Lawsuit: Snapchat’s Design Aided Adult in Raping 12-Year-Old
The parents of a 12-year-old girl who was raped by an adult she met on Snapchat have sued the company Snap and the attacker in a Missouri state court. The lawsuit, filed on June 24, 2026, alleges that Snap refused to disable dangerous features or warn parents about potential harms to children.
According to the complaint, the girl began using Snapchat in 2021 at age 11 without her parents' knowledge. Although the app requires users to be at least 13, the lawsuit states that children could easily bypass the age requirement by entering a false birth date.
About a year after she started using the platform, Snapchat’s friend recommendation system suggested the girl and other teens as friends to Gabriel Joel Valentin-Rios, a 25-year-old adult with no real-life connections to them. The app did not warn the children about the dangers of connecting with strangers.
After connecting, Valentin-Rios sent unsolicited nude photographs to the girl. The lawsuit states that the girl did not want these images and initially did not reciprocate, but Snapchat’s product design made it impossible for her to avoid the explicit content. Additionally, the Snap Maps feature shared the girl’s home address with Valentin-Rios without her knowledge.
Valentin-Rios then groomed the girl, pretending to be a 17-year-old local high school student. He eventually convinced her to meet 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 Snap knew that Valentin-Rios had multiple accounts, violating company policy, including one used to lure teenage girls. Snap did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The girl has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, and depression. 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.
This is not the first such lawsuit against Snap. In 2024, New Mexico sued the company, alleging that its design features foster sextortion and sexual abuse of minors. A judge denied Snap’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.
