Ninth Circuit agrees Grindr is shielded from underage rape liability

PASADENA, Calif. (CN) — The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday agreed that Grindr, the world’s largest dating app for LGBTQ+ individuals, can’t be held liable for matching a then-15-year-old Canadian youth with four separate men who raped him.

The appellate upheld the findings by a trial judge in late 2023 that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act shields Grindr from the claims by John Doe, as the plaintiff is identified in court filings, in so far as he sought to treat the online platform as the publisher — or speaker — of the content posted by app’s users.

“Each of Doe’s state law claims necessarily implicates Grindr’s role as a publisher of third-party content,” U.S. Circuit Judge Sandra Ikuta, a George W. Bush appointee, wrote in the unanimous opinion.

Doe sued Grindr for defective design, defective manufacturing, and negligence because the app facilitates communication for illegal activity, including the exchange of child abuse material. But whereas he argued that Grindr had a duty to suppress matches and communications between adults and children, the panel disagreed.

“These claims necessarily implicate Grindr’s role as a publisher of third-party content because discharging the alleged duty would require Grindr to monitor third-party content and prevent adult communications to minors,” Ikuta said.

The panel also agreed that Doe failed to make a persuasive argument under the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, which can override an app or website’s protection under the Communications Decency Act because he couldn’t back up his claim that Grindr either was a knowing perpetrator of sex trafficking or knowingly benefitted from the sex trafficking.

Doe’s attorney, Carrie Goldberg, said they’ll ask the U.S. Supreme Court to take up the case.

“This would have been a moment for the Ninth Circuit to recognize that a product that recommends children to adults is defective,” Goldberg said in a statement. “We have faith the Supreme Court, which has expressed disgust about the overreach of Section 230, will correct course on this disappointing result.”

Doe was a high school student living in a rural town in Nova Scotia when he downloaded the Grindr app in April 2019 and, when prompted, confirmed that he was 18 or older. The same day he signed up, he was matched with an adult man who lived near his school and who raped him that afternoon. Over the next three days, he met with three other adult men through the app who also raped him.

When Doe’s mother confronted him about his whereabouts after his fourth Grindr hookup, he told her he met the men through the app and that they raped him. Three of the men have since been sentenced to prison for sex crimes against Doe. The fourth remains at large.

A federal judge in Los Angeles dismissed Doe’s lawsuit, agreeing with Grindr that his claims ultimately sought to hold the company liable for failing to regulate third-party content. Since this would treat Grindr as the publisher of its users’ content, the judge ruled, Doe’s claims were barred by Section 230.

“None of our claims have to do with the publication of content,” Goldberg told the appellate panel at a December hearing in Pasadena, California. She likened Doe’s lawsuit to a case against Snap Inc. where a different Ninth Circuit panel found that negligent design claims over a Snapchat feature weren’t barred by Section 230.

The Grindr app defects include a lack of age verification, the use of geolocation to match users to the nearest other user without segregating children from adults, and a failure to warn children that there is a real problem with child rape on the platform, Goldberg argued.

The other two judges on the appellate panel were U.S. Circuit Judges Jay Bybee, another George W. Bush appointee, and Bridget Bade, a Donald Trump appointee.

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