Snap Sued After 12-Year-Old Raped by Adult She Met on Snapchat; Lawsuit Alleges Platform Design Enabled Predator
The parents of a 12-year-old girl who was raped by an adult stranger she met on Snapchat have filed a lawsuit against the app's parent company, Snap, and the convicted attacker in Missouri state court, alleging that the platform's design directly enabled the abuse.
Filed Wednesday, the lawsuit claims Snap has repeatedly refused to disable features it knows put children at risk or to adequately warn parents about the dangers. The girl, now a teenager, began using Snapchat in 2021 at age 11 without her parents' knowledge, according to court documents. Although the app requires users to be at least 13 to register, the lawsuit says children routinely bypass the age check by entering false birth dates — and that Snap has done little to stop it.
About a year after she joined, the app's recommendation algorithm suggested the girl and other teen girls from nearby high schools as friend suggestions to Gabriel Joel Valentin-Rios, an adult with no real-life connection to them. The lawsuit says Snapchat did not warn minors that connecting with strangers could be dangerous. Soon after the two connected, Valentin-Rios began sending the girl unsolicited nude images. 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," the lawsuit states.
Snap's Snap Maps feature further exposed the girl's home address to Valentin-Rios without her knowledge, according to the filing. Valentin-Rios, who presented himself as a 17-year-old local high school student but was actually 25, groomed the girl and eventually convinced her to meet him in person, where he raped her. He later pleaded guilty to statutory rape and is serving an 18-year prison sentence in Missouri.
The lawsuit also alleges that Snap was aware Valentin-Rios maintained multiple accounts — in violation of the platform's own policies — including one he used to target teenagers. "We care deeply about the safety and well-being of all Snapchatters, and our teams have worked for years to build safeguards, launch safety tutorials, partner with experts, and work with law enforcement to help prevent the misuse of our platform," Snap said in a statement.
The girl has since been diagnosed with PTSD, anxiety and depression, the lawsuit says. Her family is seeking unspecified damages and 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 filed the suit. "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 latest legal action adds to Snap's mounting legal woes over child safety. In 2024, the state of New Mexico sued Snap, alleging its design features foster sextortion, sexual abuse and unwanted contact between adults and minors. A judge denied the company's motion to dismiss that case last year. Other individual lawsuits are pending, including one in Vermont on behalf of two 12-year-old girls who were sexually assaulted by an adult they met on Snapchat. The repeated litigation underscores a growing scrutiny of how social media platforms design products that may inadvertently — or knowingly — facilitate harm to children, and could push lawmakers to consider tighter regulation of app features like friend recommendations and location sharing.