[Update: Marriott has dropped the appeal.] If you want to live dangerously, why not try an unrelaxing visit to the Stamford Marriott Hotel & Spa? It features a game room, a BBQ/picnic area, $10 a day Internet access, and the occasional mentally unhealthy transient wandering for days around the parking garage waiting to attack you. Best of all, if you are attacked Marriott will let you take all the credit for it, and then subpoena your friends and professional contacts, thereby permanently ruining any anonymity you hoped to maintain. Because at Stamford Marriott, if you’re raped in our parking garage by a guy our security should have noticed and kicked out, don’t come crying to us!

The woman, identified in court papers only as Jane Doe, claims in the suit that Fricker had been in the hotel and garage acting suspiciously days before the attack, as well as the afternoon of the attack, and the hotel failed to notice him, apprehend him or make him leave. During the attack, security personnel did not see or stop him, the suit claims.

“Stamford Marriott claims woman was negligent in her own rape” [Connecticut Post Online] (Thanks to Ryan!)

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Update: Thanks to our readers who continue to follow up on this story and post links to more detailed articles, we now know a lot more about the situation. We thought, considering how scandalicious the accusation is, the fair thing to do is to repeat Marriott’s side of the story—which is that the hotel’s lawyers never made the claim directly, and that they tried to get it removed from their defense well before anyone else heard about it.

Here’s what Marriott has claimed in this Associated Press article:

• Marriott says they did not subpoena anyone yet, and have not disclosed the woman’s identity:
  

  Marriott attorney Donald Derrico said the company was trying to determine the effect of the crime on the victim and that subpoenas have not been issued. The hotel will decide whom to subpoena on a case-by-case basis, he said.

  “Her name was never, ever, ever disclosed to anyone,” Derrico said.

• Derrico “said that Marriott officials asked his law firm to withdraw the claim in July, but that his associate had not done so because his mother died.”

  In this article from Greenwich Time, Marriott’s lawyer says pretty much the same thing:

  “From its inception, the legal case involving this tragic incident has been handled by the insurance company and its lawyers under the terms of the hotel’s insurance policy, as is customary where an insurance company bears the risk of loss,” said Stamford attorney Marc Kurzman in a statement from the hotel. “Interestingly enough, when we recently learned of this defense we requested that it be withdrawn.”