A federal jury Thursday afternoon convicted a 40-year-old Tigard man of sex trafficking a woman by force in 2021 but found him not guilty of driving her across state lines to engage in prostitution.
Selva Delano Mudaliar, 40, was prosecuted in federal court in Portland after he fled the country in 2024, buying a one-way ticket to Bangkok to avoid a trial in Washington County, where he remains accused of brutally assaulting the same woman for not going through with the sex-for-money arrangement. He was arrested about six months after he fled and returned to the U.S. to face a new federal indictment.
The jury’s split verdict came at the end of a three-day trial before U.S. District Judge Michael W. Mosman.
Mudaliar had met the woman on the dating app Tinder and was casually dating her for several months before he arranged for her to have sex with a stranger, a man she said they both met at the Scandals nightclub in Portland in December 2021, the woman testified. He arranged a drug deal with the stranger and then negotiated a prostitution deal in front of her, offering to have her perform sexual acts for him for a week for $1,500, she testified.
She said Mudaliar drove her and the stranger to the man’s motel in Vancouver, Wash. Mudaliar forcefully grabbed her and led her to the motel room, leaving bruises on her left arm, according to court testimony. Once inside the room, the stranger and the woman did not go through with the deal, and the stranger gave her a signed blank check to show Mudaliar, sensing Mudaliar might harm her if she didn’t hand over money to him, according to court testimony.
She returned to Mudaliar’s car, but Mudaliar became enraged that she hadn’t returned with cash, Assistant U.S. Attorney Mira Chirnick told jurors. He started beating her in his car and later at his Tigard apartment. He strangled her, shoved the thumb of his other hand down her throat, and left her with a black-and-blue left eye and swollen, bleeding lips, the prosecutor said. The woman lost consciousness and “came to” on the floor of his apartment and then managed to escape and call 911, according to Chirnick.
The woman did not tell police or nurses that the beating resulted from a forced prostitution attempt, according to court testimony. Two weeks later, she notified a Washington County prosecutor of the sex trafficking that led to her beating, but it took four months before a detective there contacted the woman to learn more, according to court testimony.
Assistant Federal Public Defender Peyton Lee told jurors that the alleged victim was not to be believed, citing her shifting accounts of what occurred in multiple official tellings over the past five years. Lee also argued that the government failed to prove its case, noting prosecutors and police never identified the alleged stranger who had entered into the sex-for-money deal with Mudaliar and did not obtain any surveillance footage from the motel.
Prosecutors said the woman was not forthright about the commercial sex deal initially because she feared Mudaliar would kill her if she spoke to police and was embarrassed and ashamed by what occurred.
Mudaliar will be sentenced Feb. 2. He faces a mandatory minimum sentence of 15 years in federal prison.
Assault charges are pending against Mudaliar from the same incident in Washington County. He was previously convicted of promoting prostitution in Multnomah County in 2015.
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