Saudi Princess Meshael Alayban was arrested on suspicion of human trafficking, after a 30-year-old Kenyan domestic worker hailed a bus in Southern California Tuesday and informed a rider that she had been held hostage.
According to prosecutors who spoke with CBS News, Alayban is a wife of Saudi Prince Abdulrahman bin Nasser bin Abdulaziz al Saud.
She was found and arrested at a condominium in Irvine, Calif. on Wednesday, after police spoke with the domestic worker and gained knowledge of the Princess' whereabouts.
According to the reported victim, she herself was hired in Kenya last year, then taken to Saudi Arabia. There, her passport was immediately confiscated, and she was pushed into working extra hours, was paid far less than she was originally told, and was forbidden to leave.
Local news reports said that when the Kenyan woman hailed the bus, she held in her hands a pamphlet from the U.S. Department of State that detailed her rights as a worker and cautioned against human trafficking. She said she received the paper when she went to the U.S. Embassy in Saudi Arabia to get her work visa, according to CBS.
Alayban has been charged with human trafficking, and will appear in an Orange County court on July 29. Her bail has been set at $5 million-she is now under GPS surveillance and cannot leave the United States without the proper ok from government officials.
Attorney to the Saudi Princess Paul Meyer claimed that the issue was one of a contractual discrepancy, and said that his client should not receive such a high bail simply because of her wealth. According to Meyer, Alayban has been making trips to America since childhood and has even owned real estate in the country.
"This is a domestic work hours dispute," he said to CBS.
But for District Attorney Tony Rackauckas, that wasn't the case.
"This is not a contract dispute," he said at the bail hearing on Wednesday. "This is holding someone captive against their will."
The victim claimed that she had signed her name on a contract for two-years of work with an employment agency that assured her she would receive $1,600 a month for eight hours of work a day, five days a week. But once she began working for Alayban, she was forced to perform extraneous household chores for 15 hours a day, every day of the week. She reportedly received $220 for her work, and was only given back her passport long enough to travel to the United States.
Once she arrived, she took care of more than eight people in four Irvine apartments-cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, and ironing.
Four other women were found in the condominium, and left on their own volition with police once law enforcement arrived on the scene. They told officials that they wanted to be freed.
