Excessive-flying “Miami get together woman” and tech influencer Lucy Guo has been named in a class-action lawsuit alleging she and her subscription-based social media platform for influencers, Passes, knowingly recruited underage women to create and distribute little one pornography to members.
The bombshell swimsuit alleges how Passes and one of many specific web site’s brokers, Alec Celestin, took pains to cover the alleged sexual exploitation of the teenager plaintiffs, and that Guo herself “personally intervened” to override the positioning’s inner restrictions to strip underage content material creators of protections put in place to guard minors. Guo has vigorously denied the accusations.
In accordance with the swimsuit, between July and September of final yr, Celestin and Lani Ginoza, the positioning’s erstwhile director of expertise, instructed lead plaintiff and OnlyFans mannequin Alice Rosenblum — who was allegedly 17 on the time — to “create pictures and movies of herself engaged in sexually specific conduct” and add them on the positioning through its knowledge storage system generally known as “The Vault.”
It additional alleges that each Passes and Guo knew Rosenblum was underage however by no means took any steps to thwart the content material from being made out there, and that the positioning allegedly stays in possession of pornographic pictures and movies of the then-underaged women who make up the category members.
Celestin and Ginoza, the swimsuit claims, used Passes’ web messaging system to market, promote and distribute the illicit pictures to clients in trade for cash.
Passes, which payments itself as offering “the instruments to assist creators develop into entrepreneurs,” boasts greater than 500,000 subscribers, and 1,000 content material creators, together with massive names like actress Bella Thorne, NBA legend Shaquille O’Neal and gymnast and influencer Livvy Dunne.
Between July 2023 and February 2024, Passes raised greater than $49 million from a who’s who of angel traders and enterprise funds, together with YouTuber Jake Paul’s Anti Fund, Paris Hilton and Bruce Gersh’s 11:11 Media and OG Silicon Valley-based enterprise capital agency Menlo Ventures.
In January 2024, Fanfix, which additionally supplies monetization companies for influencers, sued Passes for alleged unfair enterprise practices, claiming Guo and Celestin — whom Guo was accused of poaching from Fanfix — conspired to steal confidential info to recruit creators.
In accordance with the brand new swimsuit, Passes at one level allowed content material creators aged 15 to 17 to affix, however they had been subjected to enhanced restrictions supposed for the safety of minors on the platform.
Becoming a member of the positioning as a minor required “verifiable mother or father consent” types which included a signed consent kind, a video convention held with a mother or father, a replica of the mother or father’s identification or license, or a “profitable knowledge-based problem check” for folks, the swimsuit states.
Passes’ personal group and content material pointers explicitly forbade “specific grownup content material, nudity, or pornography,” in addition to touting itself as being “dedicated to defending minors” on the platform, and ensures that any picture or video of a minor engaged in sexually specific content material would instantly be eliminated and reported, in keeping with the court docket submitting.
Nonetheless, the swimsuit claims that on or about Feb. 24, the choice for 15- to 17-year-olds to affix the positioning — in addition to the main points of its stringent inner safeguards — “vanished” from Passes’ phrases and circumstances.
Guo, 30, is a Silicon Valley wunderkind who established herself as a profitable programmer at a younger age by creating one of many first-ever Twitter bots that allowed customers to auto-follow based mostly on particular hashtags.
In 2017, she garnered a spot as one of many “30 Below 30 in Enterprise Tech” by Forbes, and was as soon as awarded the $100,000 Thiel Fellowship — created by entrepreneur and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel to incentivize college students 22 and youthful to drop out of faculty and create a startup or pursue scientific analysis.
Following information of the class-action swimsuit breaking, Guo proclaimed her innocence in a prolonged publish on X.
“The lawsuit, at the very least as it’s associated to Passes AND myself, is totally meritless,” she wrote, claiming she had “ZERO” interplay with the plaintiff, and that the positioning at all times acted rapidly when stories of illicit exercise got here in.
She additional claimed Celestin “was not an agent of Passes nor was he ever an worker,” of the corporate.
“We’re assured the details are on our facet and sit up for presenting these details in court docket.”
The Put up reached out to Celestin via an electronic mail deal with believed to belong to him however didn’t instantly hear again Sunday. A message despatched to a telephone quantity listed for Ginoza was additionally not returned late Sunday.
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