The parents of a girl who was raped when she was 12 years old by an adult stranger she met on Snapchat have sued its parent company, Snap, and the attacker in Missouri state court.
The lawsuit filed Wednesday claims the social media company has refused to disable dangerous features in its app or warn parents about potential harms it may cause.
According to the lawsuit, the girl began using Snapchat in 2021 when she was 11 without her parents' knowledge. While the app requires users to be 13 to sign up, the lawsuit says the girl does not remember what birth date she entered and that children knew they could easily bypass the minimum-age requirement.
About a year after she began using Snapchat, the lawsuit says the app recommended her and teen girls from nearby high schools as friends to defendant Gabriel Joel Valentin-Rios, an adult who had no real-life connections to them. It did not warn the children that connecting to strangers might be dangerous.
After the girl and Valentin-Rios connected, Valentin-Rios began sending her unsolicited nude photographs, the lawsuit says. The girl "did not want these photographs and, at first, did not reciprocate but Snapchat’s product design made it impossible for (her) to avoid such explicit content,” it says.
As part of its Snap Maps feature, the app also provided Valentin-Rios with the girl's home address without her knowledge, according to the lawsuit. Valentin-Rios then groomed the girl, convincing her that he was a 17-year-old local high school boy, not a 25-year-old man. Eventually he got her to meet him in person and raped her.
Valentin-Rios pleaded guilty to statutory rape and is currently serving an 18-year prison sentence in Missouri.
The lawsuit claims Snapchat knew that Valentin-Rios had multiple accounts — even though it is against the app's policies — including one he used to lure teen girls.
Snap did not immediately respond to a message for comment Wednesday afternoon.
The girl has been diagnosed with PTSD, anxiety and depression, according to the lawsuit.
The plaintiffs seek unspecified damages and are asking the court to compel Snap to stop practices that harm children.
“This assault did not happen in a vacuum — it happened because Snapchat’s product design made it easy for a predator to reach and manipulate an unsuspecting child,” said Matthew Bergman, founder of the Social Media Victims Law Center, which brought the suit on behalf of the plaintiffs. “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.”
This is not the first such lawsuit against Snap. New Mexico sued the company in 2024, saying the platform's design features foster sextortion, sexual abuse and unwanted contact from adults to minors. According to the lawsuit, Snap was well aware, but failed to warn parents, young users and the public that “sextortion was a rampant, ‘massive,’ and ‘incredibly concerning issue’ on Snapchat.” A judge denied the company's motion to dismiss last year.
There are also individual lawsuits pending against the company, including one in Vermont on behalf of two 12-year-old girls who were sexually assaulted by an adult they met on Snapchat.
FILE - The Snapchat app on a mobile device is seen in New York. Snap Inc., Wednesday, Aug. 9, 2017. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)
