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Picture: Wikimedia Commons/SSgt Caroline Hayworth
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Picture: Wikimedia Commons/SSgt Caroline Hayworth
Monday, 30 March 2015 - 18:46
“I feel like the biggest victim”: hotel owner about girl prostitute case
The owner of the Valkenburg hotel used in the so called "lover boy" prostitution case, claims she is the biggest victim in the incident, AD wrote. Sonja Botterweck says that her hotel's visitor numbers have plummeted after her family hotel was the scene where a 16-year-old girl was forced into acts of prostitution with dozens of men.
Police raided the hotel and phone the girl in bed with a client, and her pimp boyfriend sitting on the toilet in the bathroom. The alleged 21-year old pimp, Armin A., was initially believed to have charged 50 clients for sex with his 16-year-old girlfriend. That number was later revised up to as many as 80.
The hotel owner wrote a letter to several media outlets requesting they no longer use images of the Hotel Botterweck while covering the child exploitation case. Botterweck says the hotel is a small family business in which she and her daughter work seven days a week, and the case has obliterated their business.
"I had nothing to do with it. The media hardly talks about the young girl and the man, so why is the hotel getting dragged into the picture? And my name? I feel like the biggest victim. I'm back to square one," she wrote in the letter.
Botterweck also contacted several booking sites to gather information about the visits to her page and thinks that people recognize the hotel from the news and do not click it. The bookings have dropped from 134 in January 2014 to 80 in January 2015, she claimed. The hotel has a rating of roughly 2.5 out of five on consumer review site TripAdvisor, with seven of the 15 reviews being either terrible or poor.
The owner is now planning on redecorating and painting the hotel to make it less known to people.
Two of the suspected clients in the case committed suicides since the investigation began.