A woman is suing Snap Inc., alleging the social media company’s Snapchat app connected her with an older man twice her age who turned out to be a sexual predator who brutalized her after luring the plaintiff to a meeting at a hotel in 2020.
“This lawsuit seeks to hold Snap liable for the physical and emotional harms it caused to plaintiff in December 2020 after Snap connected plaintiff to a violent sexual predator via its user-recommendation product known as Quick Add and because of Snap’s own representations and contributions that … encouraged, and ensured the connection between the predator and plaintiff,” according to the Los Angeles Superior Court lawsuit, in which the young woman is identified only as Jane Doe.
The suit alleges negligence, fraud and violations of the Business and Professions Code and the Unfair Competition Law. Doe seeks unspecified compensatory and punitive damages.
“The defendants’ acts and omissions, which were motivated by a single-minded focus on profit-maximization, showed serious indifference to and callous disregard for the rights of sex trafficking victims, including plaintiff,” the suit filed Friday states.
Snap is the parent company of disappearing messaging app Snapchat. A Snap representative did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
In late 2020, Doe, then 14, used Snapchat to try and connect with new friends and she was connected with a male, then 31, via friend suggestion feature Quick Add which has since been renamed Find Friends, according to the suit, which further states that Snapchat connected them because they were geographically close.
But the man was a sexual predator who began grooming Doe and convinced her to meet him in person at a hotel in late December 2020, the suit states.
“Once he got plaintiff into the room, she experienced the worst nightmare any young girl could imagine, the suit states. “She was drugged, raped and sodomized in that hotel room.”
Doe was brutalized with such force that the hotel staff reported what they thought was a crime scene because of the amount of blood-soaked linens and towels that they photographed, the suit states.
If Snap had taken reasonable measures to design a product more useful, Doe and many others would not have been harmed by its “dangerously defective product,” according to the suit.
