In a statement after his arrest, Atkinson said he met the girl on Fortnite and began to chat with her and make video calls on an app called Discord, the affidavit says. — Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash
A 26-year-old man is accused of raping a 15-year-old girl he met while playing the online video game Fortnite, according to a Florida sheriff’s office.
Dillon Atkinson, 26, is charged with lewd and lascivious behaviour or lewd and lascivious battery on a victim between 12 and 16 years old, according to an arrest affidavit from the Lee County Sheriff’s Office. Lewd and lascivious behaviour is also known as statutory rape, according to a Florida attorney’s office.
The victim’s parents called police on Dec 29 after discovering a chat between their 15-year-old daughter and someone with an email address matching Atkinson’s name on her school-issued Chromebook, according to the affidavit.
When her father asked her about the chat, she told him that the man was 26 years old and that she’d been “having a sexual relationship” with him, the affidavit says. She also said she’d met the man on Fortnite in June.
Fortnite is a multiplayer, free-to-play “Battle Royale” video game where players enter an online world and collaborate to survive. The game’s developer, Epic Games, is facing a class action lawsuit from parents in Canada who say the game is designed to be addictive, McClatchy News reported. The lawsuit says developer designed Fortnite to “create a dependency in users and failed to provide warnings of the risks associated with playing,” ABC 7 reported.
A spokeswoman for Epic Games said in a statement that the company has protections in place for younger players, including parental controls and a feature that allows players to report inappropriate behaviour during gameplay. The company also offers accounts for players under 13 that require parental consent to access certain features, such as chat.
“We take reports about the safety of our players seriously and thoroughly investigate them, including working directly with local law enforcement to take action,” the statement says.
Atkinson raped the 15-year-old on at least two occasions, according to the affidavit.
Deputies arrested Atkinson on Dec 29 in Fort Myers, the affidavit says. Fort Myers is about 130 miles south of Tampa.
In a statement after his arrest, Atkinson said he met the girl on Fortnite and began to chat with her and make video calls on an app called Discord, the affidavit says. Their communication started friendly but later “turned romantic in nature”, the affidavit says.
He told police he knew she was underage because the girl told him she was 16 years old, according to the affidavit. The age of consent in Florida is 18.
Atkinson is being held on a US$100,000 (RM440,250) bond, according to Lee County jail records. – The Charlotte Observer/Tribune News Service
