A 40-year-old Tigard man who skipped the country before his scheduled court date in February 2024 has been found guilty of sex trafficking a woman by force, fraud, or coercion, and now faces a minimum of 15 years in federal prison, with life in prison as the maximum possible sentence. Selva Delano Mudaliar was tracked down in Thailand and brought back to the United States to answer for the charges, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office.
A Scheme That Turned Violent
According to trial evidence, Mudaliar met a customer outside a Portland nightclub in December 2021 and drove the woman he was trafficking, along with that customer, to a hotel in Vancouver, where he arranged for the man to pay $1,500 to have sex with her. When the arrangement failed, prosecutors said Mudaliar assaulted the woman, striking her repeatedly in the face and head and strangling her until she passed out. The case echoes an earlier report reviewed by oregonlive.com, which found that a woman reported to Tigard police on Dec. 3, 2021, that Mudaliar had beaten and choked her.
An affidavit cited by the outlet said Mudaliar struck the woman repeatedly while the two were in his Volkswagen Passat, and the same federal affidavit said she was later found to have suffered a broken hyoid bone in her throat. The Washington County District Attorney's Office separately charged Mudaliar with multiple state offenses, and those state court charges remain pending even after his federal conviction.
Fleeing Before Trial
Mudaliar fled to Thailand just before his scheduled court date in February 2024, and the FBI later located him overseas before Thai authorities made the arrest. The circumstances of that arrest have been reported differently by different outlets: OregonLive reported that he was arrested Aug. 15 in Thailand and returned to the United States, while Malay Mail reported that Thai police arrested him at a Bangkok condominium on May 3, 2024, after the FBI asked Thai authorities for help. The two accounts also diverge on what happened around his missed Oregon court date — OregonLive reported that a warrant was issued after Mudaliar failed to appear for a late-February pretrial conference ahead of a scheduled March trial in Washington County, while Malay Mail reported that an Oregon court had jailed him for at least 25 years that same March on 11 counts including strangulation and coercion. Mudaliar ultimately consented to extradition and was returned to the United States to face the Washington County charges along with additional federal charges.
A Pattern Stretching Back a Decade
This is not the first time Mudaliar has faced allegations of violence tied to prostitution. He was previously convicted of promoting prostitution in Multnomah County in 2016 and sentenced to four years and seven months in state custody, per the same oregonlive.com account. Years before that, in September 2015, he was arraigned in Multnomah County Circuit Court on charges that included attempting to compel prostitution, subjecting another person to involuntary servitude, coercion, menacing, and fourth-degree assault constituting domestic violence, according to a separate oregonlive.com report from that case.
Court documents from the 2015 case said a woman told police Mudaliar used to beat her so she would engage in prostitution and turn over the money she earned to him. The woman also told police that Mudaliar demanded she return to “the biz” because she needed to pay him $70,000, which he said covered legal costs tied to his arrest in Reno.
Prosecutors Respond to the Verdict
The U.S. Attorney for the District of Oregon said sex trafficking exploits vulnerable victims for financial gain, and that the verdict demonstrates a commitment to prosecuting cases involving force, fraud, and coercion. The same official said Mudaliar attempted to sell a woman for sex and brutally assaulted her when his scheme failed. Mudaliar is scheduled to be sentenced on Feb. 2, 2027, and will face the still-pending Washington County state charges in addition to his federal sentence.
