A seafarer who alleged she was raped by a steward on a Crowley-managed vessel has sued the US government as she continues litigation against the Florida maritime conglomerate and her union.
Lawyers for the anonymous woman, who started the case in November under the name Jane Doe, have filed an amended complaint adding the government as a defendant.
As TradeWinds reported last year, the woman alleged she was raped by a steward working on the 44,500-gt USNS 2nd Lt John P Bobo (built 1985), a ro-ro owned by the US Navy’s Military Sealift Command and managed by Crowley.
The two were onshore while the vessel called in Saipan, capital of the US territory of the Northern Marianas Islands in the western Pacific. Doe, a native of Hawaii, was working as the ship’s steward assistant.
The amended complaint filed by Miami law firm Lipcon, Margulies & Winkleman targets the US government with several claims, including the contention that the ship was legally unseaworthy because it did not have adequate policies and procedures to keep its crew safe from sexual assault.
“The vessel had crew members with savage and vicious disposition,” lawyers Jason Margulies and Carol Finklehoffe wrote in the document, filed in Jacksonville in the US District Court for the Middle District of Florida.
“The vessel failed to warn of the dangers of rape, sexual assaults and sexual harassment.”
The government has yet to file an answer in the case, and the Department of Justice declined to comment for this story.
The ship’s steward, Willie Carnell Frink, was arrested in Saipan on a charge of first-degree sexual assault in 2022 before a court dismissed the case for lack of evidence.
Then in June last year, the Northern Marianas Islands Supreme Court reversed the dismissal, leaving the commonwealth’s Attorney General’s Office to evaluate whether to continue the prosecution, according to the text of the decision.
The office could not be immediately reached for comment, and Frink did not immediately respond to a message from TradeWinds on the social media platform X.
The addition of the US as a defendant came after lawyers for Crowley asked a judge in the federal court to dismiss Doe’s lawsuit because federal laws “provide that plaintiff’s exclusive remedy is against the United States” rather than the Florida company.
“The proposed amended complaint fails to address the key issue raised in Crowley’s … motion to dismiss,” Alexander DeGance Barnett lawyer Kelly DeGance wrote.
But US magistrate judge Joel Toomey rejected that argument and threw out Crowley’s dismissal motion.
“The court cannot conclude at this time that amendment would be futile or that the proposed amended complaint is a shotgun pleading such that amendment should be denied,” he wrote.
Seafarers International Union and its Seafarers Harry Lundeberg School of Seamanship, which are also defendants in the case, have filed papers denying negligence claims against them. They are represented by Florida law firm Braswell & Herrera.
