Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Personal Injury Law Blogs -> Cruise Ship Law

Personal Injury Law

: Cruise Ship Law

Cruise Ship Sexual Assault - Princess Cruises Captain Sex Assault On Child In Cabin

By Lipcon, Margulies & Alsina, P.A.

Imagine, if you dare, that your child is sleeping in the cabin next door. You are within earshot of those all too-thin walls. She is tucked in, the cabin door is locked and everyone in your family is asleep. You feel as secure as you do at home, you in the master bedroom, your child in her bedroom next door, or down the hall. Soon, there is a man in the child's cabin, he is sexually assaulting her in her sleep. He's not a stranger who has crawled in through a window in the dead of night. You are on a ship, where nobody crawls through a window, you and your children are suppose to be safe in your beds.

We have heard these tales before. Sometimes the victim is an adult, other times a child. Each of the past cases involved a passenger who either let a fellow passenger or crew member into their cabin or a crew member who entered with a master key card. None of them reach the level of horror this family faced, when the man in their child's cabin was somebody they knew, had every reason to trust, THE CAPTAIN OF THE SHIP. He had entered the cabin and sexually assaulted their child.

Because it seemed like a dream to the child, taking place while she slept, it wasn't reported during the cruise. After the child got home from the cruise, she realized it was no dream when the captain began contacting her on MSN Messenger. He wanted more. He begged her for sexually explicit conversation, nude photos and tried to enticed her to perform sexual acts on herself while he watched. That's when what seemed like a dream became a living nightmare and the chat transcripts were shown to her parents.

Up to this point in time, many would say, that these are the libelous mutterings of a family looking for a big insurance claim. Few of these cases are ever proven, confessions are rare. When there is a confession, the accused claims it was consensual sex. There is rarely a conviction.

When the captain admits the sexual assault and the offences he committed after the girl was back home, is convicted and gets a prison sentence, the entire case becomes just plain surreal. The realization sets in, this was one severely depraved captain, he really did all the things he was accused of, making this case extremely rare.

This case would have remained hidden, had an officer with verified employment at Princess Cruises not came to us with this horrific tale. I thank him for his bravery in contacting our Mike Groves with this horrifying case.

Credible whistle blowers in the industry are few and far between. Those who work in career positions fear their job and future jobs if they speak out. It's one thing for a crew member in housekeeping to speak out, quite another for someone much higher in the larger scheme of ship life. For that reason, we are protecting the whistle blower's identity.

This would not be the only claim the Cruise Bruise visitor would make. We would hear that Princess Cruises is not reporting all sexual assaults to law enforcement - cases are being covered up. Again, this just seemed too hard to believe.

However, when I look at any one cruise line as a whole, I see trends when compared to other cruise lines. Taking a look at Princess Cruises, for example. I have documented that Princess Cruises reports more passenger injuries aboard than any other cruise line, by far. How is it, that ships sailing the same itineraries have reported no or few injuries on an annual basis, while Princess reports many? It seems simply impossible; it's the law of averages.

If a dozen ships are sailing to Alaska every week, the injuries aboard those ships, sailing in the same weather conditions, with basically the same passenger demographics, should have similar injuries in similar numbers. Yet, that is not the case. It would seem some cruise lines are simply not reporting cases that are required to be reported, by law. Princess seems to be reporting them all, because they report a lot of them. Just because they report a high number of injuries, doesn't mean they report all their crimes.

Then, there is the situation with the cocaine drug busts in the Caribbean aboard Royal Caribbean Cruise Line ships. Nearly half of all drug busts on cruise ships in the Caribbean take place on RCCL ships. Again, this number is much too high as a percentage of all cruise ships sailing in the Caribbean.

It would seem that RCCL is working hard to ferret out the drug smugglers, much harder than other cruise lines, including Carnival Cruise Lines. Again, because RCCL makes a lot of headlines with major drug busts, doesn't mean they report all their injuries or other crimes. Carnival, who has the lion's share of the business in the Caribbean, hasn't had a single major drug bust aboard one their "fun" ships in at least the past five years. This would lead us to believe that Carnival is simply not working hard enough to eradicate cruise ship drug smuggling.

In looking at this Princess Cruises child molesting captain, who sailed with Cunard and Princess for about a dozen and half years, the claim by the whistle blower seems highly probable. If the captain of the ship is a child molester, what are the odds he would advocate reporting child molestation cases aboard his ship, or any sexual assaults for that matter?

I find it hard to believe that a man in his 60s, wakes up one morning and decides to become a child molester. Then, he commits an act so brazen, it defies comprehension. That is the act of a seasoned child molester, one who has the confidence to pull off such a dangerous and risky crime. I mean, come on.

He entered her cabin with a key card that could be tracked back to him. He knew he would be on video footage every step of the way to and from her cabin. He knew she might wake up screaming and dozens of people would come running out of their cabins, only to find him with his pant zipper open and no logic reason he would be in the child's cabin in the middle of the night. That my friends, is one brazen act of a seasoned child molester, not the act of a first time molester. Then consider, that over those dozen and half or so years, he was the captain over likely a couple million passengers. You begin to imagine with horror, far more than this one case reveals.

Our whistle blower alleges, he knows for a fact that shipboard sexual assault cases he personally knows about, were reported by victims, but were never reported by the ship to law enforcement. This leaves it up the victim to report the incident to police, which may or may not happen. If the crime was ignored after getting up the courage to report it once, it may not be reported again.That's the simple victimology of victims who are deeply humiliated by sexual assaults.

That victimology is demonstrated in the case of a child the same age as the captain's victim, who reported a lawyer sexually assaulted her in a California public library. As the case drug on, the victim refused to testify and the case was dropped. That happens a lot in child sexual assault cases. The entire process is horrifying and humiliating to a child. But, then the lawyer did something surprising, he sued the family in a California court for a million dollars and he won.

The only reason I know about that case, is because the lawyer, a man who got the bulk of his university education in prison, was the former spouse and traveling companion of a woman who went missing at sea (see our 'missing' section) in the middle of the night. Her case was never solved and I've followed it every since. The case involving these Americans was never solved largely because the cruise ship they were on had no cameras aboard, the incident took place in the middle of the night while most of the people aboard were asleep and the ship was sailing in European waters.

Details came out when the lawyer tried to get a pardon for his numerous criminal convictions, so he could practice law in Florida as well as in California. He sought to practice law in Florida, so he could sue someone who he thought had wronged him. The pardon was denied, based on several factors, with the lawsuit against the child's family and the missing at sea case actually specified in the denial.

This case of the child molesting captain opens up an entirely new bevy of questions about cruise ship security, which as you know the industry fought on the floors of the U.S. Congress after the International Cruise Victims Association fought for it. Had safety latches been installed on the cabin doors, this child and her family would have never been scarred for life. The cruise industy had that language removed from the bill before congress, because they said, it was too expensive.

The simple fact is that passengers can trust NOBODY on a cruise ship, not even the captain. The industry refuses to take any real action that would guarantee the kind of safety passengers reasonbly expect, require and demand. There are laws in place to govern how ships conduct themselves when it comes to incidents at sea, yet the industry does as it pleases in spite of those laws.

Originally Posted at: www.cruisebruise.com

Full post as published by Cruise Ship Law on March 26, 2011 (boomark / email).