Parents of a Missouri teenager sued Snapchat’s parent company, Snap, Wednesday alleging the platform bears some responsibility for their 12-year-old daughter’s rape.
Social Media Victims Law Center filed the lawsuit on behalf of the plaintiffs alleging that the social media company has refused to disable dangerous features or warn parents of the harm they could cause, according to CBS.
“This assault did not happen in a vacuum- it happened because Snapchat’s product design made it easy for a predator to reach out and manipulate an unsuspecting child,” Matthew Bergman, founder of Social Media Victims Law Center said, according to the outlet. “Snap executives have long known that their features create a perfect environment for predators to exploit children, yet they have repeatedly failed to make the platform safe.”
Snapchat did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
The minor victim, referred to by the initials J.F. in the lawsuit, began using Snapchat in 2021 when she was 11 years old. The app requires users to be at least 13, however, the girl could not remember the date she used to bypass the age requirement, according to Fox5.
A year later, Snapchat allegedly began recommending defendant Gabriel Joel Valentin-Rios to the victim and her friends — even though they did not have any connections with him in real life. After becoming friends on the app, Valentin-Rios began sending unsolicited nudes to the victim, the lawsuit stated, according to CBS.
“J.F. did not want these photographs and, at first, did not reciprocate but Snapchat’s design product made it impossible for J.F. to avoid such explicit content,” the lawsuit says, according to the outlet.
J.F. has since been diagnosed with depression, anxiety and PTSD, the lawsuit states, CBS reported.
Valentin-Rios convinced the victim he was a local 17-year-old high school student, while actually being 25, and used snap maps to locate the address of the victim without her knowledge, according the outlet. After Valentin-Rios coaxed J.F. into meeting him in person, he raped her.
Snap maps is a feature on snapchat that allows people who are friends on the app to see the real-time location of each other, Fox 5 reported.
Valentin-Rios pled guilty to statuary rape and is currently serving an 18-year prison sentence in Missouri, CBS reported.
The lawsuit claims that the defendant had multiple accounts, one of which he used to lure teen girls, according to Fox 5. The Plaintiffs are seeking unspecified damages and a call for Snap to stop practices that are harming children.
Snapchat was sued by New Mexico in 2024 for alleging that the company had features that allow sextortion, sexual abuse, and unwanted contact between adults and minors, CBS reported.
Democratic New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez said in a 2024 press release that his office’s “undercover investigation revealed that Snapchat’s harmful design features create an environment where predators can easily target children through sextortion schemes and other forms of sexual abuse.”
Several individual lawsuits are also pending against the company, one of which involves sexual assault, according to CBS.
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