Staff members at the Minneapolis Hotel Ivy played an “integral role” in former Minnesota GOP operative Anton Lazzaro’s repeated sex trafficking of teen girls at his luxury downtown condo, according to a new lawsuit filed on behalf of one of Lazzaro’s teen victims.
An anonymous “Jane Doe,” who was 16 at the time of her trafficking, is the lead plaintiff in a federal civil suit filed this week that accuses the hotel of helping Lazzaro traffic her and four other girls “in plain sight” at Lazzaro’s residence.
“This is an industrywide problem that is horrific,” attorney Molly Burke said. “This case in particular is a horrific set of facts where the Hotel Ivy enabled a predator that harmed … multiple teenage girls, multiple times.”
Burke is representing the victim alongside St. Paul attorney Jeff Anderson — a prominent attorney in representing child sex abuse victims who previously filed civil litigation against Lazzaro amid his criminal prosecution.
A federal jury found Lazzaro, now 34, guilty of child sex trafficking last year after a trial that featured emotional testimony from five girls who were between the ages of 15 and 17 when Lazzaro paid them for sex inside his 19th floor condo at the Hotel Ivy Residences in 2020. The businessman was a rising Minnesota Republican operative at the time of his 2021 arrest and gave more than $240,000 to GOP campaigns and political committees, according to state and federal campaign finance committees.
Chief U.S. District Judge Patrick Schiltz sentenced Lazzaro to 21 years in federal prison, and Lazzaro is being held at the Sandstone Federal Correctional Institution with a 2039 release date.
The complaint names as defendants Heartland Ivy Partners LLC, the Minneapolis-based owner of the Hotel Ivy; Ivy Equity Partners LLC and Wischermann Partners Inc. — which owned the hotel at the time of Lazzaro’s crimes but sold the property in 2022. The hotel’s current ownership is not part of this litigation.
“Hotel Ivy is aware of the lawsuit, however since the defendants in the case are the former hotel owners and management company who have not been affiliated with the hotel for several years, we have no comment on the case,” Hotel Ivy General Manager Mark Maggiotto said in a statement.