Jane Rosenberg/Reuters
- Fourteen states filed separate lawsuits Tuesday alleging TikTok harms children's mental health.
- NY AG Letitia James helms the effort and has tapped senior counsel Kevin Wallace as lead litigator.
- Wallace twice grilled Trump in James' NY fraud case and also gave opening and closing statements.
Fresh off the success of a $454 million fraud verdict against former President Donald Trump, New York Attorney General Letitia James has now picked her most prominent Trump litigator to take on her next big target — TikTok.
On Tuesday, 14 states filed separate lawsuits against the popular, Chinese-owned social media app, alleging it profits from damaging children's mental health.
James' office laid the groundwork for this bi-coastal TikTok litigation throughout much of this year, networking with other attorneys general while building a legal framework and a Manhattan-based staff led by Kevin C. Wallace, a veteran AG senior enforcement counsel.
Wallace has been something of a stealth David to James' Goliath targets, including her ultimately failed anti-trust efforts against (a pre-Meta) Facebook between 2020 and 2022.
Wallace was at James' side in 2022 as she announced she had sued Trump for larding his annual financial statements with billions of dollars in fraudulent exaggerations of his worth.
Wallace twice went head-to-head with Trump himself. He questioned Trump pretrial in an April 2023 deposition, during which the verbose former president insisted he was too busy "saving millions of lives" as president to commit business fraud.
At one point, Wallace complained of Trump: "We're going to be here until midnight if your client answers every question with an eight-minute speech."
Wallace went on to deliver opening statements and closing arguments when the lawsuit went to trial in Manhattan last year. And when Trump was subpoenaed to the stand a month into the trial, it was Wallace who questioned him.
Brittainy Newman/AP
Tuesday's lawsuits against TikTok allege separately, but in like language, that the app's calculatedly addicting qualities cause severe mental health and even physical harm to young users.
Around-the-clock notifications disrupt their sleep, the "autoplay" feature provides an endless stream of videos, and "beauty filters" encourage young girls to "fix" their appearances, the James lawsuit alleges.
"Young people have died or gotten injured doing dangerous TikTok challenges and many more are feeling sad, anxious, and depressed because of TikTok's addictive features," James wrote in a press release.
An attorney who represents TikTok in multiple adolescent addiction and personal injury lawsuits did not immediately return a request for comment Tuesday afternoon.
The TikTok lawsuit may be another of the kind of yearslong litigation marathons that James' office hasn't shied from since she first took office in 2019.
Her investigation into the National Rifle Association and its former executive Wayne LaPierre began six years ago, and resulted in a 2020 lawsuit and $5.4 million Manhattan jury judgment that is still in post-trial litigation.
The Trump fraud investigation began in 2018, and also isn't over yet. The $454 million judgment is under appeal, with a decision expected any time in the coming weeks.
TikTok's lawyers may be interested to know that Wallace in particular, does not shy from yearslong litigation. In April, he signed a letter to Trump's fraud judge warning that James' office is still investigating if the former president withheld evidence, a matter that, like the appeal, remains pending.