A real estate agent filed a lawsuit on Monday against the brokerage eXp Realty, accusing it of failing to investigate when she reported that she believed she had been drugged and sexually assaulted by a company contractor.
Kirsten Childress, 31, the agent, became the sixth woman to sue the brokerage in the last two years. All have similar claims that they were given a laced drink and then attacked while attending an eXp event.
In May 2023, Ms. Childress said, she flew to Orlando for the three-day eXp Shareholder Summit, where she went to a private networking event that was offered as part of the conference. There, she believes, she drank a spiked cocktail, and hours later, she said, awoke dazed and bruised in an unfamiliar hotel room. The contractor, a real estate photographer, was on top of her and assaulting her, she claims.
“It was the worst moment in my entire life,” Ms. Childress said in an interview at her home in Mooresville, N.C., where she lives with her husband and three children.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Orlando, Fla., names both the brokerage and the photographer, Nicholas Moore, 26, who describes himself on his website as a “trusted photography partner” for several real estate brands, including eXp.
Mr. Moore declined to comment on the lawsuit through a text message and wrote, “Do not contact this number again.” The New York Times first reported Ms. Childress’s allegations in 2023. At that time, Mr. Moore said that Ms. Childress’s statements were “false allegations.”
According to an incident report filed with Florida’s Orange County Sheriff’s Office, Mr. Moore was interviewed by detectives the following morning. He told them that the intercourse was consensual and that he had choked Ms. Childress as part of a sex act. The incident report makes no mention of them asking Mr. Moore if he had drugged her. Though Ms. Childress told the police that she wanted to press charges against him, the Florida state attorney’s office for Orange County declined to prosecute because of the absence of toxicology results, according to the lawsuit.
The brokerage did not respond to multiple requests for comment on Ms. Childress’s legal claim. But in a statement provided to The Times in 2023, an eXp representative said that “the alleged assaulter was not an eXp agent or employee” and that “the assault did not occur at the eXp event location,” adding that the brokerage had banned Mr. Moore from further eXp events.
Ms. Childress is suing Mr. Moore for sexual battery and emotional distress and eXp for breach of contract and for creating an environment where she felt forced to leave the company at the end of 2023. Ms. Childress contends that the brokerage failed to uphold its “zero tolerance” policy on sexual harassment and assault.
The real estate industry has been rocked by several high-profile allegations of sexual harassment and assault. Earlier this month, the vice president of the Appraisal Institute, the key trade group for the home valuation industry, stepped away from his public appearances after The Times reported that multiple women had accused him of groping them and making them uncomfortable.
In December, Oren and Tal Alexander, who had been star brokers in New York and Miami, were arrested on federal sex-trafficking charges after multiple women accused the two of drugging and then assaulting them. More than a year earlier, the president of the National Association of Realtors resigned days after The Times reported that women had long complained that they had been sexually harassed at the organization, and that the group then offered at least three of them payments that came in exchange with nondisclosure agreements.
At eXp, as within the trade groups, whispers about misconduct had long circulated.
In February 2023, the brokerage was sued by four former female agents who each described a yearslong pattern of predatory behavior by two marquee eXp agents. Those women said the agents, Michael Bjorkman and David Golden, drugged them during alcohol-soaked eXp events. Three of the women said they were then sexually assaulted; one maintains that she believes she was drugged and can’t remember the following hours clearly enough to know if an assault occurred. Executives ignored complaints about the men for years, agents said.
A fifth woman filed a lawsuit with nearly identical allegations later that year.
Both men have denied all allegations. Those lawsuits are in litigation.
The brokerage has a unique structure — agents are recruited by other agents who then take a cut of their earnings, so everyone is funneling money to people above them. That means there is little incentive to root out high earners even when they are accused of assault, female real estate agents who have worked there said.
“Everyone is just a recruiter — they’re not there to sell homes and represent the client,” said Tricia Turner, 55, a Houston broker who left eXp in 2023. “The ones that grow their teams the fastest are the center of attention for the company and the cheerleaders for the company. And unfortunately, it’s like they can do no wrong.”
In 2018, Ms. Childress left a career assisting surgeons in hospital operating rooms to start a real estate marketing company with her husband, Grant Childress, who is also a Realtor. She earned her real estate license in December 2020, and joined eXp five months later.
The summit kicked off in Orlando on May 17, 2023. On the evening of May 19, Ms. Childress attended the private event, a happy hour at the Icebar Orlando.
Ms. Childress said she was looking forward to networking with fellow agents. She drank two cocktails of vodka and cranberry juice, she said.
“And then I just remember nothing — until I was being choked,” she said in the interview. She said she was naked, in a hotel room, but wasn’t sure where. She said she did not recognize the man who she said had his hands around her neck and was sexually assaulting her.
She said she pulled on her clothes and ran out of the room and down to the hotel lobby. She realized later that the shoes on her feet were not the black sandals she had gone out in; they were someone else’s. She had no idea where her phone was (she had left it at the Icebar; a bartender later returned it). A hotel employee at the front desk helped her get a taxi to the hotel where she was staying, where she found two eXp agents she had traveled to the conference with.
She was “bruised, trembling and confused,” according to the complaint.
An ambulance was called, and she was taken to the hospital, where a police officer transferred her to a rape crisis center; neither facility took her blood or urine to check for the presence of drugs. Ms. Childress told the police that she could not remember how she had arrived in Mr. Moore’s hotel room or what happened in the hours before she woke up. She had arrived at the happy hour at 7 p.m.; she ran from the hotel room around 2 a.m., according to the lawsuit and police records.
Mr. Moore’s photography business relies on relationships with real estate agents. The sheriff’s report says that he had traveled to the eXp conference with an eXp agent that he worked with. According to the complaint, that agent paid for his hotel room as well. Ms. Childress’s friends, who told the police they had met Mr. Moore at the Icebar and had seen him with Ms. Childress, provided his identity to law enforcement.
According to the complaint, Robin Mann, a broker in Ms. Childress’s office, reported the incident to eXp’s director of agent compliance hours after Ms. Childress had talked to law enforcement. The complaint says that Ms. Mann reached out again on May 22. Ms. Mann declined to comment for this story. In 2023, she told The Times she believed eXp had acted appropriately in their response to the allegations.
But Ms. Childress said no one from the brokerage contacted her until six months later, when it learned about The Times’s reporting.
Debra Kamin reports on real estate, covering what it means to buy, sell and own a home in America today.
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