Security firm ordered to pay $1bn after guard raped teenage girl
Record damages awarded as victim waives right to anonymity
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Your support makes all the difference.A security company has been told by a jury to pay $1bn (£750m) to woman who was raped by one of its guards when she was 14-years-old.
Hope Cheston was with her boyfriend outside a party in Atlanta, Georgia in October 2012, when the armed security guard approached, her attorney said. The guard told the boyfriend not to move and raped Ms Cheston.
While the media never normally identify victims of rape – and it would be illegal to do so in a British case - but Ms Cheston, now 20, waived her anonymity.
The full-time college student who plans to spend her summer working with an organisation in Atlanta that helps homeless people, said she wanted her story to provide strength for other sexual-assault victims.
The guard, identified in the lawsuit as Brandon Lamar Zachary, is serving a 20-year prison sentence, according to online prison records.
Ms Cheston’s mother, Renatta Cheston-Thornton, filed a lawsuit in 2015 on behalf of her daughter.
The jury has now handed down the verdict against Crime Prevention Agency, the security company that employed Zachary.
Zachary, who was 22 at the time, should never have been hired because he wasn’t licensed as an armed guard, attorney L Chris Stewart Stewart said.
The judge had already determined the security company was liable, so the jury was only determining damages, Stewart said. After reading the verdict, jurors immediately left the jury box — without waiting for the judge’s permission — to hug Ms Cheston and her mother.
Attempts to reach the company for comment were unsuccessful.
Online corporate registration information for Crime Prevention Agency shows that it was dissolved in 2016. The phone at a number listed online for Mario Watts, who is named on the corporate registration as the CEO and identified in the lawsuit as the company’s registered agent, were unanswered.
A lot of women who suffer sexual assault don’t pursue justice, choosing instead to put it behind them, Ms Cheston said.
“I feel like my case is just to show that you may not get it immediately, but you will get what you’re worth. This shows that people do care about the worth of a woman.”
Mr Stewart said: “I was really proud of the jury because there is no basis in the legal world for how high a rape verdict can be,” he said.
Verdicts in the tens of millions of dollars, or even hundreds of millions, are not uncommon, Jeff Dion, director of the National Crime Victim Bar Association said in an email. But he’s never heard of a $1bn verdict in a case with a single victim.
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