FOLLOW US

CALIFORNIA — The complaint runs to several dozen paragraphs, but the moment at its center takes less than two seconds. Just after midnight on June 24, Richard Gorman, an American businessman, was walking back to the Sofitel Barcelona Skipper along the boardwalk that fronts the Mediterranean when, according to court papers, a group of men closed around him, wrenched his arm behind his back, and tore a Rolex Sky-Dweller from his wrist. By the time he understood what had happened, the watch — valued at roughly $51,400 — was gone, and so were the men who took it.

What is unusual is not the theft. Barcelona, by most rankings, is now the sleight of hand city, and the pickpocket capital of Europe, with a per-capita street-crime rate nearly three times the Spanish average.

On June 29, Mr. Gorman filed suit in the Superior Court of California for the County of Los Angeles, and a parallel complaint has been prepared for the United States District Court for the Central District of California. The defendants are Accor S.A., the French hospitality conglomerate that owns the Sofitel brand; the Spanish entity that operates the Barcelona property; Accor Management US Inc., a Delaware corporation; and Matthias Bernard, the hotel's general manager, sued in his individual capacity.

The complaints assert claims for negligence, premises liability, negligent failure to warn, negligent infliction of emotional distress and — in the state-court version — fraudulent concealment. They seek damages of not less than $5 million, together with punitive damages under California Civil Code § 3294.

The legal question the case presents is older than the Sofitel, older than Accor and older than Barcelona's modern tourist economy. It is the question of what an innkeeper owes a guest who walks out the front door.

A Doctrine With Deep Roots

American common law has long treated the relationship between hotel and guest as a "special relationship," one that imposes affirmative duties beyond those owed by an ordinary landowner to an ordinary visitor. The leading California authority, Delgado v. Trax Bar & Grill, 36 Cal. 4th 224 (2005), holds that a business proprietor's duty to protect patrons from third-party criminal conduct turns on the foreseeability of harm, measured against the burden of the precautions a plaintiff says were required. Where the harm is highly foreseeable, even modestly burdensome measures — a warning, a posted notice, an escort to a taxi — may be required as a matter of law.

It is into that doctrinal frame that Mr. Gorman's complaint pours its facts. The filing alleges that in the same three-day window in which Mr. Gorman was robbed, at least four other guests of the Sofitel were stripped of luxury watches, including a Patek Philippe. It further alleges that an assistant manager at the hotel, identified in the state-court complaint as Olga Incagnoli, told Mr. Gorman that guests of the property were robbed "at least once a week," and that hundreds of similar incidents had been reported in the immediate vicinity over a period of years.

The complaint's most striking factual allegation concerns Mr. Bernard himself. According to the state-court pleading, the general manager, when asked why the hotel did not post any warning to guests about the pattern of watch thefts at its doorstep, responded that signage of that kind "would not match the décor." That sentence, if it is established in discovery, may end up doing a great deal of work. In premises-liability law, the cost of a warning sign is the canonical example of a precaution so cheap that a jury is usually entitled to demand it.