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If you were sexually assaulted at a hotel, an apartment complex, a bar, a store, a parking garage or any other business, the company that controlled that property may be legally responsible, separately from the person who assaulted you. The claim is not about what he did. It is about what the business failed to do that allowed it to happen.
There are two claims, and usually only one of them has insurance behind it. The claim against the person who assaulted you is real, but that person is often uninsured, sometimes never identified, and frequently has nothing to pay a judgment with. The second claim is against the business or property owner who controlled the place where it happened. That is the claim that generally matters, because commercial property carries liability insurance and a company can answer for a verdict. Texas law allows a survivor to bring both.
You do not need a criminal case for any of this. No arrest, no charge, no conviction and no police report are required. A civil claim is your own case, brought on your own timeline, and it is decided by a lower standard than a criminal prosecution.
What a civil claim does need is evidence. That is the part survivors are almost never told, and it is better news than it sounds, because most of the evidence is not yours. It is in the building’s own records. Surveillance video, key card and access logs, incident reports, complaints other people made about the same employee or the same broken gate, guard schedules, work orders on the light that had been out for a month. Those records are on an automatic timer, and once they are overwritten they do not come back.
So both things are true at once, and they belong together. The law does not require a criminal case. The case does require evidence, and evidence is what decides whether anyone can help you. If you already showered, waited, told nobody or never called police, that is rarely what decides one of these cases. Most people do exactly that. What matters more than any of it is how soon someone asks the business to stop deleting. See what evidence actually matters, and what disappears.
Where the assault happened decides who is responsible and what has to be proved, so these situations are covered separately.
If it happened at a bar, a nightclub, a restaurant, a retail store, a gym, an office building, a parking lot or a parking garage, this page is the one that covers it.
What the business is answerable for is the security failure, not the assault itself. In practice that means the things a company decided about the place: whether the parking lot and stairwells were lit, whether cameras existed and worked, whether a guard was posted where the company had told customers one would be, whether locks and key controls functioned, whether an employee with a history was left alone with customers, and whether the company had been warned by earlier incidents at the same location and did nothing. Businesses very often know about a problem long before a survivor ever arrives, and that knowledge is provable.
The single most useful fact for most survivors is that the strength of the case usually turns on the property’s own history rather than on anything the survivor did or did not do. A location with prior assaults, prior robberies, prior police calls and prior complaints is a location where the company was on notice. That record exists in documents the company keeps and in police call data for the address, and it can be obtained.
The evidence starts disappearing almost immediately, and this is the most time-sensitive part. Camera footage at a smaller business is frequently overwritten within days, and within about thirty days at larger ones. Staffing and scheduling records get purged on a cycle. Employees leave. A written demand to preserve that material, sent early, is one of the first things this firm does, and it is the difference between a case built on records and a case built on memory. If the assault happened recently, that is the reason to call now rather than after you have decided anything else.
What a survivor can recover in a civil case includes medical and counseling costs already incurred and reasonably expected in the future, lost earnings and lost earning capacity, and compensation for mental anguish, emotional harm and the effect on daily life. That last category is usually the heart of a sexual assault case. Many survivors carry no visible physical injury at all, and the absence of one does not weaken the claim. Texas juries award for psychological harm because that is the harm sexual assault actually causes.
How long you have depends on what happened and how old you were, and the deadlines for sexual offenses are not the ordinary personal injury deadline. Because getting this wrong ends a claim permanently, it is covered separately at the time limits on a Texas sexual abuse claim. If you think it may be too late, call and ask rather than assuming, because a great many people are wrong about this.
You can also bring a claim without your name appearing publicly in most circumstances, and survivors ask about that more than almost anything else. That is addressed at filing a Texas lawsuit without using your name.
Foreseeability. Timberwalk Apartments, Partners, Inc. v. Cain, 972 S.W.2d 749 (Tex. 1998), directs courts to consider whether criminal conduct previously occurred on or near the property, how recently, how often, how similar it was, and what publicity it received such that the owner knew or should have known.
For a business, this analysis usually starts with the police call history for the address and the surrounding blocks, and with the business’s own incident reports. A bar with a documented history of fights in the parking lot is in a different position from one without.
A second route to foreseeability. Del Lago Partners, Inc. v. Smith, 307 S.W.3d 762 (Tex. 2010), holds that the Timberwalk factors “are not the only reasons that a criminal act might be deemed foreseeable.” Del Lago itself involved roughly ninety minutes of open, escalating hostility between intoxicated patrons that the owner observed and did not address. Where staff watched something build and did nothing, prior-crime statistics are not the only evidence available.
Unreasonableness. UDR Texas Properties, L.P. v. Petrie, 517 S.W.3d 98 (Tex. 2017), holds that foreseeability is necessary but not sufficient: “Foreseeability is the beginning, not the end, of the analysis in determining the extent of the duty to protect against criminal acts of third parties.” The plaintiff must present evidence about the burden of preventing the risk, weighed against the risk. In UDR the plaintiff lost because that evidence was absent.
In a business case that means evidence about a specific measure: a security guard during specific hours, a functioning camera, lighting in a specific part of the lot, a door that locked, a policy about cutting off intoxicated patrons. What it would have cost, and what it would have prevented.
Bars and nightclubs, particularly in and around parking areas at closing time. Restaurants. Convenience stores and gas stations. Retail parking lots. Shopping centers. Gyms. Office buildings and their garages.
Every statute and case linked above was read at its primary source. Texas statutes change every legislative session and case law is constantly changing.
This page is general information about Texas law. It is not legal advice about your situation, and reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship.
Camera footage, which is frequently overwritten within days at smaller businesses and within thirty days at larger ones.
The business’s incident report, and prior incident reports for the same location.
Police reports and the call history for the address.
Staffing records for the night, and any security vendor contract.
Names and contact details for witnesses, including employees, who often leave these jobs quickly.
Every venue on this page keeps a different set of records, and knowing which set applies to yours is most of the work.
A hotel or motel has key card entry logs, folio and registry records, camera coverage of corridors and entrances, housekeeping and maintenance logs, and personnel files for whoever had access to the room. More on sexual assault at a hotel or motel.
An apartment complex has gate and access logs, camera coverage of the entrances and the parking areas, calls for service to the address, tenant complaints, courtesy officer schedules and patrol logs, and work orders on the gates, locks, fencing and lighting. More on sexual assault at an apartment complex.
A rideshare or delivery platform has the trip record, the GPS route, the in-app messages, the driver’s history and any prior complaints about the same driver, all of it on the company’s servers. More on sexual assault by a rideshare driver.
A bar, restaurant, store, gym or office has camera coverage, incident reports, staffing and shift schedules, security contracts and post orders, and complaint records.
The timing problem is the same everywhere. Surveillance systems record over themselves on a loop. In 2014 the Supreme Court of Texas described one store’s system as recording “in a continuous loop that, after approximately thirty days, recorded over prior events.” In that case the store preserved about eight minutes of footage and let the loop overwrite the rest. Eight minutes is what survived, out of a system that held roughly a month. Every system is set differently, nobody outside the business knows how its system is set, and what gets saved is decided in the first days.
There is also a legal reason the first letter matters more than the first lawsuit. Under Texas law a business is not obliged to preserve anything until it knows there is a substantial chance a claim will be made and that the specific records matter to it. Until it is told, an overwrite is a machine doing its job and nothing follows from it. A dated, specific letter identifying the cameras, the date and time window and the individual logs and reports is what changes that, and it is the first thing this firm sends, on the same day where the facts call for it. What evidence matters, and how fast it goes, is set out on the evidence page.
Schiffer Law Firm represents survivors of sexual assault in civil claims against the hotels, apartment complexes, businesses and institutions whose security failures allowed the assault to happen, in Houston and across Texas.
There is no charge to talk, and no attorney’s fee unless there is a recovery. You are not asked to decide anything on the first call.
Call 713-521-0059.
This page is general information about Texas law, not legal advice about your situation, and reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship.
Where the lot is part of the premises the business controls and the risk was foreseeable and unreasonable, yes.
Foreseeability under Timberwalk or Del Lago, and unreasonableness under UDR v. Petrie. They are separate and a claim that proves only the first loses.
Two years under Section 16.003 of the Civil Practice and Remedies Code.
The claim is against the business, not the attacker, so it does not depend on identifying him.