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The Choice of Forum

The case also presents the kind of jurisdictional puzzle that increasingly occupies federal courts as global hotel brands face suits over conduct on foreign soil. The federal complaint invokes diversity jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 1332(a), pleading that Mr. Gorman is a citizen of California and that the corporate defendants are citizens or subjects of France, Spain and Switzerland, with an amount in controversy comfortably exceeding the $75,000 threshold. Venue, the plaintiff says, lies in the Central District of California because Accor markets and books rooms there through an American management and reservations entity.

The defendants will almost certainly press a motion under the doctrine of forum non conveniens, arguing that Spain is the natural situs of any trial — the witnesses, the surveillance footage, the police file and the boardwalk itself are all there. The Supreme Court's decision in Piper Aircraft Co. v. Reyno, 454 U.S. 235 (1981), gives them a serious argument.

The Hotel's Public Response

Outside the courtroom, the Sofitel has taken a posture that is, at least rhetorically, very different from the one its general manager is alleged to have taken inside it. Mr. Gorman has announced a €100,000 reward for information leading to the identification and apprehension of those responsible for the theft. €100,000 Reward Offered in Hunt for Barcelona Watch Thief, USA Herald

That statement, made after the suit was contemplated if not yet filed, will be of interest to both sides. Plaintiffs' lawyers tend to read such pronouncements as admissions that the harm was serious and the hotel's response inadequate; defense lawyers tend to read them as evidence of the very care that a duty of reasonable protection requires. Which reading prevails will depend, as it usually does, on what discovery turns up about what the hotel knew, when it knew it, and what it told — or did not tell — the guests who walked out its front door each evening into one of the most heavily worked theft corridors in Europe.

What Mr. Gorman Says He Lost

The complaint enumerates injuries that go well beyond the watch. Mr. Gorman, who is in his forties, alleges that the robbery left him with a dislocated arm, nerve damage running from his lower back through his legs, and a hernia, in addition to the emotional consequences that ordinarily attend a violent street attack. He has, the filings say, been unable to resume his ordinary activities. The Rolex itself is, in legal terms, the least of it; the prayer for relief on the property loss is pleaded at "not less than $50,000," while the prayer on the personal injuries and emotional distress is pleaded at "no less than $5,000,000."

The pleading also accuses Mr. Bernard and the hotel of fraudulent concealment — a claim that, if it survives demurrer, carries with it the possibility of punitive damages. To prevail on that theory, Mr. Gorman will have to show not merely that the hotel failed to warn, but that it actively suppressed information it had a duty to disclose, and that it did so with the kind of conscious disregard that California law requires before a jury may punish.

For all its specifics, the case is being watched by hotel-industry lawyers for reasons that have very little to do with a single Rolex on a single boardwalk. The hospitality sector has spent two decades quietly absorbing a doctrinal shift in which the duties owed to guests have crept outward — first to the parking lot, then to the curb, and, in some courts, to the block beyond. A ruling that a hotel in Barcelona must warn American guests, in English, about a pattern of street crime that local police are themselves struggling to contain would push that line further still.

It would also pose, in a particularly modern form, a very old question. The medieval innkeeper's duty grew up around travelers who could not protect themselves in a town they did not know. The Sofitel's guests, stepping out at midnight onto a boardwalk in a city they had come to see, were, in the end, in much the same position. Whether the law as it now stands requires the hotel to have done more than it did is the question Mr. Gorman's lawyers have placed before two courts on two continents.

The defendants have not yet filed responsive pleadings. Mr. Bernard, through the hotel, has declined to comment on the litigation. Mr. Gorman's lawyer, Reid A. Winthrop of the Winthrop Law Group in Newport Beach, said in the complaint that his client intends to pursue the case "through trial and any necessary appeals."

A summons has issued. The case has a number. The clock, as lawyers say, is running.