Hundreds Of Passengers Have Said They Were Sexually Assaulted On Cruise Ships. Their Stories Highlight Years Of Lax Security, Critics Say.

The Carnival Miracle cast off from Cozumel, a picturesque island off the coast of Mexico, slowly making its way across the Caribbean Sea back to Tampa, Florida. It was the first Saturday of December 2018, and clouds dotted the sky, but the day was still bright and warm — perfect conditions for a winter break.

A 21-year-old woman was traveling with her friend and up to 2,000 other passengers on the Carnival cruise ship, a 960-foot-long, 12-story-tall ocean liner teeming with spas, bars, restaurants, and deckside pools. The eight-day trip was the young woman’s first-ever cruise.She had enjoyed herself, spotting sea turtles off the Cayman Islands, visiting Mayan ruins in Belize, and swimming with dolphins off Cozumel — but everything would soon change. The woman, referred to as Jane Doe in court documents, spent that Saturday tanning by the pool, drinking, and hanging out with her friend and some acquaintances they had met on the cruise.In the evening, the group went to dinner and attended a comedy show at the ship’s theater. By midnight, the party was in full flow. Doe decided to run around the cruise decks. As she ran up a stairwell, a Carnival crew member was waiting for her. According to a complaint filed in 2019, which BuzzFeed News reviewed, she claimed he then lured her into a closet and locked the door.

“I remember being scared seeing him holding the lock, so I started asking him where he was from to, like, calm the situation down, and he just kept saying that I looked like his girlfriend,” Doe recalled during her deposition.

She said the crew member then raped her and ejaculated on her.

When the assailant finally unlocked the closet door, Doe immediately rushed to her room. According to her deposition, she was pursued by the employee, who caught up with her and asked to be let into her cabin. She declined and closed the door behind her.

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Once inside, Doe burst into tears and told her friend what had happened, she recalled in her deposition. She began having a panic attack and hyperventilating. She and her friend immediately reported the alleged crime to Carnival guest services.

Doe was placed in a wheelchair and taken to the ship’s medical facility. When she told the doctor what had occurred, Doe said the medic apologized and told her, “Unfortunately, this happens all the time.”

In dozens of court documents reviewed by BuzzFeed News, cruise ship passengers say they have been dragged into cabins and raped, pushed into janitors’ closets and assaulted, and even attacked in the public corridors of ships. Likewise, parents and guardians have alleged that their children were molested by other passengers or crew members, plied with alcohol, and in some instances, abused by daycare staffers at onboard activity centers. As recently as two weeks ago, the parents of a 17-year-old passenger filed a civil suit alleging she was raped by a fitness instructor onboard a Carnival cruise ship.

In fact, sexual assaults are the most prevalent reported crime on cruise ships, according to the FBI. Since 2015, there have been 454 reported allegations of sex crimes on cruise ships. Experts believe that the actual numbers are far higher, as many sexual assaults often go unreported. (For reference, more than two-thirds of all sexual assaults in the US are not reported to law enforcement, according to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network.)

And many of the major cruise lines have been told — even by their own security staffers — that more could be done to protect passengers, such as installing more surveillance cameras and hiring additional security personnel. But according to court records, including a deposition from this February in a lawsuit alleging the gang rape of a minor on a Carnival Cruise ship, senior executives have opted not to implement the changes, claiming they're too expensive.Troublingly, in many instances, the alleged assailants are the very crew members who are supposed to protect passengers — since 2015 nearly 1 in 4 of all reported sexual assaults on cruise lines have been committed by a crew member, according to a BuzzFeed News analysis of FBI data.

For this story, BuzzFeed News spoke with industry experts, former cruise ship employees, victims’ attorneys, and passengers who say they were sexually assaulted — including a now-21-year-old woman who was allegedly molested by a crew member when she was 11 and a woman who claimed that she contracted HIV after allegedly being raped by a cruise employee. Both are speaking publicly here for the first time. All the cruise lines named in this story were also contacted for comment.

BuzzFeed News also reviewed hundreds of pages of court records, showing that major US cruise companies and their subsidiaries, including Carnival, Royal Caribbean, Disney, and Norwegian, have settled at least 68 civil cases in the last two decades. Attorneys told BuzzFeed News that many cases are settled confidentially before reaching court. (While these settlements exist, they do not imply that the companies have admitted wrongdoing.)

At least 30 of these court settlements involved minors. Documents show that in two of those cases, the families of children allegedly abused a decade ago were paid around half a million dollars to settle their cases in confidential agreements where “all parties expressly deny liability.”

Over the course of BuzzFeed News’ investigation, some key themes emerged: The cruise vessels where the alleged crimes occurred appear to lack proper coverage from security cameras, while security staffers are inadequately trained in investigating sexual assaults and are too few in number to serve as an effective deterrent for predators.

The cruise lines “don’t need to increase security and safety standards because they can continue to simply and legally avoid them,” said Jamie Barnett, president of the advocacy group International Cruise Victims. Barnett’s daughter died of a drug overdose on a Carnival cruise, an incident she believes was not properly investigated. “It is much more profitable and financially beneficial for them to just settle each claim or lawsuit on a case-by-case basis,” she said.

For alleged victims, facing the cruise lines in civil court can often be a draining process that is drawn out for years. They have to recount their harrowing experiences during depositions, and key evidence in their case, such as surveillance footage, often does not exist or has been deleted. Most major cruise lines also only give passengers one year after an alleged incident to file a civil case, and the cruise operator chooses the state and the court where the complaint must be filed, meaning alleged victims may have to travel cross-country to pursue their case.

“That’s something people don’t realize, is that the rights and protection that we all as Americans have do not go with you when you get on a cruise ship,” Barnett said. “You have no idea where to turn.”

It’s a stark realization, given how lucrative the industry is and how many vacationers cruise ships service. In 2018, the same year Doe embarked on Carnival’s Miracle, the cruise industry had one of its most financially successful years, with Carnival Corporation — the largest cruise company in the US — generating just under $19 billion in revenue. Royal Caribbean, the second-largest US cruise line, reported around $9.5 billion in revenue. Both delivered billions in profits to their shareholders.

But the industry struggled during the pandemic, with its ships berthed during the lockdowns. When tourism opened up again, the cruise sector launched vibrant marketing campaigns to bring passengers back. The strategy appears to have worked — business is rebounding. But as passengers returned to the seas after COVID, the number of sexual assault allegations reported to the FBI shot up again, too. In 2022, 87 alleged sexual assaults were reported on cruise ships — the second-highest number of such incidents recorded since the US Department of Transportation began publishing crime data in 2010.

The issue of sexual assaults on cruise ships was brought to light in 1998 when the New York Times published an exposé about onboard sex crimes and found a pattern of cover-ups by the industry. A former chief of security for Carnival told the paper, “Even when I knew there was a crime, I was supposed to go in there and do everything in the world to get Carnival to look innocent.”

In the wake of the New York Times coverage, the industry promised to improve. In 1999, Royal Caribbean commissioned an outside task force to look into the issue of sexual assaults on its ships. The consultants suggested multiple ways in which Royal Caribbean could improve passenger safety and prevent sexual assaults. Several of the suggestions involved increasing security measures, according to the task force reports obtained by BuzzFeed News.

“They didn’t implement a single change,” James Walker, a Miami-based maritime attorney who received the task force’s internal reports from 1999 via a court order against Royal Caribbean, told BuzzFeed News. Walker said that after taking several depositions of Royal Caribbean employees, he learned that none of the proposed changes were implemented by the company and that the cruise line decided to run a “zero tolerance” marketing concept instead.

Royal Caribbean did not respond to multiple requests for comment from BuzzFeed News.

Safety advocates and politicians have long called for the industry to take more action to reduce sex crimes on its ships. But Congress hasn’t passed an expansive cruise safety bill since the Cruise Vessel Security and Safety Act of 2010, which, among other things, required cruise lines to report alleged onboard crimes to the FBI for investigation.

Connecticut Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal has worked on cruise ship safety legislation for over a decade. Onboard crime, including sexual assault and physical violence, “interferes with the celebratory mood of the cruise,” Blumenthal told BuzzFeed News in an interview. “So their goal is to minimize it and even sweep it under the rug without other passengers becoming alarmed or even aware of it.”

In a statement emailed to BuzzFeed News, CLIA, the Cruise Lines International Association, insisted that cruise ships are one of the “safest vacation options in the world,” adding that their rates of serious crimes are “exceedingly lower than those on land due to multiple layers of security and the nature of cruising.”

“Cruise lines have a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to criminal behavior, and allegations of major crimes on cruise ships are extremely rare,” CLIA said in the statement.

The organization pointed to a 2019 study it commissioned on cruise ship crimes, including sexual assaults, by James Alan Fox, a criminology professor at Northeastern University who has served as a defense expert on cruise sexual assault cases. Fox’s report, based on a review of FBI data, suggests that the rates of sexual assault between 2015 and 2018 were far lower on cruises than in cities of comparable populations.

“No place is totally safe — you have to obviously take a certain degree of precautions,” Fox told BuzzFeed News in an interview. “Overall, the risk is very low. But not zero. I don’t think the industry would say it’s zero. I think they would say it’s a safe way to take a vacation. And it is a safe vacation.”

Meanwhile, the industry spends millions lobbying Congress — figures from Open Secrets, a nonprofit that tracks lobbying and political donations, show that the cruise industry has spent $21.6 million on lobbying members of Congress over the last five years — and enlists celebrities for slick commercials to encourage people to spend their vacations on voyages.

“We go to Congress holding pictures of our family members, and afterwards the lobbyists just waltz right in, and nothing ever changes,” International Cruise Victims’ Barnett said of her advocacy work. “I think the cruise industry does a fabulous job, with all the billions of dollars they have, making the public feel like a cruise is the safest thing you could do. Nothing will go wrong. It’s paradise.”

But while there are more incidents of reported crimes on land than at sea, maritime attorney Michael Winkleman pointed out one big difference: At sea, there is no independent law enforcement to immediately investigate these alleged crimes. Instead, victims often must rely on onboard security to maintain the crime scene and preserve evidence. Experts and victims’ attorneys say that poorly trained security staff sometimes fail to collect critical evidence and testimony, leaving alleged sex crime victims unable to find justice in either criminal or civil trials.

BuzzFeed News has found, in some cases, critical evidence — such as surveillance footage (when it exists) and, in one instance, a rape kit — has gone missing or been mishandled by cruise operators. “In my experience, the vast majority of people who commit crimes at sea are not charged, never arrested, not prosecuted, and walking free right now,” Winkleman said.

The FBI does have jurisdiction to investigate a lot of these crimes — namely when a ship is US-owned or departing or arriving at a US port, or if the alleged crime involves a US citizen — but the bureau oftentimes doesn’t have immediate access to the ship or crime scene because the boat is at sea.

Documents BuzzFeed News reviewed from a settled 2011 lawsuit, in which a 15-year-old girl alleged that she was forced to perform oral sex on a crew member, show an FBI agent emailing a senior investigator at Royal Caribbean about the suspected assailant. “To ask law enforcement officers to pull themselves off an active case to interview a guy on a hunch???” the FBI agent wrote. “We can’t go interviewing people just because. A guy off the street is one thing… but this would require a ship board[ing], identification to upper management, and a potential can of worms.” Instead, the agent suggested that the Royal Caribbean investigator conduct an interview and share the findings with him.

The cruise employee reported back that the accused attacker denied the allegations. “That’s it…,” the FBI agent responded. “No further investigation on my part… we had very little, to begin with, and far too much time has gone by… our best bet would have been the CCTV footage at the particular time and place along with any key card logs. But you did not have that. It is what it is.”

The FBI declined to comment to BuzzFeed News on this specific incident. But the bureau said in a statement that it remains “committed to investigating these crimes and bringing justice for the victims and their families.” The statement continued, “The FBI works closely and tirelessly with our partners in law enforcement and in the cruising industry to collect the evidence and facts of cases.”

After Jane Doe reported the alleged rape to the Carnival Miracle staff and was taken to the medical facility on the ship, the boat docked back in Tampa. FBI agents boarded the vessel to investigate the incident and interview her and the alleged assailant. He claimed that they had consensual sex. For two weeks after the incident, Doe bled from her genitals, she said in a civil suit she filed around 11 months after the trip.

According to the court records from her case, after she was taken to the ship’s medical facility that morning after the alleged rape occurred, the medical personnel administered a rape kit and removed her clothes and underwear. Her lawyer, Daniel Courtney, told BuzzFeed News that during the trial it was revealed that Carnival did not preserve the rape kit, and thus it could not be used as evidence during litigation.

The best answer that Carnival gave Courtney, he said, was, “At some point, someone would have thrown it out.” Doe was also never given her underwear or clothes back by Carnival, according to Courtney.

During the trial, Carnival also didn’t provide surveillance footage of the alleged incident, as he said the company claimed that, too, was not retained. Courtney added that Carnival said during the trial that it didn't have the alleged assailant’s employment file.

“It’s really frustrating not having the information, because you feel powerless,” Courtney said. In addition, the lawyer said, during the discovery period, he and his client learned that she had allegedly signed a form retracting the rape allegation.

During their depositions, both Doe and her friend said they couldn’t remember signing a retraction. “They were giving me a lot of papers to sign,” Doe testified. “I just was signing what they were telling me to sign.” When asked by her lawyer whether there was ever a moment she wanted to retract the allegation, Doe said, “Absolutely no.”

“Her signature and her roommate’s signature are on this form,” Courtney said. “Everything else is in the doctor’s handwriting. The clinical rules are that everything should be in the person’s handwriting.”

Carnival Corporation said it would not comment on any of the specific cases laid out in this article but did say in an emailed statement to BuzzFeed News that it is committed to the health and safety of its guests and has “effective onboard security measures and also use[s] screening tools to promote a safe and secure environment for all on board.” The company added, “In the rare instances of an incident, our ships are equipped with security, medical staff, and facilities to handle and investigate alleged sexual assaults and provide immediate victim care services.”

A Carnival Corporation spokesperson stressed that since 2018, “out of the almost 25 million guests who sailed on board our ships, we reported 145 allegations of assault.”

The spokesperson added, “As with all areas of our operation, we constantly examine and adjust our safety and security processes and protocols to adopt industry best practices and address the needs of our business.”

Last year, Carnival confirmed in a statement to the Washington Post that the alleged assailant in Doe’s case was fired from the cruise line after the incident was reported. He was never charged.

“Perpetrators are rarely convicted,” Miami-based maritime lawyer Jack Hickey told BuzzFeed News, referring to crew members who have been accused of sexual assault. “They’re convicted, generally speaking, only if they confess and if they are taken into custody by the cruise line or on US soil. If the cruise line allows them off the ship at the next port, which often happens, then they take a plane back to their home country, they get into the wind.” Indeed, Winkleman added, “Finding them is like finding the proverbial needle in the haystack.”

Going against a major cruise company in civil court can take years to litigate. In July 2022, three years after Doe first filed the lawsuit and almost four years after the alleged incident occurred, a jury in a Miami federal court ruled that Carnival Cruise Line owed her more than $10.2 million in damages. It was Courtney’s understanding that this was the largest sum ever awarded in a sexual assault case against a major cruise line, he told the Washington Post at the time. While the jury did not find that Carnival was negligent, it said that the cruise line was liable for the acts of its crew members.

“It was a significant verdict and likely served as a wake-up call to the industry on how juries view these crimes at sea,” said Winkleman, who was not involved in the case. “I’m confident the eight-figure verdict will force all cruise lines to take another look at how they work to prevent these crimes at sea and protect their passengers.” However, he added, he had yet to see any changes in the industry as a result of the judgment.

While she may have won in court, Doe spoke about how the experience on the Carnival cruise ship changed her life, saying in a written statement during the discovery period that she now has depressive episodes and anxiety. “It has affected how intimate I am with a person,” she said, adding that at her lowest point, she seriously considered killing herself. “I had a plan,” she said in the statement she wrote during litigation, which was subsequently sent to BuzzFeed News by Courtney. “I went around to visit my friends and created memories for them to remember me. I also wrote everyone notes.”

Carnival has denied any wrongdoing and is appealing the multimillion-dollar judgment.

In two separate lawsuits reviewed by BuzzFeed News — filed seven years apart and involving alleged sexual assaults on Carnival ships — the issue of security took center stage. In the civil cases, filed in 2015 and 2022 by Miami-based attorney Nicholas Gerson, Carnival’s own security staff admitted in depositions that they had been warning management about security staffing issues for years.In the first case, a woman passenger alleged that in September 2014, she had been raped by two male passengers aboard the Carnival Sensation. According to her deposition, she didn’t realize that she was being followed through the ship by the alleged assailants. As she reached the door of her cabin, they forced their way into her room and raped her.

According to civil court documents, a passenger staying in the cabin next door heard “banging noises” and was so worried about what was happening that she called security twice. It took cruise security officials 20 minutes to arrive.

Once they did, a security officer — who, according to deposition records, had only been given nine hours of online training after he was hired — interviewed the woman and decided that what occurred wasn’t sexual assault. He didn’t tell the ship’s chief security officer about the incident for two and a half hours. And when the woman wanted to see the onboard doctor, she claimed she was told by one of the cruise employees that it would cost her $100.

In her deposition, she recounted that a Carnival employee she spoke with after reporting the incident told her to “keep quiet and not disturb other guests” and that “sometimes things are better left unsaid.”Per court records, the cruise company took an immediate, aggressive stance, arguing that she should refile the case under her real name rather than the pseudonym “Jane Doe,” as she “voluntarily” brought the case in the pursuit of money and should “publicly stand behind her allegations.”

During the depositions, Carnival Cruise Line’s then–security director Michael Panariello told the court that he had flagged security shortcomings to management for years.

Panariello said that he “would love to have more security officers patrolling cabin areas” as a deterrent and that his teams were understaffed — but he said that the company had ruled out hiring more staffers due to budget constraints.

When asked whether he was aware of any adjustments relating to physical security aboard Carnival ships as a result of past sexual assaults, Panariello replied, “No.”

“We’re always requesting more [security]” on Carnival vessels, Panariello said in his deposition in 2015. When queried about how long he had been asking for more security officers, the director responded, “Probably since I’ve been there in 2007.”

“What have you been told in response?” the plaintiff’s attorney asked. “No cabin space,” the security director responded, adding that the changes did not fit the budget. (Panariello died in 2018.)

Panariello’s boss, Dominick Froio Jr., the then–vice president of security, also testified. He admitted that his team had requested increased staffing, but in his view, they didn’t need it, as the vessels were safe. Froio said that they had asked for more resources “to make their life easier,” and so “they have to work less.”

Froio did not respond to BuzzFeed News’ questions about his 2015 deposition.

While there were 135 cameras on the vessel in 2014 and 2015 — and according to Robert Williams, the senior manager of investigations in Carnival Cruises’ security department, only 70 or 80 of those could record video — court documents show there were no cameras installed in passenger corridors, the nightclub, elevators, stairways, or one of the restaurants.

In the deposition, Williams acknowledged that security officers had requested more CCTV cameras in passenger hallways. “They’ve also requested more pay,” Williams said, “and they’ve requested several other things.”

Williams said that around 2013 or 2014, he conducted a security assessment of all Carnival ships regarding the need for more cameras on its vessels. In the report, he concluded that the boats were deficient in the number and placement of CCTV cameras and that more needed to be installed in “areas where our guests go.”

“Carnival had a duty of care to protect passengers like Doe, and by failing to remedy conditions, it knew to be deficient, breached their duty to provide reasonable security protection,” maritime security expert Kim Petersen, a former special forces officer and founding security officer of Princess Cruises, a Carnival Corporation subsidiary, from 1996 to 1999, wrote in an expert report for the plaintiff.

Carnival Corporation settled the case in 2016 for an undisclosed amount of money; the settlement is under yet another confidentiality agreement.

The case should “have opened up Carnival’s eyes to make significant changes to the way that they were conducting their security operations, as far as staffing and manning levels,” Gerson, the attorney, told BuzzFeed News. “So far, it doesn’t seem like anything has changed. They seem to be conducting business the exact same way that they were since that case was resolved.” Carnival did not respond to BuzzFeed News’ questions about whether any steps have been taken to increase security staffing or video surveillance on its ships.