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High-flying “Miami party girl” 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 girls to create and distribute child pornography to members.
The bombshell suit alleges how Passes and one of the explicit site’s agents, Alec Celestin, took pains to hide the alleged sexual exploitation of the teen plaintiffs, and that Guo herself “personally intervened” to override the site’s internal restrictions to strip underage content creators of protections put in place to protect minors. Guo has vigorously denied the accusations.
According to the suit, between July and September of last year, Celestin and Lani Ginoza, the site’s erstwhile director of talent, instructed lead plaintiff and OnlyFans model Alice Rosenblum — who was allegedly 17 at the time — to “create images and videos of herself engaged in sexually explicit conduct” and upload them on the site via its data storage system known as “The Vault.”
It further alleges that both Passes and Guo knew Rosenblum was underage but never took any steps to thwart the content from being made available, and that the site allegedly remains in possession of pornographic images and videos of the then-underaged girls who make up the class members.
Celestin and Ginoza, the suit claims, used Passes’ internet messaging system to market, sell and distribute the illicit images to customers in exchange for money.
Passes, which bills itself as providing “the tools to help creators become entrepreneurs,” boasts more than 500,000 subscribers, and 1,000 content creators, including big names like actress Bella Thorne, NBA legend Shaquille O’Neal and gymnast and influencer Livvy Dunne.
Between July 2023 and February 2024, Passes raised more than $49 million from a who’s who of angel investors and venture funds, including YouTuber Jake Paul’s Anti Fund, Paris Hilton and Bruce Gersh’s 11:11 Media and OG Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm Menlo Ventures.
In January 2024, Fanfix, which also provides monetization services for influencers, sued Passes for alleged unfair business practices, claiming Guo and Celestin — whom Guo was accused of poaching from Fanfix — conspired to steal confidential information to recruit creators.
According to the new suit, Passes at one point allowed content creators aged 15 to 17 to join, but they were subjected to enhanced restrictions intended for the protection of minors on the platform.
Joining the site as a minor required “verifiable parent consent” forms which included a signed consent form, a video conference held with a parent, a copy of the parent’s identification or license, or a “successful knowledge-based challenge test” for parents, the suit states.
Passes’ own community and content guidelines explicitly forbade “explicit adult content, nudity, or pornography,” as well as touting itself as being “committed to protecting minors” on the platform, and guarantees that any image or video of a minor engaged in sexually explicit content would immediately be removed and reported, according to the court filing.
However, the suit claims that on or about Feb. 24, the option for 15- to 17-year-olds to join the site — as well as the details of its stringent internal safeguards — “vanished” from Passes’ terms and conditions.
Guo, 30, is a Silicon Valley wunderkind who established herself as a successful programmer at a young age by creating one of the first-ever Twitter bots that allowed users to auto-follow based on specific hashtags.
In 2017, she garnered a spot as one of the “30 Under 30 in Enterprise Tech” by Forbes, and was once awarded the $100,000 Thiel Fellowship — created by entrepreneur and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel to incentivize students 22 and younger to drop out of college and create a startup or pursue scientific research.
Following news of the class-action suit breaking, Guo proclaimed her innocence in a lengthy post on X.
“The lawsuit, at least as it is related to Passes AND myself, is utterly meritless,” she wrote, claiming she had “ZERO” interaction with the plaintiff, and that the site always acted quickly when reports of illicit activity came in.
She further claimed Celestin “was not an agent of Passes nor was he ever an employee,” of the company.
“We are confident the facts are on our side and look forward to presenting those facts in court.”
The Post reached out to Celestin through an email address believed to belong to him but did not immediately hear back Sunday. A message sent to a phone number listed for Ginoza was also not returned late Sunday.
