Tag: georgia

Girl Wins $164 Million Lawsuit from Hotel in Sex-Trafficking Case

A federal court in Georgia has ordered a hotel to pay a female victim $164 million because it allowed a sex trafficking ring to operate on its premises.

The victim, who was 15 at the time of her trafficking, was reportedly held at the Super 8 hotel in College Park, Georgia, in 2020 and 2021, where she was sexually assaulted by her captors and their clients.

“They set up an environment for children to be sold,” said Patrick McDonough, the anonymous victim’s attorney, according to WAGA-TV. “This hotel operator would actually warn the traffickers if the police were coming.”

“Hey, look, if you’re going to turn a blind eye and profit off of children being sold, you’re going to be held accountable,” the attorney added, noting that the girl was held in the hotel for about 120 days.

The federal jury in the case determined that the owner of the hotel chain, Lincoln Bancorp LLC, would have to pay $44 million in compensatory damages and $120 million in punitive damages.

This is not the first hotel that has been held liable for sex trafficking in Georgia. Last year a $40 million verdict was returned against United Inn and Suites in DeKalb County. A woman who was 16 when she was trafficked sued the hotel and won, making it the first hotel in the Peach State to be found civilly liable for sex trafficking.

There are currently three other hotels being sued in civil court for sex trafficking in Georgia.

Georgia is not the only state where hotels are being accused of participating in sex trafficking.

According to the Lawsuit Information Center, there are currently two hotels in New Jersey being sued for cases of sex trafficking. Other cases include hotels in Los Angeles, Ohio, Philadelphia, and more.

Breitbart News has reported several cases of hotel and motel operators being accused of either facilitating or turning a blind eye to sex-trafficking going on in their establishments.

One such incident occurred in Virginia, where an Indian family with the last name of Sharma was arrested for allowing drug and sex trafficking to occur in their Red Carpet Inn hotel in Dumfries.

In another case, federal authorities in Nebraska carried out a series of raids, leading to the arrest of a group of Indian nationals who were allegedly engaged in an elaborate scheme involving sex, labor, and drug trafficking. In addition to multiple businesses owned by the suspected traffickers in Nebraska, the scheme also involved companies in Georgia and Texas.

In yet another case, Kavankumar Patel, an illegal migrant from India, was sentenced to a ten-year prison term for participating in a child sex-trafficking ring in Omaha, Nebraska, the Department of Justice announced.

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Georgia Election Board Asks Trump DOJ to Declare Statewide Dominion QR-Code Machines UNLAWFUL Before Midterms — Demands Six-Month Phase-Out as Raffensperger Stonewalls

Georgia’s Republican-controlled State Election Board has formally invited the Trump Department of Justice to step in and shut down the Peach State’s unverifiable, QR-code voting system before voters start casting ballots in the 2026 midterms.

In a September 30 letter to Attorney General Todd Blanche, State Election Board Executive Director James Mills asked the DOJ to prohibit the use of “unreadable, unverifiable QR-code-based vote tabulation and any other electronic tabulation method that does not permit the voter to verify the vote that is actually counted,” concerning Georgia’s Dominion voting system, now owned by Liberty Vote USA.

Mills also asked Blanche to set a binding six-month deadline, forcing Georgia to dump the machines and move to a system with voter-verifiable, hand-auditable paper records.

The letter, obtained and published by the Georgia Recorder, was copied to Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin.

According to the Georgia Recorder, the demand follows a September 28 resolution, introduced by GOP appointee Carolyn Roddy and passed 3-2, directing Mills to seek federal help forcing a software fix on the Dominion Democracy Suite 5.5-A system, the same equipment, now branded Liberty Vote, that Georgia rolled out statewide for the 2020 election. Early in-person voting begins October 13.

The letter does not stop at the machines. Mills asks the DOJ to open an investigation into Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office for withholding, blocking review of, and allegedly altering original election records, and for sharing Georgia motor-vehicle and voter-registration data with private vendors including ERIC and the Center for Election Innovation and Research.

He also wants a court-backed order requiring a forensic backup of election-management servers and Dominion scanners, then installation of a later EAC-certified software version, 5.17, 5.20, or newer, before November, with independent verification that CISA-documented vulnerabilities and the so-called DVSorder privacy flaw have actually been fixed.

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Bottoms: We Had Crime Spike in Atlanta When I Was Mayor in 2020 Due to Things Like ‘Social Justice Protests’

On Monday’s edition of CBS’s “The Takeout,” Democratic Georgia gubernatorial nominee Keisha Lance Bottoms responded to a question on crime during her tenure as the mayor of Atlanta by saying that there were drops in crime and then Atlanta “experienced spikes that we can only attribute to what was happening in 2020, between the social justice protests, between watching George Floyd be murdered before our eyes, in Georgia, watching Ahmaud Arbery be killed in the middle of the street, Breonna Taylor.”

Host and CBS News Chief Washington Correspondent Major Garrett asked, “So, you were mayor of Atlanta. Being governor of Georgia is a promotion. For every leader in this country, COVID and everything around it was a crucible of leadership. Everyone was tested, and everyone made mistakes, I think. You would agree with that? When you look back at that, as you ask for a promotion to be governor of Georgia, what would you want the voters of Georgia to know you would do better, do differently?”

Bottoms responded, “What I would say to the voters of Georgia is to remember I was the woman in the arena. I was making very tough decisions there was no blueprint for. But any leader worth her salt is going to always look back and wonder, could I have done something differently? Should I have done something –?”

Garrett then cut in to ask, “Have you identified an answer to that question?”

Bottoms responded, “There are a lot of things. Hindsight gives us this great lens that we don’t always have in the moment. So, there are things, big and small, that I wonder, should I have made a different decision, could I have made a different decision in that moment? But what I will say is that every decision that I made was based on what I truly believed to be the best decision in that moment, and just reminding people, even during that time, this huge economic downturn and all the uncertainty that came with the pandemic in 2020 and Trump 1.0, I still left the city with four years of balanced budgets. We didn’t lay off employees. We didn’t raise property taxes. We created a child savings account for our public school kindergarteners. We even closed the largest real estate transaction that’s currently the largest public-private partnership happening in the southeastern United States. And out of that, we created an affordable housing trust fund and created 7,000 units of affordable housing. So, there [was] a long list of accomplishments, even in the midst of all of the uncertainty that was happening in the world. But you don’t grow as a leader without doing your own self-assessment and considering how you can be better and stronger.”

Garrett then asked, “Your Republican opponent, Rick Jackson, hammers you on crime, and the crime rate rose in Atlanta. It rose nationwide in many urban areas. Public safety’s a part of a governor’s job. What would you say to the state — voters in the state of Georgia and the sheriffs across the counties of Georgia about your attitude and what you learned about public safety in that crucible of COVID?”

Bottoms answered, “Yeah. And it’s interesting, prior to COVID, I was being called a public safety mayor, because I had given our police and firefighters the largest pay increases they had ever received in the history of the city. I was very supportive of law enforcement. And then 2020 came, and Atlanta, like so many other cities across the country and across Georgia, experienced spikes that we can only attribute to what was happening in 2020, between the social justice protests, between watching George Floyd be murdered before our eyes, in Georgia, watching Ahmaud Arbery be killed in the middle of the street, Breonna Taylor. There was thing after thing after thing. But I can say, even in 2021, when we were still in the midst of the pandemic, my first meeting in the White House in the Oval Office with President Biden, we were there to talk about the rolling out of vaccines. There were governors, Republican leaders, governors and mayors, to talk about this rollout. And I took the opportunity to advocate for more funding, for federal funding for us to put towards public safety, because I knew that people were emerging from the pandemic in a way that we didn’t go into the pandemic. I remembered looking at a draft of my State of the City address that I was scheduled to give at the beginning of March of 2020, and we ended up canceling that address. But, in that draft, I had talked about these drops in our crime numbers and how well we were trending, and then there was 2020, summer of 2020.”

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Woke Georgia Democrat who’s running for governor by opposing school choice is caught sending her own children to $38k-a-year private academy

Democrat’s woke candidate for Georgia governor was caught sending her children to an elite $40,000-a-year academy despite her party’s staunch opposition to programs that help less wealthy students attend ‘unaccountable private entities’.

Keisha Lance Bottoms, 56, was revealed to have sent her children to Woodward Academy, a private institution with tuition upwards of $37,000 a year.

While Bottoms has not publicly outlined a position on school choice programs that allow students to use public funds for private tuition, the Democratic Party of Georgia (DPG) strongly opposes the policy they call a ‘scam to siphon taxpayer money away from public schools’. 

‘While [Governor Brian Kemp] and his administration preside over a failed rollout of a failed idea, Georgia Democrats will keep fighting for a high quality, fully funded public school system that works for all students,’ said DPG in a statement slamming the Republican’s school choice program.   

Bottoms, meanwhile, has been a strong proponent of her party’s message that vows to increase funding for public schools, even as she sends her own children to the cushy private school in College Park.

The former mayor has already had two of her four children graduate from the academy. Tuition this year for her 15-year-old twins, who just recently posed in photos wearing the school’s uniforms and have profiles on the sports team, would cost nearly $80,000 for both.

While it is unclear how many years each of Bottoms’s children attended the school, the cost for a student to have a full 14-year career at Woodward Academy from pre-K to 12th grade graduation would cost $477,740.

Parents sending four children through 14 years at the private school would have a tuition bill just shy of $2 million under today’s rates. 

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Democrat Georgia Senate Candidate Who Co-Hosts Drag Shows Convicted of Child Cruelty After Beating 5-Year-Old With a Spatula — Sentenced to 7 Years

A Democrat nominee for the Georgia State Senate is heading to prison after a judge found him guilty of cruelty to children and battery for striking a 5-year-old girl at a daycare.

Justin Grant Gillespie, 41, of Hull, was sentenced last week to seven years, with two years to serve in state prison. The rest will be served on probation. He remains in the Madison County Jail.

According to the Athens Banner-Herald, Gillespie was convicted in a bench trial before Madison County Superior Court Judge Chris NeSmith. The charges stemmed from a Feb. 1, 2021, incident at Happy Kids Learning Center in Hull, where Gillespie worked.

Authorities said he hit the child in the lower back with a spatula, leaving a red, raised welt. The girl told investigators Gillespie was mad at her for not taking a nap. Gillespie admitted swinging the spatula but claimed he was on the phone and did not realize the child was standing nearby.

The parents discovered the wound and reported it to the Madison County Sheriff’s Office. Charges were filed in March 2021. The case dragged on for more than five years.

Gillespie showed up for a jury trial, fired his lawyer that day, hired another attorney, and chose a bench trial instead. During testimony from the victim’s family, Gillespie was seen rolling his eyes. The judge factored that conduct into the sentence, according to Northern Circuit District Attorney Parks White, as reported by 92.1 WLHR.

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Flock Safety Offers Buyouts As Abuse Scandal Deepens — Georgia Should Take Note

Flock Safety, the Atlanta-based company that’s built a surveillance network of license plate readers across the country, is offering employees the chance to leave with a packet of cash and benefits in what the company is calling the “most generous” severance package ever offered, Wired reports.

The crisis for Flock Safety is centered around the misuse of its surveillance technology by law enforcement. In August The Washington Post detailed 46 instances of police officers using Flock cameras to track people including ex-girlfriends, wives, and even partners of domestic violence incidents. The revelations led to a firestorm of cancellations across the country.

Florida and Texas announced they would no longer use the license plate readers. An anti-surveillance group also said that 90 cities had dropped Flock contracts in August, a fourfold increase from the previous month. CEO Garrett Langley called the “biggest damage” to his company from the controversy to “internal morale.”

As for why this is a big story for Georgia, the Atlanta-based company is after all headquartered in the state where its extensive network of cameras across neighborhoods, highways, and smaller cities and towns is secretly monitoring the vast majority of vehicle travel. And Florida and Texas have seen enough to stop using the surveillance system.

For now, the voluntary buyout move by Flock Safety’s management is an effort to contain the crisis while avoiding the appearance of mass layoffs. However, the core question remains: who will watch the watchers when the largest surveillance company in the US discovers that there are limits to what the public at large, as well as the company’s employees, are willing to accept?

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Democrat Jon Ossoff Campaigned with Alleged Sexual Deviant Georgia Mayor Impeached for Corruption

Georgia Democrat Sen. Jon Ossoff has repeatedly campaigned with a mayor who allegedly exchanged explicit messages with an 18 year-old student and was impeached for spending thousands of taxpayer dollars on personal expenses.

Ossoff has been photographed with disgraced former Stockbridge Mayor Jayden Williams dating back to 2023, as seen in photos on social media. Breitbart News reported last week Williams was impeached by the Stockbridge City Council after he was accused of misusing city funds and exchanging sexually suggestive messages and explicit photos with an 18-year-old high school student.

He was removed from office on grounds of malfeasance, misfeasance, and violation of his oath, Fox 5 Atlanta reported.

Ossoff in the past has bragged about “exposing human trafficking” as a former investigative journalist and staked his campaign on rooting out corruption.

Atlanta News First reported on a Stockbridge police report filed on March 17 detailing an investigation into communications between Williams and an 18-year-old high school student who said he was enrolled in the city’s youth mentorship program.

Police said a search of the teen’s phone revealed active messages on Instagram and Snapchat starting on Dec. 1, 2025, that appeared to escalate into sexually suggestive flirting with other implications, the news outlet reported.

Ossoff has campaigned with Williams and spoken at the same events numerous times over the years:

Ossoff and Williams at a Harris/Walz campaign event: (Instagram, 9/8/24)

Ossoff and Williams at a Democratic Party of Georgia State Elections event: (Instagram, 1/8/23)

Ossoff and Williams at a Joe Biden campaign event: (Instagram, 1/15/23)

Ossoff, Williams, and Lance Bottoms at a campaign event: (Instagram, 5/31/26)

Ossoff and Williams at the NLC Congressional City Conference: (Instagram, 3/20/26)

Ossoff faces Republican Rep. Mike Collins in November, a race that has seen polling margins tighten in the past week. Quantus Insights published a survey giving Ossoff just a 4-point lead, with 48 percent to Collins’ 44 percent.

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Democrat Jon Ossoff Staffer Embraced Reparations in Gates Foundation Grant Study He Coauthored

Georgia Democrat Sen. Jon Ossoff’s data and analytics director received a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to study how to shame white Americans into embracing reparations.

A summary of the grant reads as follows:

Racially restrictive housing covenants – used by white homeowners to prevent migration of people of color into their neighborhoods – contributed to contemporary patterns of residential segregation, social stratification, and inequality. Yet, policy proposals to correct these historical wrongs have not gained broad support. Political scientist Bryant Moy will investigate whether awareness of racially restrictive housing covenants bolsters support for reparations. He will conduct a nationally representative survey experiment for his study.

Bryant Moy, who has been hired to Ossoff’s campaign ahead of the 2026 midterm election, also serves as an associate professor at New York University.

Additionally, he is a principal investigator at the Urban Politics Lab, where his biography states in part:

He studies urban and local politics, with a focus on racial inequality, local governance, and public opinion. His research uses large-scale datasets, survey and field experiments, and modern methods of causal inference to understand how local institutions produce—or undermine—equity and democratic responsiveness in multiracial communities.

Moy explains on his personal website that he wants to fix white Americans’ lack of support for reparations.

“Public support for reparations among white Americans remains divided…  This study examines whether informational and visual interventions that present the structural roots of racial inequality can increase support for reparative policies,” an explanation on his website of one of his studies outlines.

The study, titled “Can Knowledge of Racially Restrictive Covenants Increase Support for Redress?”  is listed as “under review.”

In August, a Fox News report unearthed a 2019 interview in which Ossoff himself said he supports reparations, saying “there is a debt unpaid.”

In the exchange, Ossoff agreed with paying reparations: “There is a debt unpaid. I think it is a very, very difficult question: how to pay it,” he said.

“But see, that should be the question — not if it should be paid,” the host responded.

“Exactly,” Ossoff replied.

The Fox News report added that far-left progressive groups like Movement for Back Lives (M4BL) and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have made reparations a part of their platforms.

In the 2019 interview, Ossoff also said, “Forty acres and a mule was never paid out,” but has declined to sponsor Democrat Sen. Cory Booker’s legislation to establish a commission to study and develop reparation proposals.

That bill, introduced most recently on January 9, 2025, has 20 cosponsors, all of whom are Democrats with the exception of Independent Bernie Sanders, who caucuses with the Democrats. The list includes Sens. Mazie Hirono (HI), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Adam Schiff (CA), Chris Van Hollen (MD), Elizabeth Warren (MA), and Sheldon Whitehouse (RI).

Ossoff faces Republican Rep. Mike Collins in November. Polls have shown Ossoff with a steady, but somewhat declining lead. Outgoing Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp has formally endorsed Collins.

“Jon Ossoff’s far-left agenda doesn’t represent Georgia values, and the future of our state and country demands a different direction,” Kemp said in a statement.

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Georgia’s “Historic” Youngest Mayor Ousted After Just 10 Months Following Alleged Taxpayer-Funded Spending Spree and Sexually Suggestive Messages With 18-Year-Old Student

Ten months. That is how long it took for Georgia’s youngest elected mayor, a media-anointed “historic” figure who once called himself “the Obama of my family,” to be thrown out of office.

Jayden Williams, 23, was removed Saturday by the Stockbridge City Council after a roughly 10-hour investigative hearing into allegations that he treated the city purchasing card like a personal wallet and traded sexually suggestive messages and explicit images with an 18-year-old male high school student.

The city confirmed the result on Sunday.

“The City of Stockbridge confirms that the City Council has taken formal action concerning the Office of Mayor following proceedings conducted pursuant to applicable City processes,” officials said. “As a result of that action, the Mayor has been removed from office.”

Mayor Pro Tem Elton Alexander is now acting mayor while the city prepares a special election. Williams can appeal to Henry County Superior Court. No criminal charges have been filed.

City workers flagged unusual charges and alerted management and the city attorney. An independent law-firm investigation followed. Local outlets including Atlanta News First and Fox News have reported the alleged personal burn on the municipal purchasing card at more than $4,000, restaurants, clothing, a haircut, a movie, plus about $2,600 in fuel and personal use of a city vehicle.

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Democrat Nominee for GA Governor Keisha Lance Bottoms: Black Women Conditioned into ‘Post-Traumatic Slave Mentality’

Black women are conditioned into a “post-traumatic slave mentality,” Democratic nominee for Georgia governor Keisha Lance Bottoms claims.

Speaking during the women’s event Radiant Conversations, Bottoms said, “As black women, we are conditioned. Girl, you can’t depend on anybody else. If you don’t do it for yourself, ain’t nobody else gonna do it for you.”

“And in many ways, that is a post-traumatic slave mentality,” Bottoms claimed. “That it is – it is not just on our backs. That this is a burden that we can all carry. It’s a win for all of us. And so it is just remembering that this is a sisterhood, that this is about community. It’s not about going fast.”

Bottoms continued: “It’s about taking others with you, and I’m just – I’m so grateful to have learned those lessons and to be able to apply them in this season.”

Bottoms, the former mayor of Atlanta and former senior advisor to former President Joe Biden, is hoping to become the Peach State’s next governor and has stated she will put President Donald Trump up to Biden’s record, asserting the former president “delivered” for Georgia.

“I will put Biden up against Trump’s record any day of the week, especially in the way he delivered for Georgia,” she said during an appearance on CNN’s OutFront.

She continued, adding, “The people of Georgia are talking about the cost of living. They’re talking about grocery costs. They’re talking about healthcare costs, 500,000 people in this state opted not to get healthcare after the big, ugly bill. Those are the things that people care about.”

Notably, Bottoms made her anti-Trump position abundantly clear when she announced her intention to run for governor in Georgia, deeming the commander-in-chief a “disaster for our economy and our country — from his failure to address rising prices to giving an unelected billionaire the power to cut Medicare and Social Security.”

“Donald Trump is no laughing matter,” she said. “Well, My grandmama taught me, no matter how hard they swing you never stay down. You fight back. That’s why I’m running for governor, because Georgia families deserve far better than what Donald Trump and Republicans are giving us.”

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