Orange bail bonds company helped owner coerce jailed women for sex, lawsuit claims

An Orange County bail bonds company is being sued after its employees helped its owner coerce jailed women into having sex with him in exchange for their freedom, according to the lawsuit.

Three women, using their initials to remain anonymous, filed the suit Friday in federal court in Orlando against Moncrief Bail Bonds. It comes just days after Russell “Bruce” Moncrief, the company’s founder and owner, pleaded no contest to a racketeering charge in a deal with prosecutors in which four human trafficking charges against him were dropped.

Moncrief will also have to pay $80,000 to his victims as part of the deal, the law firm representing him said. All three women in the lawsuit against his company were victims in his criminal case and are being represented by attorney Lisa Haba, who represented two of them in that case. Haba says two of the three will receive Moncrief’s restitution.

“These three brave survivors have been forever affected by the harm caused by Moncrief and Moncrief Bail Bonds,” Haba said in a statement Friday. “[They] hope, through this lawsuit, to make Florida safer for vulnerable individuals and to hold those that would prey on the vulnerable accountable for their actions.”

Moncrief’s arrest and plea followed a years-long police investigation that found he created a system where he exploited desperate women who’d seek him out because of his well-known reputation in jails. The system included secret code words like washing cars, cleaning houses and even licking eyebrows to refer to sex acts.

“I’ll take all the paint off of those doors. Please get me out of here,” a phone call to Moncrief from the Brevard County Jail included in a police report said. “Please, I’m begging you … I will take all the paint off those doors, I got you.”

The lawsuit says employees and agents at Moncrief Bail Bonds, headquartered across the street from the Orange County jail and with offices in Osceola, Brevard and Pinellas counties, aided him in creating that system, which targeted and exploited women facing charges relating to drugs and prostitution. All three women in the lawsuit were already being sex trafficked by unnamed individuals and addicted to drugs.

“You may not have family, you may not have money, but you do have some eyebrows that you can lick, and that’s with Bruce,” one victim told investigators, according to that same police report. “90% of the girls in there are just trying to get back out to that needle, just trying to get back out to that fix, and he definitely monopolizes off that.”

The employees and agents understood and accepted the coded references to sex instead of payment, connected or directed the women to Moncrief, processed their bonds without lawful payments, filed misleading or fraudulent paperwork about the bonds in court and facilitated the transactions knowing that sexual acts were being exchanged for releasing the women, according to the suit.

The suit says they would also threaten to revoke women’s bonds and send them back to jail if they refused Moncrief’s demands. The company benefited from the scheme, in part due to increased business from the individuals trafficking the women and their associates.

One of the three plaintiffs was trafficked by two unnamed individuals, one of whom routinely contacted Moncrief to arrange the release of women under his control so that they could “pay off ” their bond obligations through sexual acts with him. Moncrief had an ongoing relationship with him and knew he was trafficking women, according to the suit.

While the plaintiff was in jail, she called Moncrief Bail Bonds, identified herself as that trafficker’s “girl” and provided a code phrase. The employee who answered the phone asked why her trafficker was not calling instead and instructed her to have the pimp call Moncrief directly to make the arrangements, the suit says.

Moncrief later picked her up from the Orange County Jail and said she must either pay ten times the amount of the bond or perform ten sexual acts. He would exploit her for commercial sex acts, use the threat of re-incarceration to maintain control over her and even supply her with fentanyl and MDMA to reinforce her drug dependency and ensure her compliance, according to the suit.

At one point the woman was hiding from her trafficker and Moncrief threatened to turn her back over to him if she did not comply, the suit claims, despite knowing he was violent and would harm her.

One of the other plaintiffs contacted Moncrief Bail Bonds at their trafficker’s request so they could post bond for another woman they were trafficking. The plaintiff then went to the company’s office to sign paperwork relating to the other woman’s bond. While there, the employees and agents knew the bond had been issued in exchange for sex and continued to process and facilitate the transaction, the suit says.

Moncrief later met the plaintiff and the other woman, now released, in an Orlando hotel room. He said the woman’s bond would remain in effect only if her and the plaintiff had a “two-girl” sexual encounter with him, making it clear that refusal would result in revocation of the bond and their return to jail, according to the lawsuit.

When the woman was unable to comply fully with Moncrief’s demands, Moncrief demanded the plaintiff submit to sexual acts. Over the following week, he returned to the hotel room on at least five occasions and each time subjected her to commercial sexual acts through force, threats, and coercion.

As a result, the plaintiff escalated from methamphetamine use to intravenous heroin use in an effort to numb the trauma she experienced and suffered chronic pain, emotional distress and ongoing psychological injuries, the lawsuit says.

The suit, filed under the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, seeks an unspecified amount of money.

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