Annie McAdams

Chapter 98 Against a Platform

Texas enacted Chapter 98 of the Civil Practice and Remedies Code in 2009. It allows a trafficking survivor to sue the trafficker — and anyone who knowingly benefits from participating in a venture that traffics a person.

For nine years, the second half of that sentence went mostly unused.

Pretty Enough to Be a Model

In 2012 a sixteen-year-old girl in Texas was using Facebook. A user with friends in common sent her a request and she accepted it. He messaged her that she was pretty enough to be a model.

Within hours of meeting him in person, she was being trafficked.

Annie McAdams filed suit on her behalf in October 2018 in Harris County. As lead counsel she named Facebook, Backpage and its principals, and the motel where the exploitation occurred. The pleading alleged that Facebook provided the first point of contact and gave the trafficker credibility when he approached the child through its platform.

Liability for Facebook's Own Conduct

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act generally prevents an online service from being treated as the publisher or speaker of content created by someone else. McAdams argued that the Chapter 98 claim sought to hold Facebook responsible for its own alleged participation and benefit — not for the trafficker's words.

The theory tracked the statute's elements. A trafficking venture. Participation in it, through a product that let an adult reach a child and through what the company did with the reports it received. And a benefit, measured the way the company measures itself: engagement, time on the service, advertising revenue.

McAdams has put the underlying problem in one sentence: Facebook does not require anyone to verify who they are, so what looks like a fourteen-year-old classmate can be a forty-five-year-old convicted child molester — and the platform is the bridge from the predator into your home.

Congress had amended Section 230 in 2018 through the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, permitting certain federal and state sex-trafficking claims. The dispute was whether this survivor's Chapter 98 allegations fit that opening.

June 25, 2021

The Supreme Court of Texas held that Section 230 did not require dismissal of the Chapter 98 claim as pleaded, and denied mandamus relief as to that claim.

The ruling sent the statutory trafficking claim back to the trial court for discovery. The requested record included account and age information, the reports the company received and what it did with each of them, its moderation and escalation records, and the internal communications behind the relevant business decisions.

McAdams's clients had fought for more than two years to reach the stage at which a plaintiff normally starts.

Some of that record was perishable. When Facebook launched a tool in January 2020 letting users detach their accounts from past activity data, McAdams recognized immediately what it meant for cases whose evidence lived in exactly that data.

Rooms and Truck Stops

Earlier, in January 2018, McAdams and co-counsel had filed for a survivor exploited beginning at fifteen, naming Backpage, fifteen hotel chains, and five truck-stop operators in a single action.

The hotel claims examined notice: what the people at the front desk saw, whether it reached a manager, and which entity — brand or local operator — had the authority to act on it. McAdams has argued that a hotel should be accountable when forty or fifty men visit one room in one night and no one intervenes.

A later action against Motel 6 entities turned on the same axis, with the added question of which corporate entity actually controlled the decision.

That allocation shapes the practice. McAdams identifies the specific responsibility alleged against each defendant, and then goes after the records capable of proving or disproving that one thing.

Why Houston

Facebook argued the cases belonged in California.

McAdams answered that Houston was where the children were harmed, and that Houston had long been recognized as a trafficking hub — that the venue question and the merits pointed at the same place. The cases stayed.

Social Work First

McAdams earned a social-work degree at the University of Texas before her law degree at South Texas College of Law in 2005.

McAdams protects her clients' identities through pseudonyms and limits public disclosures to what their claims require. She structures interviews to avoid making a survivor retell the experience more times than the case requires. The survivor's account establishes how the contact began and what happened where. McAdams tests that account against business records to determine who owned the account, what an employee saw, who was told, and which company controlled the decision at issue.

She founded Annie McAdams PC after a decade at Steelman & McAdams. Beyond trafficking, her practice includes catastrophic injury and product cases, and she represents more than 280 homeowners against a master-planned-community developer over repeated flooding. She is admitted in Texas, Colorado, Tennessee, and New Mexico.