Attorneys for the plaintiff, identified in court documents as Rebecca Dallas, accuse the owners of Roblox and Discord of “recklessly and deceptively operating their business in a way that led to the sexual exploitation and suicide” of the plaintiff’s 15-year-old son, Ethan Dallas.
A California mother has filed a lawsuit against Roblox and Discord, claiming that her 15-year-old soon took his own life after being groomed and coerced into sending explicit images by an online predator.
According to NBC News, the lawsuit was filed Friday in San Francisco County Superior Court.
Attorneys for the plaintiff, identified in court documents as Rebecca Dallas, accuse the owners of Roblox and Discord of “recklessly and deceptively operating their business in a way that led to the sexual exploitation and suicide” of Dallas’s 15-year-old son, Ethan Dallas.
The lawsuit describes Ethan as a “bright, imaginative boy who loved gaming, streaming and interacting with friends online.” He started using Roblox, a gaming and communication platform popular with children, around the age of 9. His parents say that he only opened his account after obtaining their permission; they also claim to have place parental controls on his account.
Several years later, when Ethan was 12, he was targeted by “an adult sex predator” who misrepresented their age to win the boy’s trust. Initially innocent conversation slowly “escalated to sexual topics and explicit exchanges.” During this same period, the man encouraged Ethan to deactivate the parental controls on his account and take their discussion to Discord, a a social, chat-oriented application primarily used by gamers.
On Discord, the man “increasingly demanded explicit photographs and videos” of Ethan, threatening to post the boy’s previously-sent images on the internet if he didn’t comply.
Ethan ultimately complied out of fear.
“Tragically, Ethan was permanently harmed and haunted by these experiences, and he died by suicide at the age of 15,” the lawsuit states. NBC News notes that an obituary for Ethan Dallas indicates that the boy died sometime in April 2024.
Attorneys for the Dallas family now say that, had Roblox and Discord taken steps to ensure the safety of its users—like screening users before allowing them to open accounts, or requiring some form of identity and age verification—then “Ethan never would have never interacted with this predator, never suffered the harm that he did, and never died by suicide.”
Ethan’s mother, Rebecca Dallas, said that she thought both platforms would be safe for her son to use, largely because Discord and Roblox offer parental-control features and because they are marketed as casual, gamer-oriented platforms.
However, at the time of Ethan’s death, Roblox and Discord—together used by hundreds of millions of people around the world—imposed no age-related restrictions, lacked effective mechanisms for identity verification, and did not typically require anything beyond a working email address for registration and account creation.
The lawsuit states that the man who allegedly groomed Ethan was eventually arrested in Florida “for sexually exploiting other children through Defendants’ apps.”
Roblox’s current default settings prohibit communications between minors and adults, but children can still easily enter a fake birth date to bypass this restriction, among others.
In response to the lawsuit, a spokesperson for Discord said that, while the company does not comment on pending litigation, it is “deeply committed to safety.”
“We require all users to be at least 13 to use our platform. We use a combination of advanced technology and trained safety teams to proactively find and remove content that violates our policies,” Discord said. “We maintain strong systems to prevent the spread of sexual exploitation and grooming on our platform and also work with other technology companies and safety organizations to improve online safety across the internet.”
Sources
He Made a Friend on Roblox. Their Relationship Turned Sinister.
Roblox, Discord sued after 15-year-old boy was allegedly groomed online before he died by suicide
Join the conversation!