According to the complaint, Mendoza was attracted to the job because of an advertised 35 to 40 hour weeks, at $10.02 an hour, between 7 a.m. and 9 p.m. on weekdays and a Saturday weekend shift, with time-and-a-half pay for overtime. Sundays off, vacation, and transportation. A good job with a diplomat. At the time Koehler was an official with the Delegation of the European Union to the United Nations. Since 2016 he has been a counselor to the Permanent Mission of Germany to the United Nations. Koehler’s job at the UN, according to Emily Brease, the communications coordinator at Damayan, was specializing in human rights and child welfare.

Because of Koehler’s employment, the family would be sponsoring her for a G-5 visa, designated for personal domestic workers of an employee working for an international organization, such as the United Nations or the World Bank. His status in the United States offered him another right: diplomatic immunity—the legal privilege that means that diplomats and their immediate family members are exempt from criminal prosecution and most civil actions in the country to which they are posted. Originally established because of the need for diplomats to be able to conduct their business freely without fear of retribution by a foreign government, it can in practice mean diplomats enjoy enormous legal freedom unrelated to their immediate work—including, even, freedom from laws that regulate how people must treat those they employ in their own homes.

Mendoza signed the contract in the fall of 2014, according to the complaint. In January of the next year, she told me, she found herself sitting at the Koehlers’ dining table for her first dinner in the United States, marveling at the size of their kitchen. Mendoza said that Koehler’s wife, Mareike, told her to wake at 6 a.m. the next day: There were five different lunches to prepare, one for each of the kids plus Mr. Koehler. When he had gone off to work and the kids to school, Mrs. Koehler took her on a tour, detailing the tasks Mendoza would be expected to complete, as she alleged in the complaint: a daily thorough cleaning of the six-bedroom home and two-car garage, including vacuuming, laundry, dusting, ironing, food preparation for the family and guests, and occasional shopping, shoveling snow, cleaning the fence, and caring for the pet birds, in addition to her work as an au pair, a live in caretaker for the Koehlers’ four children, one of whom was one-and-a-half. This seemed like way too much to do, especially with one of them being so young. “There is also the baby,” she told me. “I said baby because he is still young, a one-and-a-half-year-old playful boy, and I need to be aware for his safety.”

Mendoza said she cleaned without gloves or protection. And the worst part of the job was looking after the Koehlers’ pet birds. Mendoza said she used a ladder to reach the high points of the house to sanitize them from bird poop multiple times a day. She was completely overwhelmed by the volume of work. “Mareike wants everything be organized, so it’s really hard you know,” she told me. “And I’m only one person, only one domestic worker has to do this every day for a long day without eating or having rest. I almost never felt my bed.”