When She told the Man She Met on Facebook She Wanted to Leave, “I Got Hit,” She Tells Laurie Segall

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An argument with her mother led her to accept her new Facebook friend’s “modeling” job offer and meet up in person. Then 15 years old, she went with her “friend” to a hotel where his aims became obvious. She wanted to leave. He hit her, says the woman, now 24. What happened next is a horrible and familiar story to many minors who have been tricked and coerced into sex trafficking by people they met on social media sites. “Jane Doe” – 60 MINUTES+ agreed to protect her identity – tells her story publicly for the first time to Laurie Segall for a report on sex trafficking’s connection to social media and a lawyer’s quest to hold Facebook responsible. The story is streaming now on Paramount+.

Her adult attacker opened a fake Facebook account, posed as someone else and friended her. She says eventually an offer to “model” was strategically made. “He waited until I got into an argument with my mother, and I just wanted to go, so I was feeling like the best option was to go make $2,000 being a model at the time. So that’s when we met,” she says. The poses were erotic and she asked to leave. “And as soon as I said that, I got hit,” she says. She endured multiple rapes: First her “friend,” then he posted her images to an online prostitution site. More men showed up within hours and she endured several more rapes. She was able to finally get a phone and called her mother who called police. Her attacker and one of the other men were arrested and sent to prison for decades.

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) reported instances of adults enticing children increased nearly 100% in the past year. Some of them wind up like this victim in what the Department of Homeland Security called a “worldwide epidemic” of minors being sex trafficked. Up to 100,000 such cases are estimated to occur in the U.S. each year and in 2019, nearly 40% of these victims met their traffickers online. NCMEC’s cyber tip line received 21.7 million reports of child exploitation last year – Facebook and other platforms it owns accounted for 94% of them.

Jane Doe’s lawyer in her suit against Facebook, Annie McAdams, blames the social media giant “100%.” Facebook has twice tried and failed to get the suit dismissed and it recently went to the Texas Supreme Court. That’s further in the judicial system than hundreds of similar cases before. McAdams says she’s come this far due to an increased scrutiny on technology and the fact that she filed in Texas, a state she says won’t tolerate the abuse of children and where the crime against Jane Doe took place. McAdams blames the Facebook algorithms that brought her client and her attacker together; they need to employ more substantial verification, she says. “I think what really stands out to me is the age differential; the way that they connected; the algorithms that existed to connect this minor child with this adult predator; the signs that existed on this predator’s site,” McAdams tells Segall.

McAdams is a personal injury attorney. She is claiming product liability and gross negligence under Texas law. “I’m still representing catastrophically injured individuals. The harm is just being created by not just the obvious sources of harm, not just the trafficker, not just the sex buyer…But actual corporations that are equally knowing in the facilitation of these harms,” says McAdams, who believes the suit may wind up before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Facebook argued to dismiss the suit in Texas’ Supreme Court, claiming it was protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the law that says Internet platforms are not responsible for the content posted by its users. In a statement Facebook told 60 MINUTES+, “We use technology to thwart this kind of abuse and we encourage people to use the reporting links found across our site.”

Nearly a week after 60 MINUTES+ asked Facebook for comment, the company announced new safety measures to limit adults from reaching out to minors they’re not already connected with on Instagram, which is owned by Facebook.

Jane Doe remains traumatized by her ordeal; she says she doesn’t know how to feel anymore and is numb. “I don’t know how to feel. I don’t want to cry and be miserable because I’m still dwelling on the past…I wouldn’t think that would happen to me in life.”

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