The Ritz-Carlton Half Moon Bay (via YouTube/KRON).
Upon taking a sip, a woman sensed something was horribly off about her water while staying at the Ritz-Carlton Half Moon Bay and she has now sued the luxury hotel, claiming one of the employees “ejaculated his semen” into a bottle brought up to her room last year.
According to the lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, obtained by Law&Crime, the husband and wife plaintiffs — identified only as Jane and John Doe — claim a trip meant to celebrate a birthday and a visit with their college-aged daughter in San Francisco abruptly turned into an assault.
“When Jane and John Doe checked in to the Half Moon Bay resort, they were greeted with the kind of comfort and seduction would one expect from one of the most well-known and well-regard luxury hotel brands in the world,” the 30-page complaint states. “But by the time [they] checked out of the Ritz-Carlton, they took with them the horror and trauma of having been sexually assaulted and exploited as a direct consequence of the hotel’s own negligence.”
The woman claims she rung the front desk for water and was promptly obliged by a male attendant who delivered five bottles to her door. With no reason to suspect anything was wrong with the drinks, she left them on the counter and went to sleep.
Waking up thirsty in the middle of night, she grabbed for a water and took a sip.
When she realized the “taste and texture” of the water she ingested “may have been semen” she immediately woke her husband to tell him what she thought she ingested. They immediately contacted Ritz-Carlton management and later, the local police, the lawsuit notes.
It wasn’t until the woman was in the lobby talking to staff that “she began to realize that the chemical taste she had experienced was similar to semen.”
“Jane Doe was mortified, terrified, embarrassed and humiliated but shared with her suspicion with her husband who then asked hotel security and management representatives to call the police,” the complaint states.
The plaintiffs claim the hotel ultimately had the water sent to a lab for testing and roughly two months after their stay, a representative from Ritz-Carlton called to “confirm that the water contained semen.”
Alleging that management failed to identify or apprehend the individual who may have been responsible, lawyers for the couple note that all they received for their troubles were “a few measly Marriott rewards points.”
“Which, of course, could only be used for another anxiety-inducing stay at a Ritz-Carlton property,” attorney Terrence Jones wrote in the complaint.
Jones also accused the hotel of refusing to cooperate with police involved in a larger investigation of the November 2022 episode. The plaintiffs claim the hotel has declined to turn over the “defiled water bottle” for examination by police so that a DNA test could be run to cross-check sex offender registries throughout the United States.
“So, at present, the Ritz-Carlton employee that ejaculated his semen into a hotel-labeled water bottle and then served it to Jane Doe — and likely countless other guests — remains unidentified, uncaptured and his ongoing sexual deviance unabated,” the attorney wrote.
Not knowing “what kind of germs and infections” could have been present in the semen she ingested, Doe says since last November she has regularly subjectd herself to medical testing for viruses.
Her husband also claims he has had to seek therapy “because of the distress associated with knowing what occurred to her and yet at the same time not knowing what may befall her in the future if she ultimately tests positive for some kind of sexually-transmitted virus.”
Left “powerless” to stop the assault on his wife “by some deviant,” John Doe says he has been profoundly frustrated by thoughts that he cannot protect his wife from sexual assault.
This has “negatively impacted their intimacy and the emotional depth of their relationship,” Jones wrote.
The couple is seeking damages to be determined at trial.
A representative for the Ritz-Carlton Half Moon Bay did not immediately respond to a request for comment by phone or email on Friday.
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