The Scale AI cofounder’s second startup Passes banned creators under 18 ahead of being sued for allegedly hosting child sexual abuse material, which Guo has denied.
Lucy Guo’s first startup hit, AI unicorn Scale, made her one of America’s richest women, with a stake worth more than $500 million. Her second, Passes, promised to rip up the script on the creator economy set by rivals Patreon and Fanfix, pledging to help creators as young as 15 make more money on what her startup said was the “safest and most secure creator and fan platform on the planet.” But unlike her competitors, Guo allowed underage teenagers to post revealing content, as long as they had parental consent.
Passes took off, raising $65 million from investors like Mary Meeker’s Bond Capital, Menlo Ventures and talent agent Michael Ovitz. Guo signed deals with celebrities like Shaq, DJ Kygo, gymnast Olivia Dunne and the college sports program at the University of Michigan — as well as teenage social media stars like Ava Majury, singer Sicily Rose, and actress Ava Justin. But last month, she made an abrupt change: Passes banned all underage users and purged the site of their content just days before being hit with a lawsuit accusing the company of hosting child sexual abuse material (CSAM).
The lawsuit, filed by Florida teenager Alice Rosenblum in civil court at the United States District Court for theUnited States District Court for the Southern District of Florida, claims Passes hosted and distributed illegal, sexually explicit images of her in the two months before her 18th birthday. Federal and state laws have strict rules that criminalize the possession or distribution of any explicit imagery of a minor even if they are now adults. Rosenblum’s lawyers declined to comment on whether the teen had reported the images to law enforcement agencies.
When Rosenblum was 17, she was allegedly recruited by Alec Celestin, a talent agent linked with Guo who also has an equity stake in Passes, and Lani Ginoza, Passes’ former director of talent who at the time was working for Celestin’s agency. According to the suit, Celestin and Ginoza encouraged Rosenblum to take nude images and videos and upload them to Passes. Both are named as defendants in the suit, along with Passes and Guo.
The now 18-year-old shouldn’t have been able to join the site as a creator without her parent’s permission but the lawsuit alleges that Passes allowed this check to be skipped, and other Passes staff removed blocks on her account that would have prevented users from direct messaging her because she was a minor.
“The defendants exploited Ms. Rosenblum and other creators who were minors on Passes and they are now sadly victims of child pornography. We look forward to vindicating their rights in court and obtaining a measure of justice for them,” attorney Christopher Clark, who is representing Rosenblum, told Forbes.
Guo, a 30 Under 30 alum, last week posted on Instagram: “The definition of evil is a sad attempt to ruin someone’s reputation and business with false allegations for money (15 million to be exact).” Guo did not respond to a request for comment.
Rosenblum’s attorney declined to comment on settlement negotiations.
Passes spokesperson Andrew Brimmer of crisis PR firm Joele Frank said: “This lawsuit is untethered from reality. The claims of misconduct relate to the plaintiff’s third-party talent manager, Alec Celestin. Passes is a safe platform for brand-friendly content creators, and we have strict policies to enforce our content guidelines. The alleged conduct described in the complaint is a direct violation of our terms of service, content guidelines and everything Passes stands for.”
Celestin confirmed he was Rosenblum’s former agent but said he had no control over Passes, and was not involved in uploading Rosenblum’s content to the site. “We followed strict legal guidelines as well as guidance from counsel to make sure we would not run into any issues,” Celestin said in a statement to Forbes.
Ginoza did not respond to a request for comment.
With creator platforms like Patreon and Fanfix barring under 18s, and social networks like TikTok, YouTube and Instagram also preventing minors from earning a share of advertising revenue (without parental consent), teens who have built followings online have few ways to monetize their fame. Passes offered an additional option.
But Guo’s decision to work with underage creators like Rosenblum has made her the newest player in a dark corner of the internet where children can build huge online followings but often draw uncomfortable and dangerous attention from adult men.
It’s a rampant problem on social media. Forbes reported in 2022 that TikTok Live had become a “strip club filled with 15-year-olds” being sent cash gifts largely by men. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2023 that Instagram’s algorithm served risque footage of children to test accounts who followed teen and preteen influencers, and funneled pedophiles to accounts selling child sexual abuse material. TikTok said it had a zero tolerance policy on child exploitation, and removed the videos involved, while Meta said the WSJ’s tests were not representative of what its users see.
The content posted by some teenage creators (or their parents) on social media has exposed them to grooming from pedophiles. These dangers have also crossed into the real world. The father of teenage TikTok star Ava Majury shot and killed a stalker who broke into their Florida home in 2021 (he was cleared of all charges). Majury, who is now 18, posts on Passes, and her Passes profile was shown on a billboard in New York’s Times Square earlier this month to promote her on Valentine’s Day.
Guo’s decision to work with teenage creators was always controversial. In interviews after Passes’ launch, she has talked up adult stars like magician Anna DeGuzman, fitness influencer Alysia Magen, and therapist Jeff Guenther (only DeGuzman remains on the platform). But elsewhere on her site, teenagers have posted photos in bikinis and revealing outfits to sell subscriptions to exclusive content and access to their direct messages to the site’s users.
Got a tip? Contact reporters Iain Martin at iain.martin@forbes.com
A post from one 16-year-old Passes creator seen by Forbes was titled: “Not your ordinary jammies [no under 18s emoji] left it open to give you a good view ;).” Another from a 17-year-old Passes creator was labelled “all bare and natural.” “Such a beautiful young woman. Watching you grow up and to how you are today,” wrote @mark8270, a user with a profile picture of a middle aged male, on the profile of a 16-year-old creator reviewed by Forbes. A number of Rosenblum’s Passes posts mentioned in the lawsuit referenced nudity, underwear and other suggestive terms.
The creator leaderboard on Passes app shows that three teenage creators — Sicily Rose, Ava Majury and Ava Justin, who are all now adults — were ranked as the site’s most popular this month based on the volume of messages.
“Not hard to…kick off creators who are under 18 from monetizing on a platform, unless of course you are intentionally keeping them on because you want to profit from them,”
The seedy details of the lawsuit and the sexually suggestive posts from other under 18 Passes creators are a jarring contrast to the glitz and glamor of the 30-year-old founder’s Florida life. Interviews and media profiles have fawned over Guo’s $7 million condo in a luxury Miami building designed by Zaha Hadid, her rose-colored Ferrari Roma and her blowout parties featuring exotic wildlife.
“Not hard to…kick off creators who are under 18 from monetizing on a platform, unless of course you are intentionally keeping them on because you want to profit from them,” wrote Rosie Nguyen, cofounder of a rival creator platform Fanhouse, on X in January. Fanhouse was acquired by Passes in July 2023, and Nguyen left the startup at the time of the deal. Guo told Techcrunch at the time of the Fanhouse takeover: “We do have content guidelines, it’s just more lax.”
Passes said in a statement that only around 20 of its over 1,000 creators were under 18 prior to its crackdown. “We believe all creators of any age should be able to monetize their brand, but we will not do that if it risks the safety of our creators,” said Passes spokesperson Brimmer.
Even after Passes’ ban, the profile of at least one under age creator remained on the platform until it was flagged by Forbes.
Rosenblum found internet fame at a young age, building a following of over 130,000 on Instagram. Her account there now almost exclusively features photographs of her wearing bikinis and lingerie, with some posts dating back to 2021. Rosenblum would have been 14 at the time of this first post.
Minors involved in legal cases involving CSAM are normally not named but Rosenblum was identified in the court filing submitted by her lawyers. She now has an account on the creator platform OnlyFans, which permits nudity and sexually explicit content.
The suit alleges Rosenblum was recruited to Passes by talent agent Alec Celestin in May 2024, who signed her as a client of his management company and pushed her to join Passes as a creator. In another legal battle with a rival startup, Celestin claimed to have worked with Guo to recruit creators for Passes.
Rosenblum’s suit claims that Celestin and Ginoza encouraged her to take sexually explicit images of herself while she was still underage and upload them to the site’s “vault,” where exclusive material was stored. Celestin is alleged to have been aware of Rosenblum’s age, having seen her driver’s license; and to have encouraged her in texts to create sexually explicit material for a “18th birthday themed marketing campaign.” According to the suit, Passes staff then advertised and sold this material on Passes in the months before Rosenblum turned 18.
“The allegation is these photos were put up within a month before Alice’s 18th birthday in September,” said Passes spokesperson Brimmer. “Until the day Passes received a demand from a plaintiffs’ attorney in mid-February threatening legal action, Passes was never informed of any illicit or problematic content on her account.”
Celestin told Forbes that Rosenblum had expressed interest in posting nude content after her 18th birthday but he had warned of the legal risk. “We were extremely explicit & direct in letting her know that she could not send me or anyone I worked with said content ahead of her being the legal age to do so,” Celestin said in a statement to Forbes.
Nude images from Rosenblum’s Passes account were later leaked online, and circulated at her high school, per the suit. “The aggressive marketing and widespread distribution of the images and videos of Plaintiff engaged in sexually explicit conduct had become so prevalent that they even reached her high school community,” said her attorney Clark in the court filing.
Passes claims to bar nudity from its platform and has said it runs four separate AI programs to detect sexually explicit content and child sexual abuse material. The lawsuit claims that the illegal images of Rosenblum were flagged by Passes but remained accessible on its platform. Rosenblum’s account was only taken offline by Passes earlier this month.
In a now deleted tweet, Guo said on March 2 that: “Our ML classifiers were not running because he [Celestin] was marked as a talent manager. They are expensive to run and we trusted a talent manager to abide by our TOS. Unfortunately, we were wrong about that.”
When challenged by X users over why Passes’ AI filters were removed for talent agents like Celestin, she replied in another deleted tweet: “Cost and trust. It’s an important learning lesson for us.”
The lawsuit also alleges that while Passes had banned underage users and creators from receiving direct messages as a safety measure, Passes staff lifted this check for Rosenblum. That move was apparently lucrative, with the lawsuit claiming that the site earned $47,000 from unnamed “agents of Passes” impersonating Rosenblum in just one sexually-explicit conversation with a high spending member of the website.
“We do not trust children to chat, but we believed she had an adult supervising her account,” said Passes spokesperson Brimmer. A Forbes review of the profiles of four other creators under 18 found language claiming subscribers would have direct message access to the teenagers.
Passes said Celestin was an independent consultant who worked with the startup to make social media content from May 2023 to May 2024. He posted a photo with Guo on Instagram in February 2024 celebrating Passes raising $40 million. “Passes just got a lot more young, hot, rich and famous,” wrote Celestin in the post. Guo replied in the same post: “Thank you!! You’re the best.” Celestin posted on X in January, “Ask me Anything. I’ve helped build a unicorn (private) @passes with @lucy_guo.” The post attracted no replies.
Passes and Guo have since tried to downplay their ties to Celestin, with Guo posting on Instagram on February 28 that she “cut contact off with Alec a long time ago after he tried to steal $50k from us and went completely manic. He was never an employee.” Celestin disputed Guo’s comment, and claimed Passes owed him money.
Texts and posts from messaging app Telegram seen by Forbes suggest that Guo and Celestin were still in contact in January, and Celestin had attended meetings at Passes’ Miami office as recently as November.
Two lawsuits filed by rival platform Fanfix last year also allege that Guo recruited Celestin, Fanfix’s then director of brand and community, in 2023 to help poach its top creators for her new startup. Celestin is alleged to have downloaded thousands of internal documents and files before leaving Fanfix and used this to target creators. Fanfix and its founders obtained a restraining order against Celestin in January over allegedly threatening social media posts and texts he directed towards his former employers. Celestin disputed the lawsuits and claimed he had faced retaliation for whistleblowing over a HR complaint. Passes contested both lawsuits, which are ongoing.
Guo was also sued by biography website Famous Birthdays in 2024 over a claim that she ran a script and ChatGPT to download and rework the profiles of over 100,000 celebrities and creators. Passes also contested this lawsuit.
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