The parents of a girl who was raped as a 12-year-old by a man who groomed her through Snapchat have sued the platform’s parent company, Snap, as well as the attacker.
The lawsuit, filed in a Missouri state court on Wednesday, claims that Snap has refused to disable allegedly dangerous features in its app and has failed to warn parents about potential harms posed to child users.
According to the lawsuit, the girl signed up for a Snapchat account in 2021, when she was just 11, without her parents’ knowledge or consent.
The app requires users to be 13 to sign up, but the lawsuit states that children know they can easily bypass the age requirement and the girl does not remember what date of birth she entered.
The lawsuit says that after she had been using Snapchat for about a year, the app recommended the girl and teenagers from nearby high schools as friends to defendant Gabriel Joel Valentin-Rios, a 25-year-old man who had no real-world connections to them.
Failure to Warn Minors
The app did not warn the children that connecting to strangers might be dangerous, according to the lawsuit.
Valentin-Rios began sending the girl unsolicited nude photographs, according to the lawsuit. The girl “did not want these photographs and did not at first reciprocate,” but Snapchat’s product design made it “impossible” for her to avoid such explicit content, it alleges.
The app also provided Valentin-Rios with the girl’s home address through its Snap Maps feature,without her knowledge, according to the filing.
Valentin-Rios then groomed the girl by convincing her that he was a 17-year-old local high school boy. He eventually persuaded her to meet him in person and raped her.
Sentenced to 18 Years
Valentin-Rios pleaded guilty to statutory rape and is serving an 18-year prison sentence in Missouri.
The lawsuit claims Snapchat knew that Valentin-Rios had multiple accounts—in breach of the platform’s policies—including one he used to lure underage girls.
“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 victim has been diagnosed with PTSD, depression, and anxiety, according to the lawsuit.
The plaintiffs are seeking 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.”
Parents who blame social media platform Snapchat for contributing to their loved one’s death stand near a photo of Snap Inc. CEO Even Spiegel near the offices of Snap Inc. in Santa Monica, Calif., on Feb. 12, 2026. John Fredricks/The Epoch Times
Similar Suits Against Snap
This is not the first lawsuit of its kind against Snap. The state of New Mexico sued the company in 2024, claiming the platform’s design features enable sextortion, sexual abuse, and unwanted contact from adults to minors.
According to that lawsuit, Snap failed to warn parents, young users, and the wider public that sextortion was a “massive” and “incredibly concerning” issue on Snapchat, despite allegedly being fully aware of this.
A judge denied the company’s motion to dismiss the suit last year.
There are other individual lawsuits pending against the company, including one filed in Vermont on behalf of two 12-year-old girls who were sexually assaulted by an adult they met on Snapchat.
The European Commission in March launched an investigation into Snapchat over concerns the platform is not doing enough to protect children from sexual grooming and recruitment for criminal activity.
The commission said that by allowing the app to be used by adults who do not disclose their age and can potentially pose as children, “Snapchat may not be implementing sufficient safeguards to protect children from exposure to harmful content, contact, conduct, and other risks.”
It will also investigate whether the platform’s default settings provide sufficient privacy and safety for children, including whether minors are being automatically recommended to other users through the “Find Friends” function.
Additionally, the probe will examine whether Snapchat’s system is properly checking whether a user is under the age of 17, which it needs to do to ensure minors have an “age-appropriate experience.”
Social Media Crackdown
The case comes amid a growing worldwide crackdown against social media use for under-16s. A growing number of countries have announced plans to age-restrict various platforms, following Australia’s world-first ban introduced in December 2025.
Critics say the bans are often ineffective as they are relatively easy for teens to get around by using a VPN or by creating an account using an older sibling’s ID.
Critics have raised concerns that the bans are a form of censorship or that the requirement for age verification will lead to a reduction in privacy, with fears this could eventually lead to the introduction of digital ID for all.
The Associated Press and Victoria Friedman contributed to this report.
Correction: A previous version of this article misstated the state in which the Snapchat lawsuit was filed in one instance. The Epoch Times regrets the error.
