A cruise passenger is suing MSC, claiming she was sexually abused by a crew member

• A passenger is suing MSC Cruises, claiming a crew member sexually assaulted her on February 9.

• The passenger said she was taken to a staff room by a bartender who forced himself on her.

• A rape kit was created at a medical center on the ship.

A cruise passenger is suing MSC Cruises, claiming she was sexually abused by a crew member on board the ship MSC Meraviglia.

According to the lawsuit filed Feb. 24, MSC Cruises failed to provide its passengers with a reasonably safe environment and failed to protect them from sexual assault.

The plaintiff, a 29-year-old woman from Saratoga Springs, Utah, was on a week-long cruise on February 5 that departed from Port Canaveral, Florida.

The lawsuit states that an MSC bartender served drinks to the woman, her husband and four friends on the evening of Feb. 9.

The woman, whose name is not mentioned in the suit, and a friend asked the bartender for one last drink around 2:30 a.m., when the bar was closing. The lawsuit says he agreed and “waved” her to meet him across the bar and took her to an employee-only room.

According to the lawsuit, the woman followed him into the room where the bartender began “kissing her aggressively” and “putting his penis in her mouth.” The woman’s husband and a friend looked for her and found her “shocked and frightened” in the staff room.

The lawsuit says the woman’s husband confronted the crew member, who, according to the husband, apologized before security forces were alerted. The lawsuit says the woman then had a rape kit done at the ship’s medical center.

After reporting the incident, other crew members refused to take action against the bartender, the claim states.

“MSC failed to ensure the safety of my customer. They didn’t supervise the employee to make sure the customers don’t drink too much alcohol. They have not trained staff to protect drunk passengers. And they simply did not patrol areas and monitor cameras to keep my client from doing this.” “She was forced to go into a ‘staff area’ that she should not have been allowed in,” said Jack Hickey, the woman’s attorney , told Insider.

MSC Cruises fired another crew member weeks earlier after a passenger and staff caught him filming the passenger from a bathroom stall.

The passenger shared a TikTok video on February 27 in which she and co-workers confronted the man, which garnered more than 10 million views. In the video, the employee can be heard saying he did “wrong.”

MSC Cruises did not respond to Insider’s request for comment.

Read the original article on Business Insider