Karla: And how many more hashtags do we have to have to get this right?
Marcie: From the Chicagoland law firm of Salvi, Schostok & Pritchard, this is “Beating Goliath: A Plaintiff’s Pursuit of Justice.” I’m your host, Marcie Mangan. Case number two, part two, Karla Gress. In Episode 1, you met Karla Gress, a wife, mother, and career-driven woman from the Dallas, Texas area who was raped by her hotel’s on-duty security guard while traveling to the Chicago area on business.
Unfortunately for Karla, the lack of physical evidence police had to work with resulted in her assailant not being charged for the attack. But Karla was persistent in her pursuit of justice and found a team of attorneys to file a civil lawsuit against the hotel that allowed this attack to happen.
As her attorneys at Salvi, Schostok & Pritchard uncovered more and more information about how the Holiday Inn Northshore-Skokie had been operated, it became clear that the hotel was negligent and provided her attacker, Alhagie Singhateh, with an opportunity to prey on guests. As Karla’s attorneys fought an uphill battle in keeping the case alive, Karla was dealing with the emotional trauma that came in the aftermath of her attack.
Karla: I’m supposed to look at it as, I’m a rape survivor, I survived. Well, that’s not really how I feel, you know. I don’t feel lucky to have lived through this. Now I have to deal with this shit for the rest of my life. And I think that’s one thing that really, you know, kind of pushes me to keep fighting.
Jackie: Karla is never going to be the same. Karla is going to require therapy for the rest of her life.
Karla: I miss just being carefree. I’m worried about my daughter. I have a 23-year-old daughter, and I worry about her.
Marcie: As we mentioned in Episode 1, Karla’s attorneys filed a lawsuit against the hotel for their negligence. But one thing the team was not anticipating when they filed the lawsuit was the case being dismissed. As Attorney Tara Devine explains.
Tara: Our judge from the get-go was just hell-bent on dismissing our case. And, I mean, 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.
And so, what their motions to dismiss are saying on its face, looking at the complaint, reading it one through, whatever, the plaintiffs don’t have a case. And the judge, no matter how much we added in, no matter how much other criminal acts we added in, the judge consistently dismissed our case.
Marcie: After a series of dismissals over a number of years, Tara’s only choice was to appeal the judge’s decision in 2017, which is a tough decision to make due to the manpower and funds the appeal process requires.
When you file an appeal, you have to hire another lawyer that specializes in appellate work to assist you with your case. But Karla knew she wanted to explore every avenue of justice and see her case through, even if it was just for the closure of knowing she did the best she could, and in an impossible situation.
Tara: Credit to Karla, you know, Karla was, like, “Yeah, like, I’m not giving up this fight.”
Marcie: So, the appeal was filed, but Tara couldn’t help but start to doubt if this case would ever be successful.
Tara: Trust me, as a litigator, we don’t like to lose anything. But we were losing the battle, and we recognized it was gonna be an upheld battle.
Marcie: But Karla and Tara’s persistence finally paid off when the appellate court ruled that the hotel was not entitled to one free rape and reinstated the case in 2018. This means…
Tara: You don’t have to show that there’s been another rape, or another sexual assault like this that happened at this hotel, to put them on notice that another sexual assault is going to happen. So, this one free rape rule, they don’t get that, and that was big.
Marcie: The appellate court’s decision to reinstate the case, not only changed the trajectory of Karla’s case and gave new life to her battle, but it provided guidance into future cases of sexual assault.
Jackie: When we got the appeal and we won, it was a big moment because it wasn’t just going to have an effect on my case, on how these cases were looked out in the future, it was gonna have a precedent and a law-changing effect on, especially things in Illinois. When we won that appeal, our appellate attorney was just like, “You’ve gotta understand that this appeal is a big deal.”
Marcie: But just because the case was allowed to be reinstated, Karla and her legal team’s fight was far from over. They still had a number of hurdles ahead of them before justice could be achieved.
Tara: When the case gets…it’s called remanded…back to Cook County, guess who you get put in front of? The same judge that you appealed your case from, the same judge who dismissed your pleadings that you appealed, and now you’re standing right back in front of that same judge for the entirety of your case until you go to trial.
Marcie: Although it took nearly seven years since the attack, Karla’s case was finally scheduled to go to trial in 2020. But I’m sure you can see where this story is headed.
Karla: When the case was actually completing discovery, and we were gearing up and ready to go to trial, the pandemic hit. And so, in the spring of 2020, all of the court systems in the state of Illinois shut down.
Marcie: During the course of the pandemic, it was revealed that Cook County was actually a lot further behind than other court systems in terms of technology and Zoom capabilities. So, there was little movement in the case as the team waited for the world to open back up.
Karla’s attorneys, Tara and Jackie, say that during this time, Karla needed some extra reassurance that she had as many hands on the case as possible. She ended up eliciting the help of Brian Monico and John Chwarzynski Junior, of the Chicago law firm, Hale & Monico to ensure that when the courts opened back up, she would have a full team ready to fight for her. And this move ended up paying off for Karla once her case finally went to trial in early 2022.
Jackie: Tara remained the lead decision-maker on the case, and that was important to us. Now, when we talk about the dynamic of having a jury, we had more male jurors than female jurors. I believe that we had eight men and four women. It’s essential to connect with that jury.
The other aspect of it is, we had a male assailant who we knew to be difficult. We knew that we were going to have him testify a child, and the decision was made to have Brian do that examination. Because Brian’s a man, and that style of examination with a male witness was a strategic decision.
Marcie: While the delays and years waiting to get to trial were frustrating, Tara says there were some benefits to waiting until 2022 to try the case.
Tara: The one benefit that we did get by having a trial in 2022 was that the “Me Too” movement had then come to full force. The perspective or point of view of the jurors when they sat in our trial in January of 2022, it was different than had we selected a jury in 2018.
Marcie: The trial began in January. Tara, Brian, Jackie, and John divvied up the many witnesses set to testify and worked together to ease Karla’s mind during the very stressful trial process. Once trial started, Tara was grateful for the extra help and found having a deep bunch of attorneys would help keep the jury engaged over what was expected to be a month-long trial.
Tara: I could put on every “dog and pony show” that I possibly can, but that gets boring. And so, it was nice to have another experienced partner from a different firm with different experiences than I had had to keep the trial interesting and engaging.
Marcie: If you have ever been a juror, you know how long those days can feel. Now imagine, all of that time plus hours of prep work at the end of the day. Jackie explains that attorneys are consumed by trial. They barely eat, they barely sleep, and they only see their families on weekends. But sacrificing their own well-being to help a client is what keeps many attorneys motivated.
Jackie: The best thing that you can do in that situation is to put it into perspective. What is four weeks of very hard, grueling work in comparison to eight years of Karla’s life waiting to go to court? What is four weeks of being away from your family on long nights when Karla is never going to have a normal life again?
Marcie: With that fighting spirit ready to go, the trial team’s main strategy was to stress that emotional injuries can be just as horrific as physical injuries. They also wanted to show while Karla’s memory was fuzzy, she was consistent in the fact that the encounter was not consensual.
Tara: We stressed and did everything we could to show the inconsistent versions that were given by the defendant as to what transpired. Even at trial, he gave a whole nother version. So, credibility is what a jury is measuring when they listen to a witness.
Marcie: So, the team asked themselves, how can they make the jury doubt their young, attractive, and personal witness, Alhagie Singhateh?
Tara: You know, we have to have a villain in every story. You have to do something to make him a villain. On the surface, he’s not a villain, but here’s how you can make him a villain. Why is he telling so many different versions and so many different stories if he doesn’t have something to hide?
If this was consensual and he just gave into the lust of this female guest that was just continuously coming onto him and was the aggressor, then why didn’t you say that to begin with?
Jackie: He could not keep his story straight to save his life. He could not keep a single detail consistent.
Marcie: To highlight how unreliable Singhateh was as a witness, the lawyers put together a board demonstrating how many versions of the story he told.
Jackie: We had this column of what he testified to, and then he was confronted with his statements to the police. And we said, “Well, you met with the police on this day,” and Mr. Monico said, “And you knew that you should tell them everything that happened, and you were being investigated criminally, and it was important to tell the truth.”
And then he asked him the same questions again. “You told the police that she was wearing a nightgown, not a robe,” and he would write nightgown. “And you said that she called you three times,” and he would write the number three in that column calls. Did that for the first statement.
Then he went to the second statement with the police, “And then you met with the police again, right? And the police tell you that there’s a matching rape kit and your DNA is found. So, now you know that you have to be honest, right?” “Right.”
So, let’s go through it again, “You told the police that she was wearing nothing but underwear,” and then he’d write nothing but underwear. So, then we had all, in a whole chart, all of the inconsistencies. Because we felt that the best way for the jury to believe Karla, was to make Alhagie Singhateh’s story so unbelievable that they had to believe Karla.
Marcie: But of course, there are two sides to every story. So, Tara warned Karla that the defense would do everything in their power to make her the villain of the story, and that’s exactly what they did.
Tara: They, 100%, victim-shamed, character-shamed. They were able to access all of these Facebook messages and things that just don’t look good for your client. It was a real battle as to who was going to come out ahead from a credibility perspective.
Karla: They were trying to make me look like I was flying out every week and being a floozy, and hooking up, and it was just degrading, demoralizing. It was disgusting.
Marcie: When it came time for Karla to testify, the defense was successful in rattling her with their defamatory remarks about her character.
Jackie: Karla was not who we knew her to be, as a very passionate person, as a strong advocate for herself, as a wonderful mom and wife. She didn’t present that way, and I think that it was a lot of nerves, a lot of anxiety, a lot of build-up between 2013 and our trial in 2022. That’s a long time to think about what you’re gonna say to a jury.
Tara: They did a good job of making her look inconsistent as it related to, like, her real life and how happy she was in her marriage, or how good of a mother she was, or her past medical and mental health history. It was exhaustive and easy to do because she wasn’t a perfect victim, and she did come with baggage of past mental health issues.
Marcie: Tara says prior mental health records are typically not admissible in most cases. But in this case, those records were not confidential because the plaintiffs were claiming emotional damages. As you could imagine, it was not easy for Karla to see her personal struggles aired out in a public setting.
Tara: Can you imagine the stuff that people talk about with their therapists all of a sudden being blown up and put on a huge projector screen for a jury to see? That’s what happened in this case.
Marcie: Aside from the issue of whether the interaction was consensual or not, Karla’s attorneys also had to prove their premise liability claim against the hotel.
Tara: Let’s say you even assume, he’s telling the truth that this was consensual, what type of hotel are they operating in which it creates an opportunity where an employee, your security guard, thinks it’s okay to sleep with a guest while on the job?
Marcie: Tara wanted to demonstrate this negligence by showing that there was a lack of subsequent remedial measures or changes made after an incident occurs that could have prevented the incident from occurring in the first place.
Tara: I found it relevant that the hotel continued to employ him while he was under a criminal investigation for rape. They kept him on, didn’t fire him, then fired him another year later, having nothing to do with the sexual assault or the criminal complaint.
And didn’t do their own investigation, didn’t talk to their employees, nothing. And I’m, like, “Hello?” That’s the cover-up, he doesn’t get fired. He doesn’t even get reprimanded. He doesn’t even get talked to from management of the hotel as to what really happened, “Let’s make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
Marcie: But up until very late in the trial, Tara was not allowed to tell the jury that the lack of measures taken after Karla’s rape were relevant to the case at hand. To get around that, Tara had to get creative and rely on statements from hotel employees that served as witnesses for the defense.
Tara: I was able to get out to the jury, based on their questioning, they opened the door that they did not do an internal investigation.
Marcie: Looking back, Tara thinks the defense made a huge mistake by focusing their case on attacking Karla’s character rather than providing a defense that there was nothing the hotel could have done to prevent this incident from happening. In fact, one of the defense attorneys went so far as to point out that Karla put on lipstick during a break in her testimony.
Karla: She’s a woman and she fought this case against me, and did everything she could to cause pain, inflict stress, you know, demoralize.
Tara: I still don’t really understand where she thought that would be beneficial to point that out or how that would’ve been persuasive. I think the better strategy would’ve been, like, “Here’s all the evidence as to why it was consensual, and here’s what she wasn’t consistent on. And at the end of the day, our hotel did X, Y, and Z. And it’s unfortunate, but it wasn’t our fault.”
Marcie: As we explained in Episode 1, in a civil case, the plaintiff’s attorneys asked the jury to award a victim a certain amount of money to compensate them for their injury. So, it’s up to the jury to decide if, A, the defendant’s negligence caused the injury, and, B, how much this plaintiff deserves to be compensated.
One of the most important decisions attorneys have to make during the course of a trial is how much to ask the jury to award the plaintiff during their closing argument.
Tara: We don’t want any eyeballs popping out when you put the number up there. You ask what you can say with a straight face based on the evidence, and you go for it. And then you let the jurors do what exactly what they’re supposed to do, which is talk and deliberate. And we tell them, “This is a suggested number.”
Marcie: Heading into jury deliberation. Karla’s attorneys couldn’t tell which way the jury was leaning.
Jackie: We Had a very stoic jury, and they did a great job.
Tara: We’re not mind readers. To this day, what I wouldn’t do to be a fly on the wall of every deliberation.
Marcie: As we mentioned, Karla didn’t do great when she took the stand, but her attorneys could tell the jury really liked her husband, Dean. And they were encouraged knowing they connected with him as a witness.
Jackie: Dean is a wonderful guy. He’s a great witness, very supportive of Karla. He’s been with her through all of this. And attorney, Brian Monico, said, “You remember Dean? I love Dean.” And the whole jury laughed.
And it broke up this tension, and this very heated closing argument by defense about Karla lying. And we felt this reprieve from the tension when the jury laughed at that. And almost felt like they agreed with us that, “You’re right, Dean’s a great guy, and Dean wouldn’t come in here and lie.”
Marcie: As much as civil attorneys have less of a burden than in a criminal case, all it takes is one juror being completely against the group’s consensus to result in a hung jury. Plaintiff’s attorneys still have the difficult job of convincing all 12 jurors to side with them. Since the team wasn’t 1,000% confident in what the jury’s decision would be, the plaintiffs and defense attorneys reach what is called a high-low agreement.
Tara: I was trying to strike a deal with the defense counsel so that we could reach a settlement that no matter what the verdict came back as, that if it fell within the parameters of our agreement, they would pay it and there would be no appeal, the verdict came in higher than the high or lower than the low, you know, we would get the lower on the high.
Marcie: While the attorneys were still negotiating their high-low agreement, the judge informed them that the jury had reached a verdict.
Tara: My goal at that point was, this has to be the end. For better or for worse, we’re reaching an agreement this is going to be the end of the case. Like, I’m not retrying this and Karla’s not going through this again. And ultimately, I was able to reach that agreement.
Marcie: Once Tara and the defense attorneys agreed on the parameters of their high-low, it was time for them to hear what the jury had decided.
Tara: The jury came back and read their deliberations, which gave our client, Karla, the verdict in the amount of $1.8 million.
Marcie: That verdict fell within the parameters of the high-low, meaning Karla would get the full verdict amount.
Karla: It wasn’t about the money, at that time. At really any time, it wasn’t about the money, it was about more about exposing the hotel.
Jackie: This case was really important because it gave Karla a sense of justice. It not only gave her compensation for the wrong that was done, but it really gave her a voice in the court system that she was deprived of.
Marcie: Karla’s attorneys felt the verdict was not just a win for Karla, but a win for Karla’s everywhere.
Tara: You can go into a court of law, even if it’s not criminal, in a civil case, and a “he said, she said” situation. And at the end of the day, those that allow for that, if you’re a business owner or you’re an operator, you need to be aware, and you need to be fully cognizant that if this happens, and that he said or she said happens on your watch, on your premises, you will be held accountable.
Marcie: Karla finally had her day in court, and she could fly back to Texas knowing there would be no appeal and no post-trial motions.
Tara: Now she could move on. And by move on I mean, I knew her, she was going to continue to be actively involved in being an advocate for rape survivors and victims.
Marcie: Karla gives a lot of credit to the rape crisis hotline that she reached out to shortly after arriving back home in Texas just after her assault. While she hopes no one will ever have to go through the nightmare that she did, she’s not naive to the fact that sexual assault is all too common.
She encourages victims to use their voice and to talk through what they’re going through with a mental health professional or someone they trust.
Karla: I just want girls to know or women to know that there’s people out there that will listen and will help. Don’t ever feel like you can’t reach out for help, especially in these drug-facilitated sexual assaults.
Because they think, “Well, I was drunk,” or “It’s my fault,” or, you know, whatever. It doesn’t matter if you were drinking to incoherency or whatever, you were not able to give consent.
Marcie: Karla has lost a lot of hope in the criminal justice system. So, until it is more common for sexual offenders to be put behind bars for their crimes, she says she will continue to share her story so women never let their guard down.
Karla: And how many more hashtags do we have to have to get this right?
Marcie: Thank you for listening to “Beating Goliath: A Plaintiff’s Pursuit of Justice.” Special thanks to Karla Gress for allowing us to share her story, the attorneys of Salvi, Schostok & Pritchard, and all the experts who took the time to talk to us.
“Beating Goliath” was written and produced in-house by the team at Salvi, Schostok & Pritchard. Sound designed by Eric Sirianni, and editing by the talented team at Salvi Media. To learn more about this case and listen to more episodes of “Beating Goliath,” head to salvilaw.com/podcast. I’m your host, Marcie Mangan. Until next time.
