Snapchat sued in case alleging the platform is responsible for 12-year-old’s rape
The family of a teen girl alleges that Snapchat's features enabled a 25-year-old to groom and abuse her in a new lawsuit against the company.
New York (CNN) — The family of a Missouri teenager is suing Snapchat parent company Snap, claiming the social media platform facilitated her rape as a 12-year-old. Snapchat features such as Quick Add and Snap Map enabled assailant Gabriel Joel Valentin-Rios to connect with and groom the girl, referred to as J.F., the complaint alleges.
The suit, filed Wednesday in Missouri state court, also names Valentin-Rios as a defendant. Valentin-Rios recently pleaded guilty to one count of statutory rape or attempted statutory rape and one count of enticement or attempted enticement of a child; he was sentenced to 18 years.
Wednesday’s lawsuit is just the latest case seeking to hold Snapchat accountable for sexual abuse that young users say they experienced because of the platform. Multiple families have sued the platform with similar claims, and multiple men have been sentenced for abuse of minors with whom they connected on Snapchat. New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez sued Snap in 2024, alleging that its policies and features facilitate child sexual exploitation.
Snap’s rules prohibit sexual exploitation, and the company says it uses automated and human review systems to prevent abuse and proactively remove bad actors. It has also introduced features meant to make it harder for adult strangers to contact young people. In response to the New Mexico lawsuit, the company told the Associated Press: “We continue to evolve our safety mechanisms and policies, from leveraging advanced technology to detect and block certain activity, to prohibiting friending from suspicious accounts, to working alongside law enforcement and government agencies, among so much more.”
But the Missouri lawsuit claims that Snapchat has known about the risks of sexual abuse of young people and should have done more to prevent them.
In 2024, Snap executives received a 133-page manual originally published on the dark web that details how to use Snapchat features to prey on young users, the complaint states. It alleges the handbook instructs predators to use Snapchat’s “Quick Add” feature — now called “Find Friends,” which recommends accounts with which a user shares mutual friends or phone contacts — and “Snap Map” to connect with victims. The complaint states that those “dangerous design features” could continue to harm children.
CNN has reached out to Snap for comment on the Missouri lawsuit. An attorney for Valentin-Rios declined to comment.
“It is unfortunately not unique that pedophiles use the design features of Snapchat to identify and connect with vulnerable kids,” Matthew Bergman, founder of the Social Media Victims Law Center, which filed the suit, told CNN. “This is the perpetration of child sexual abuse at scale.”
Plaintiff J.F. began using Snapchat at the age of 11 around 2021 without her parents’ knowledge, according to the complaint. The lawsuit states that J.F. does not recall the birthdate she used to sign up for the platform but alleges that Snapchat “possesses the capability to estimate user age with substantial accuracy” regardless of how someone signed up and “would have known that she was younger than the age she self-reported.”
Months after she began using the platform, Snapchat’s Quick Add feature allegedly recommended that Valentin-Rios, a 25-year-old, connect with J.F. and other minor girls from the same area. The app made it appear to the girls that Valentin-Rios shared mutual friends with them, and the “Bitmoji” cartoon image associated with his account portrayed him as a “friendly looking boy,” according to the complaint. He presented himself as a local high school boy in thousands of chats with multiple minors, the complaint states.
“Snap failed to warn J.F., or other minors alike, that these users might be strangers or that connecting with them could be dangerous,” the complaint states.
Valentin-Rios then began sending J.F. nude photos, which the lawsuit claims J.F. could not avoid because Snapchat doesn’t offer a way to preview content before opening it. Snapchat’s Snap Map feature — which lets users share their live locations with friends — provided Valentin-Rios with J.F.’s home address, and he coerced her into sending explicit photos, according to the complaint. (Snapchat turns off live location sharing on Snap Map by default, but users can toggle it on.)
Valentin-Rios raped J.F. in September of 2021, after convincing her to sneak out of her home late at night; he also allegedly abused other young girls in the same area, according to the complaint.
Valentin-Rios allegedly created a second Snapchat account to connect with the young girls, which the suit claims was a violation of Snapchat rules that the company did not enforce.
The suit also claims that internal Snap documents suggest that around the time of the assault, Snapchat was “failing to review more than 40%” of serious user reports — letting reported media disappear on the app, which is known for ephemeral content, before it could conduct reviews. J.F.’s lawsuit seeks to uncover “whether and/or how many times Valentin-Rios’ accounts were reported to Snap for sexual abuse” prior to her rape.
The lawsuit also seeks unspecified financial damages.
Snap and other leading social media companies face a wave of lawsuits alleging that they have intentionally addicted and harmed young people with their features and design choices. Snap earlier this year settled a landmark case brought by a 20-year-old woman, which resulted in Meta and YouTube being held liable for her harms, as well as a case brought by a school district.
The companies have repeatedly said they have safety features and parental control tools to protect young people, but they continue to face pressure from parents and advocates.
A poll released earlier this month by the advocacy group Heat Initiative found that half of minor user respondents reported seeing “unsafe content or messages” on Snapchat in the prior year. The poll of more than 1,000 10-to-17-year-olds, conducted in December, found that one in eight respondents reported seeing sexually suggestive content at least weekly. And one in five respondents said they believed Snapchat’s “Find Friends” feature had recommended accounts of people they don’t know who they believed to be adults.
In response to the poll, Snapchat said it invests heavily in protections for young users and believed the report did not reflect those investments.
The-CNN-Wire
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