marcie: Shortly after signing the case, Tara flew Karla to Chicago to hold a press conference at the Salvi, Schostok & Pritchard office. At the time of the press conference, the decision was already made by the state’s attorney that they would not be moving forward with a criminal investigation. But shortly after the news broke about the civil suit and the attack at the Skokie Hotel, the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office made a statement that they would have another prosecutor take a look at the case and consider criminal charges.
Tara: It was a total PR move on their behalf because it was bad PR for them when we filed our lawsuit that they didn’t do anything criminally.
Marcie: But the new state’s attorney also determined there was not enough evidence to pursue criminal charges. Despite the holes in Alhagie’s story, Tara has a theory on why the criminal case never stood a chance, and it’s really eye-opening, especially for those who travel often.
Tara: Karla was not a resident of Cook County, and, you know, the states’ attorneys for the counties, you’re using taxpayers’ dollars information. You know, it can get very political. I don’t know all of the behind-the-scenes stuff that goes into that and what they prosecute and what they don’t and what results they wanna show. I’m not a government attorney and I’ve never worked in the state’s attorney’s office, but I always feel like it’s been held against her because she wasn’t a resident of the state of Illinois, nonetheless Cook County. It also was interesting to note that this hotel, you know, that was an issue, and this employee is directly across from the police department that investigated it.
So we have the Skokie Police Department directly across from the Skokie Holiday Inn that we’re investigating, and there’s information within the police report that, you know, 100% established that they knew who this employee was and had, you know, encountered him before and they had actually worked with him before in other cases that they had at the hotel. Like if someone had reported something lost or stolen or if there was an altercation, you know, the police would go over to the hotel and like they had worked with Alhagie Singhateh before this defendant.
So I think from a criminal perspective, Karla had a lot of factors working against her. The locale of the investigating police department and the hotel prior interaction with this actual assailant that she’s saying, you know, raped her. And then, on top of that, not being a resident of the state of Illinois in a rape case. You know, if you look at the statistics, which, you know, I don’t have offhand, but if you look, like, there’s so many cases that are reported that aren’t prosecuted in these rape cases with their high burden, they don’t wanna prosecute a bunch of cases and then fail because then they’ve used a lot of the resources and money in cases that they didn’t get a conviction on it.
Marcie: Another factor that was sadly working against Karla was her appearance.
Tara: When you saw the defendant, he was attractive, young, fit African American. You have to get over the suspicion, like, why would this young, fit, attractive, hot young man need to rape a overweight middle-aged woman? You’ll find out in sexual assault cases, it’s not so much about identifying victims, it’s identifying opportunities. So once you get over that, your initial inclination of like a victim should be X, Y, or Z, you’ll realize that, no, individuals who sexually assault or rape others, it’s more about for them the opportunity and what they get from it, you know, from sexually assaulting someone as compared to, “Oh, this is my type.”
Marcie: But those challenges made Tara’s job even more important in achieving justice for Karla in all of the Karlas of the world. Even though Tara’s burden was lower as a civil attorney, she still had a very tough case to prove, mainly because the investigation seemed to move unusually slow, which could be attributed to the police department’s familiarity with the hotel and its employees.
Tara: I didn’t love the way that they…how they conducted the investigation and the timeliness of it and things of that nature. So I’m critical of that, but I don’t think there was an active coverup from the police’s perspective. Now, my answer when we get there will be different. When you ask me do I think there was a coverup by the hotel, my answer to that would be 100% yes.
Marcie: As Tara and her team would eventually learn, Alhagie had been involved in a number of instances at the hotel.
Jackie: There were years of instances where Al Singhateh took the van, the hotel van, off premises without permission, got a parking ticket. They don’t fire the guy. There’s times where he is found with stolen guest possessions in his locker. They don’t fire the guy. There’s times where he gets into a physical altercation with a male hotel guest. They don’t fire him. There’s complaints after the sexual assault that he’s following female guests to their room and making them feel uncomfortable. They don’t fire him.
Al Singhateh is no longer employed but remained employed for some time after this case was filed. He was not terminated because of this. By the way, he admitted to, at the very least, he admitted to having sex with a guest, at the very least. And then, even with that, he didn’t get fired. And then we filed this lawsuit, and the police are investigating him, and then there’s, you know, a rape kit and all of these things done. He still doesn’t get fired. He’s ultimately fired… Well, there’s a dispute about why he was ultimately fired, but he’s ultimately found with a stolen laptop in his backpack.
Tara: We ultimately found out that he was in a serious relationship with the managing of housekeeping and then when you put this all together and who had access to keys and getting into rooms and it was like letting the fox into the hen house.
Marcie: Karla’s attorneys later learned that an incident report Karla filed with the hotel shortly after the attack was given to none other than the housekeeping manager, Al’s girlfriend, rather than the general manager of the hotel. When eventually asked if he had seen the incident report, the general manager initially said he did, but later, he said he had never seen it before. As the investigation drew on, the hotel, which is still in operation, by the way, became more and more suspicious.
Tara: There was no oversight, no supervision, no reprimand, no nothing.
Marcie: The fact that the hotel was negligently operated and provided Singhateh with an opportunity to prey on guests was the basis for Salvi, Schostok & Pritchard’s lawsuit against the hotel.
Jackie: What did they do? What are they doing to make sure that this doesn’t happen to people? Because when you are a business and your whole sole of income is inviting strangers to stay the night on your premises, you have to keep them safe. He was a night employee who essentially would do all the things that nobody else wanted to do, like drive shuttles in the middle of the night to the airport and unclog toilets and respond to guest calls in the middle of the night. And in our opinion, that’s how he was allowed to be kept around, is because he was just somebody that did what he wanted to do. He operated under this environment where he could do whatever he wanted, and nobody from the hotel knew about it because they weren’t there on the premises supervising him.
Marcie: In the next episode of “Beating Goliath,” Karla finally has her advocates at Salvi, Schostok & Pritchard on her side, and things seem to be moving in the right direction, but her battle is far from over.
Tara: We filed amended complaint after amended complaint, after amended complaint, I did everything we possibly could to try to appease the judge in setting forth facts that would show why the hotel would be responsible for this. And the defense kept consistently arguing that we had no evidence of any other prior sexual assaults, that they had to have been on notice of prior sexual assaults for them to be held potentially liable.
Jackie: We finally reached 2020 and were finally ready to go to trial, and then the court shut down due to a national pandemic. Our client was frustrated again, and I can’t blame her. By 2020, it had been seven years since she was sexually assaulted.
Marcie: Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Karla Gress for allowing us to share her story and the attorneys of Salvi, Schostok & Pritchard, who took the time to talk to us. You can find more episodes of “Beating Goliath” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. To learn more about this case in our firm, head to salvilaw.com/podcast. Until next time.
