A Colorado family is suing online gaming platform Roblox and Instagram owner Meta, alleging the companies’ negligence and misrepresentations about safety facilitated the sexual exploitation of a developmentally disabled teen girl in Denver.
The 119-page lawsuit, filed Friday in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on behalf of a Jane Doe plaintiff and her unnamed parent, alleges the girl — who started using Roblox when she was 13 — was groomed and sexually exploited by a predator on both the gaming platform and Instagram.
“Our client’s childhood was stolen because Roblox and Meta continue to choose profits over basic safety for their users,” the Denver family’s attorneys, Sarah London, Andrew Kaufman and Isabel Velez, said in a statement Monday. “These platforms are marketed as family-friendly, but they make it alarmingly easy for predators to exploit children.”
Roblox spokesperson Stefanie Notaney said in a statement that the online gaming platform — which allows players to interact with a monthly userbase that includes half of all American children under 16 — aims to create one of the safest online environments for users. The gaming platform features 24/7 human moderation to help detect and prevent inappropriate content and behavior, Notaney said.
“We are deeply troubled by any incident that endangers our users, and safety is a top priority,” Notaney wrote. “While no system is perfect, Roblox has implemented rigorous safeguards, including restrictions on sharing personal information, links and user-to-user image sharing, and prohibiting sexual conversations. We also partner with law enforcement and leading child safety organizations worldwide to combat the sexual exploitation of children.”
Meta representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
According to the lawsuit, the plaintiff started playing Roblox in 2023 when she was 13. Her mother was hesitant to allow her to play the massively multiplayer online game, the lawsuit said, so she signed her daughter up for supervised Roblox classes touted as a way to use the game to teach coding, design and other skills.
The teen found a workaround to continue playing Roblox outside the bounds of the monitored classes, the lawsuit said.
“Roblox’s platform facilitates children’s addiction and obsession with its platform,” the lawsuit states. “Additionally, Roblox’s defectively designed registration and account creation process allows children to easily skirt parental controls and restrictions.”
By the time the teen girl used the gaming platform, the lawsuit said Roblox knew from “countless police reports” and publicized incidents that its platform was “widely used by predators to target, groom and sexually assault children.”
Instead of warning parents and children, the lawsuit said Roblox continued its “deceptive campaign” portraying the app as safe for kids.
In 2025, Jane Doe’s mother found that her teen daughter was being sexually exploited by a predator through the gaming platform and Instagram, the lawsuit alleged.
According to the complaint, the predator messaged the teen sexually explicit questions and simulated sexual acts on the teen girl’s online character. The predator then allegedly coerced the girl into creating an Instagram account and messaged her there, too.
The predator allegedly lured the teen girl into sending nude images of herself, which were reciprocated, the lawsuit said. Soon after that, the teen girl ran away from home, was hospitalized various times and attempted to take her own life, according to the complaint.
The lawsuit said Jane Doe “suffered, and continues to suffer, life-altering psychological and emotional injuries, including severe mental anguish and pain, and loss of enjoyment of life.”
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