Plaintiffs seeking at least $30 million in damages in the first MySpace seduction lawsuit must somehow show that the popular Web site has a duty to protect underage users of its social network from adult sexual predators.

The suit, filed this week in Travis County (Texas) District Court, alleges that the failure of MySpace to prevent strangers from contacting users younger than 16 proximately caused the sexual assault of plaintiff Julie Doe, a 14-year-old girl.

According to the petition, Pete Solis, 19, assaulted the teenager in an Austin parking lot May 12, about a month after first contacting her on MySpace where she had a user profile. He had allegedly misrepresented himself to her as a high-school senior.

As their theory of liability, the teen and her mother claim MySpace promoted the site to children �- about 22 percent of visitors are minors -� and "expressly and implicitly represented that their website was safe for young underage users."

Yet despite knowing of other sexual assaults involving underage users, the suit says, MySpace failed in its duty to

institute and enforce appropriate security measures and policies that would substantially decrease the likelihood of danger and harm that MySpace posed to [Julie Doe].

In the only somewhat analogous case, a California teenager sued America Online last year, claiming the Internet provider was liable for the behavior of a chat-room monitor who solicited sexual favors from her.

The question of duty in that case, which settled before any litigation of the merits, was clearer since the alleged seducer was an employee of the service provider and AOL monitored the chat-room communications.

MySpace, on the other hand, is an "open forum" and had no control over the behavior of Solis. Suing MySpace for negligence is "like blaming the post office for the anthrax scare," says Oliver Taillieu, plaintiff's attorney in the AOL case.

Even if Julie Doe does establish that MySpace should have tighter security, another tricky issue is whether its duty extends to what users do away from its "place for friends."

As a legal expert told the Austin American-Statesman, "If you interact on MySpace, you are safe, but if a 13-year-old or 14-year-old goes out in person and meets someone she doesn't know, that is always an unsafe endeavor."

By Matthew Heller
6/20/06