Two women are suing a Ukrainian night club owner and a Detroit strip club, claiming that they were held captive, abused and forced to work as strippers.
The lawsuit comes more than a year after one of the defendants, Veniamin Gonikman, was ordered to serve three years in prison for his role in a human trafficking operation that smuggled Ukrainian women into the U.S. to work in strip clubs. Two other men named in the lawsuit, Aleksandr Maksimenko, who is Gonikman’s son, and business associate Michail Aronov were also sent to prison.
The women are identified in the Sept. 23 federal court complaint only as Jane Doe One and Jane Doe Two. They’re both from Ukraine.
The women allege that the defendants, through a firm called Beauty Search, Inc., recruited them to move to the U.S. with the promise of a better life. But when they arrived in 2004, the lawsuit says, they were forced to work 12 hours a day, six days a week for months at the Cheetahs on the Strip strip club on Eight Mile Road under the guise that they needed to repay the cost of their travel to the U.S. The men took their earnings and physically and sexually abused them, the lawsuit says.
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