Even if it does not enjoy the immunities of an Internet service provider, a dating service should still not be liable for the rape of a 14-year-old Georgia girl by a man she met on its phone chat line.

The mother of the girl, identified only as Julie Doe, last week filed a negligence suit against Quest Personals that alleges the phone chat system “poses a danger and hazard to underage minors” because it has no effective age verification procedures.

Quest Personals requires users to be over 18, but Julie Doe lied about her age when she joined the chat line in early 2006.

The service “has implemented no meaningful protections or security measures to prevent underage users from ... talking to complete strangers many times their age, and from subsequently being enticed to meet by sexual predators,” the complaint, which seeks injunctive relief and unspecified damages, says.

Wayne McDonald, 58, was arrested in May 2006 on charges of assaulting Julie Doe and two other girls at his Marietta, Ga., home. He pleaded guilty and is serving 20 years in prison.

A similar negligence case filed against MySpace ran into the liability shield of the Communications Decency Act (CDA). A Texas judge ruled in February that the Web site, as a provider of an “interactive computer service,” could not be sued for failing to implement safety measures to protect minors.

In Julie Doe's case, a threshold issue would be whether a phone chat line is an “interactive computer service.” Courts have interpreted the scope of the CDA broadly and Quest Personals' system uses a technology -- “interactive voice response” -- that allows the caller to interact with a computer.

But the MySpace ruling suggests Quest Personals may not need the CDA's protection to successfully defend the case.

Applying tort law principles, U.S. District Judge Sam Sparks said MySpace had “no duty to protect” a minor from a sexual predator “nor to institute reasonable safety measures on its website. If anyone had a duty to protect [the minor], it was her parents, not MySpace.”

In a separate claim for infliction of emotional distress, Julie Doe's mother says she did try to protect her after discovering her use of the chat line. She asked Quest Personals to close the girl's account, but

Quest brazenly refused to do so, stating that [she] could not prove that Julie Doe was not under eighteen years of age.

That alleged conduct, however, does not appear to be enough to support liability since it was surely the rapist, rather than Quest Personals, who “intentionally and proximately caused [the mother's] extreme emotional distress.”

By Matthew Heller
4/5/07