What sets this lawsuit apart from earlier cases isn't the number of images—it's the identity of the perpetrator. This wasn't some stranger online; it was her stepfather. According to reporting first broken by The Washington Post and followed up by TIDEZINE, a Wyoming woman has joined the lawsuit against xAI under the pseudonym Jane Doe 4, alleging that her stepfather used the Grok chatbot to turn her childhood photos into more than 7,000 sexually explicit images, which he then traded and circulated online.
The complaint states that among the images was a photo of her taken at age 11, which her stepfather later fed through Grok to produce sexually exploitative content. According to the report, state and local law enforcement raided the stepfather's electronic devices, seizing evidence involving child sexual abuse material (CSAM). Two days after the raid, the stepfather was found dead in his own car, in what police determined to be a suicide.
Jane Doe 4's addition expands the scope of a class-action lawsuit originally brought by three teenage girls in Tennessee. The suit initially alleged that Grok was used to generate sexually exploitative deepfake images of them, and according to the filing, the class action could potentially cover "at least thousands of minors."
xAI and Grok have repeatedly become the focus of CSAM-related investigations in recent months. This past January, California Attorney General Rob Bonta launched an investigation into xAI, alleging it generated non-consensual deepfake nudes of women and children. Later that same month, the EU also opened an inquiry into the X platform, examining whether adequate safeguards exist to prevent the spread of AI-generated CSAM content.
TIDEZINE reached out to xAI for comment on the latest developments in the lawsuit but had not received a response as of publication.
