America Online allowed a man later convicted as a sex offender to use the service to sell images of his sex acts with an 11-year-old boy, the child's mother alleges in a lawsuit.
The woman, identified only as Jane Doe, filed the suit against the nation's largest Internet provider Thursday, seeking $8 million in damages."AOL service became known to the pedophile community as a place for open discussion, trading, and marketing of child pornography," the suit alleged. "In essence, AOL Inc. has created a home shopping network for pedophiles."
The man advertised and sold videos and photographs throughout 1994, using AOL electronic chat rooms, the suit said.
The public chat rooms had names such as "Trading Teen Pics" and "Young Boys For You," spelled various ways, said Brian Smith, a West Palm Beach attorney who filed the suit.
AOL spokesman Andrew Graziani said he couldn't respond to the charges because company lawyers hadn't finished reviewing the document.
"Obviously there's no tolerance for any illegal activity on America Online," Graziani said from the company's Dulles, Va., headquarters.
Richard Russell, a 30-year-old former social studies teacher at a Royal Palm Beach Middle School, is serving a 22-year state sentence on two counts of attempted capital sexual battery and a 14-year federal prison sentence on child pornography charges.
Russell, who was arrested in February 1995, was part of a federal investigation into a ring of men who swapped child pornography by computer.
Jane Doe's son was one of the boys Russell seduced, then photographed and videotaped in 1994, according to the suit.