Sued over sex traps, MySpace points to family responsibility
Posted: 19 January 2007 0543 hrs

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SAN FRANCISCO - MySpace defended itself on Thursday against new lawsuits charging it had failed to protect five girls from being lured into sex traps by predators on the popular teen social website.

The suits demanded unspecified millions of dollars in damages from MySpace and its parent company News Corp. for "negligence, recklessness, fraud" and misrepresentation.

"MySpace serves as an industry leader on Internet safety and we take proactive measures to protect our members," MySpace chief security officer Hemanshu Nigam said in a statement.

"Ultimately, Internet safety is a shared responsibility. We encourage everyone to apply commonsense offline safety lessons in their online experiences and engage in open family dialogue about smart web practices."

The suits were filed separately on Wednesday in Los Angeles Superior Court on behalf of the families of the girls, ages 14 and 15 and from the US states of New York, Texas, Pennsylvania and South Carolina.

Each of the girls was lured into meetings with men who had chatted them up on MySpace then plied them with drugs or alcohol and sexually abused them, according to the suits.

One of the men accused in the assaults is serving a 10-year prison sentence and the others are awaiting trials, according to lawyers for the girls.

"Blaming the families of abuse victims who were solicited online, as some have done, is a cynical excuse that ignores the fact that social networking sites can lead to heinous abuse by Internet predators," said Adam Loewy, a lawyer for some of the girls.

- AFP /ls