Actor trapped in Ritz-Carlton bathroom for 3 hours, had to pick lock to get out

An actor became stuck in the bathroom of a Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Beijing (Representational image)

A Chinese actor has shared how she became increasingly distraught while stuck in the bathroom of a five-star hotel for three hours. Jadie Lin Linqi posted a video about her experience at a Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Beijing on March 13, according to the South China Morning Post.

Linqi said that she became locked in the bathroom of the five-star hotel on December 29. The Chinese actor said she went to use the toilet attached to her room but could not get it open when she wanted to get out. She became worried when she realised she had left her phone in the room outside. Moreover, the toilet’s wall-mounted phone was not working either.

With no way to alert the Ritz-Carlton staff or emergency services, the actor began yelling and banging on the door. “I felt frightened and had difficulty breathing,” she said, noting that there was no ventilation inside the cubicle.

Finding no help imminent, Linqi started devising ways to escape. She first tried the bathroom’s iron toilet paper holder to smash the lock. The method did not work and she ended up hurting one of her fingers.

“My heartbeat became fast, I was sweating,” she said in her Douyin video, according to SCMP. “I was thinking: if I fainted or suffocated to death, no one in this world would know that in this small room, there’s a person who cannot get out. What made me more scared was that I had no idea how long I had been trapped here.”

The actor then found a hard plastic cable tie which she used to turn the screws on the door lock. This time, she was able to get the door open.

“When I escaped the bathroom, I could not recover from the extreme scare. I felt my legs were weak, and my body kept shivering,” she said.

Linqi reported the incident to the police and hotel staff. She could not, however, reach a resolution with Ritz-Carlton and accused the five-star hotel chain of jeopardising the safety of its guests. She also claimed that the hotel did not follow up on the matter or contact her later.

Ritz-Carlton put out a clarification after the actor’s video went viral on Chinese social media. “On the day when the incident occurred, the hotel’s team checked the situation with the guest and offered our apologies,” the statement read.

“The management also sincerely apologised for the guest’s accident and offered a compensation proposal. But the guest and the hotel disagreed on the reconciliation.”

The hotel said it had been trying to get in touch with Linqi to settle on a compensation agreement but had been unable to do so.