Sexual Assault Lawyers in Atlanta

Sexual assault doesn't end when the attack ends. It comes back at night, in a grocery store, in a parking lot, any time the body remembers before the mind does. Then come the therapy bills, missed work, the fear of going home, and endless questions from people who have never been where you are.

You are not alone. You have a voice, even if the prosecutor declined to file charges or a jury acquitted the person who assaulted you. A civil lawsuit runs on different rules entirely. The bar to clear is lower, and what you can win looks different too.

The Atlanta sexual assault attorneys at Kermani LLP handle cases across Georgia with a trauma-informed approach: free first consultation, strict confidentiality, Jane Doe or John Doe pseudonym filings, meetings wherever you feel safe, and conversations in your native language. You pay us nothing until we win a verdict or secure a settlement for you.

The Difference Between Criminal and Civil Sexual Assault Cases

Police and the District Attorney handle criminal prosecution. Their job: prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt and put the attacker in prison. The standard is intentionally high. Someone's freedom is on the line.

Our job is different. We file a civil lawsuit under the preponderance of the evidence standard: roughly 51 percent certainty, versus something close to 99 in a criminal trial. That gap matters more than most survivors realize. All we have to show is that more likely than not, the assault happened and someone is legally responsible.

You can win a civil case even if the prosecutor never filed, even if the grand jury returned no indictment, the trial ended in acquittal, or the attacker was never identified.

In the criminal case, you are a witness for the state. In the civil case, you are the plaintiff. You direct strategy, you decide whether to settle, and compensation goes to you, not the government. For a rape attorney in Atlanta, Georgia, the civil track often matters more than the criminal one. It reaches money and institutions, and a prosecutor's decision can't kill it.

Which, for most survivors, is exactly the point.

Holding Property Owners Accountable: Negligent Security

Most attackers don't have money or a million-dollar insurance policy. Apartment complexes, hotels, parking decks, shopping centers, and university campuses do. Sounds cynical maybe, but it's how survivors actually get paid. Georgia's civil strategy here comes down to one move: find the deep pocket, the organization whose negligence set the stage.

The foundation is O.C.G.A. § 51-3-1. The statute places a duty on any owner or occupier of land to exercise ordinary care in keeping the premises and approaches safe for people who come by express or implied invitation. This area of law is called premises liability. When applied to assault cases, it goes by negligent security.

Three things have to come together:

• The owner knew or should have known about prior attacks, robberies, or other criminal activity on the property or nearby.
• Reasonable security measures (lighting, cameras, functioning locks, guards, access control) were missing or broken.
• That security failure was a substantial factor in what happened to you.

Our Result: $7 Million for a Parking Lot Assault in Atlanta

In 2024, Kermani LLP secured a $7 million recovery for a client sexually assaulted in the parking lot of an Atlanta apartment complex. The attacker was never identified. Through aggressive depositions and tens of thousands of pages of documents pulled in discovery, we showed the property owner had known about prior incidents on the property for years, never closed the lighting and security gaps, and concealed disclosures it was legally required to make.

That result shapes how we approach this work. Suing an attacker with empty pockets accomplishes nothing. Even a verdict against him is a piece of paper you can't cash. The point is to expose corporate negligence and reach the insurance policy that can actually pay for lifelong therapy, lost earnings, and real harm.

Types of Civil Sex Crime Cases We Handle

Our Atlanta sex crimes lawyers handle civil claims arising from sexual violence, harassment, and institutional failure. Every category below comes with its own legal theories, a different set of corporate defendants, and a separate playbook for reaching the money that can actually compensate survivors.

Rideshare Assaults (Uber and Lyft)

The man behind the wheel of an Uber or Lyft is operating under corporate cover. The company runs background checks, handles complaints, and decides which driver picks up which rider. If a company ignored prior rider complaints, signed up a driver with a sex-offense history, or just shrugged off the red flags an employee waved, it has civil exposure. For more on how we litigate against these corporations, see our practice page on sexual assaults by Uber or Lyft drivers, which covers the precedents, the discovery tools we use, and the defenses Uber and Lyft routinely raise.

Workplace Sexual Harassment and Assault

HR protects the company, not you. That's hard to accept, but after dozens of these cases we see the same pattern. An employee reports, the complaint goes in a drawer, the manager stays, and the woman who reported gets quietly pushed out.

Employers are liable under negligent retention and negligent supervision: keeping a known bad actor on the payroll and failing to monitor that person. When leadership knew and did nothing, the company owns what happened next. This isn't theory. It's a distinct body of Georgia law, and courts apply it.

An Atlanta sexual harassment attorney builds these cases on text threads, personnel files pulled in discovery, and internal complaint logs the company hoped would stay buried.

Institutional Abuse: Churches, Schools, Clinics, Massage Businesses

Wherever authority sits, someone can misuse it. A pastor, a coach, a doctor, a physical therapist, a massage therapist: anyone you were told to trust can turn that trust into a weapon. Two doctrines matter here. Fiduciary duty is the heightened duty of care that comes with a position of power. Vicarious liability makes the organization responsible for the conduct of its employees acting within the scope of their duties, and negligent retention extends that reach to harm the organization knew or should have known about.

If the attack happened on a campus such as Emory, Georgia Tech, Georgia State, Morehouse, Spelman, or Agnes Scott, federal Title IX also applies. Title IX requires federally funded schools to take in complaints, investigate them properly, and shield survivors from retaliation. A procedural violation is an independent basis for a civil claim against the institution. A related category is abuse of vulnerable adults in care facilities; liability there rests with the operator and often the corporate parent, built against the backdrop of Medicare and Medicaid regulatory standards.

Statutory Rape and Abuse of Minors

Children cannot give legal consent. That rule is absolute, regardless of what a child said, wrote in a text, or did. Defense lawyers try to argue around this constantly. Courts don't bite. For an Atlanta statutory rape attorney, the civil case usually doesn't hinge on consent at all. What matters is the filing window and the institutional defendant that owed the child a duty of care. O.C.G.A. § 9-3-33.1 gives survivors of childhood sexual abuse extended windows: on or before the plaintiff's 23rd birthday, or within two years of the date the plaintiff knew or should have known the conduct was abuse (for abuse on or after July 1, 2015). Trauma gets suppressed for years, sometimes decades. The realization usually comes much later, often only after starting therapy as an adult. When the defendant is an institution (a church, a school, a camp or a clinic), the statute separately sets the standard of care: ordinary negligence for the first window, gross negligence for the discovery-based path.

Protecting Your Identity and Privacy

Georgia trial courts have discretion to let a plaintiff proceed under a pseudonym. The leading decision is Doe v. Hall, 579 S.E.2d 838 (Ga. Ct. App. 2003), where the Court of Appeals confirmed a trial court's authority to grant that relief in cases involving confidential records. In Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority v. Doe, 664 S.E.2d 893 (Ga. Ct. App. 2008), involving an assault on a passenger at MARTA, the plaintiff's true name never appeared in the public record.

The mechanics are simple. We file a motion to proceed under pseudonym (Jane Doe, John Doe, or another variant) at the start of the case. When granted, only the pseudonym appears on the public docket. Your real name stays in the sealed portion of the file, available only to the court and the parties.

For depositions and hearings, we add protective orders so any documents or transcripts that may carry identifying information are shielded from public disclosure. For minor plaintiffs, pseudonymous filing is essentially automatic under the Uniform Superior Court Rules.

What to Do Right After an Assault

Every step below helps your future case. Before any of that though, your safety and your health come first.

1. Get somewhere safe. An emergency room, a friend's home, a police station, anywhere the attacker is not.
2. Get a SANE exam before you shower. A SANE (Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner) is a specially trained forensic nurse. In Atlanta, the program runs out of Grady Memorial Hospital. The exam collects DNA, documents injuries, and produces a rape kit, evidence that can't be recreated later.
3. Report to police, even if you're not sure about criminal charges. The report creates a dated record of the incident and your first account of it, which is a critical document in a civil lawsuit.
4. Preserve digital evidence: text threads, social media DMs, emails, location data, call logs, video from parking lot and entryway cameras, and screenshots of your Uber or Lyft app with the route and driver's name. Don't delete anything, even material that feels embarrassing.
5. Write down what you remember as soon as you can. Names, the order of events, what you smelled, the lighting, what people were wearing and what got said. Memory fades fast. Your own written notes, dated and signed, are admissible.

If you missed one of these, don't blame yourself. Nobody hands you a checklist in the moment, you know. We've worked with clients who had no rape kit, no police report, and an assault years in the past. A case can still be built. The earlier you talk to an Atlanta sex crime lawyer though, the more options stay open.

Damages You Can Recover in a Civil Claim

Recovery from sexual assault calls for specialized care, often for years. A civil lawsuit lets us recover:

• Specialized therapy: EMDR, trauma-focused CBT, group therapy, psychiatric care, medications
• Medical expenses, including SANE exams, STI and pregnancy screening, and surgery for physical injuries
• Lost wages and reduced future earning capacity if the trauma forced a career change or cut your ability to work
• Damages for severe emotional distress: PTSD, anxiety, depression, sleep disturbance, panic attacks
• the loss of the life you had before, including relationships, routines and the sense of safety
• Punitive damages for willful disregard of safety or intentional infliction of harm

The $250,000 cap under O.C.G.A. § 51-12-5.1 does not apply when specific intent to cause harm is proven, which is typical in intentional assault cases.

Where a physical attack causes serious neurological injury, we bring in neuropsychologists and experts in violent attacks resulting in traumatic brain injury; that's how we document the lifetime cost of rehabilitation, lost cognitive function, and daily care. Without those numbers, a corporate defendant pays a fraction of the real harm.

If the assault results in death, the family has the right to file a separate claim for fatal acts of violence and assault. Georgia law allows recovery of the “full value of the life” regardless of whether criminal charges were ever filed.

Contact Kermani LLP for a Confidential Case Review

Over the last five years, Kermani LLP has recovered more than $100 million for clients and tried more than 100 cases. Whether your matter calls for an Atlanta sex crime attorney against a rideshare corporation, a premises liability team against an apartment complex, or a trauma-informed advocate for a workplace or institutional case, the Kermani Method stays the same. We dig through every document and witness. And we'll take it to trial if an insurer bets on a cheap settlement.

We speak multiple languages, work 24/7, come to you where it's comfortable, and never share your name without permission. A call or message through the website is just a conversation. You commit to nothing. But you'll see what it's like to work with a lawyer who knows how to pull money from a corporate defendant, enough to fund the lifelong therapy and real recovery you deserve.

Call today. Write today. We will listen.