Hotel Housekeepers Share Tales of Sexual Harassment

June 6, 2011

ABCNews – Elizabeth Moreno was making the bed in a downtown Chicago hotel room when the room’s guest unexpectedly returned.

Hotel policy dictated she had to leave, but he insisted she stay.

“He started asking me, ‘What are you doing later?'” Moreno said.

Then, she said, he told her, “We can have sex. I’ll give you money — whatever you want.”

The 34-year-old, who has been a housekeeper for 19 years, said she aggressively told him no.

“I was talking to him real angry,” she said.

Watch the Diane Sawyer interview, click here.

She says he left the room soon afterward and Moreno told her manager right away.

“I was so scared,” Moreno said. “[The manager said] ‘You O.K., you O.K.?’ I said, ‘No, I’m not O.K. I’m nervous.”

Her manager confronted the guest, and Moreno said the guest denied ever having solicited her.

In the days following, she said, “nobody cleaned his room.”

It wasn’t the first time Moreno had been subjected to inappropriate behavior at work, she said. One time a man approached her in the hallway, offering to pay for a massage. He asked several times and promised to pay her “good money.”

“He said he wanted massage … maybe he wanted something else,” she said.

Similar incidents happened at the first hotel she worked at, 14 years ago, but there, she said, the management didn’t do anything.

The management at her current hotel is responsive to workers’ concerns, she said, but she worries because they only have security guards on the weekend.

To read the full ABCNews article, click here.