An immutable fact of life that continues to prove true is that kids do the darnedest things, including finding themselves on porn sites because of their love of Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo. According to court documents shared by Variety, a woman is raising a class action lawsuit against Mattel, the manufacturer of special-edition Wicked dolls, after her child suffered “emotional distress” upon being directed to a pornographic site by the dolls’ packaging.
In what could become a costly typo, Mattel released numerous Wicked dolls that had the website Wicked.com on the back of the packaging box instead of the film’s correct address of wickedmovie.com. It would be a simple, harmless error if wicked.com didn’t direct people to Wicked Pictures, a pornographic production studio that’s been around for over 30 years (and has had that website domain for just as long). The lawsuit, filed by South Carolina mom Holly Ricketson, alleges that on or around November 11, she purchased one of those Wicked dolls for her young daughter and was shocked when her child showed her the Wicked.com site which, she says, “pasted scenes of pornographic advertisements across her phone screen.”
She claims her child was exposed to full-on nude sex scenes. Mattel issued a recall of the dolls but didn’t offer a refund. By explicitly advertising the toys to children aged as young as four, the lawsuit alleges the company neglected its duty to produce an appropriate product, packaging and all. While the toy giant didn’t directly address the lawsuit, it did argue that erroneously including a porn website on its packaging “in no way impacts the value or play experience provided by the product itself in the limited number of units sold before the correction.”
While Mattel appears to want to separate the packaging from the actual product, in terms of what the company is actually selling to children, there may be another way out of culpability. When you visit wicked.com, the first image you get is an age gate prompt that explains how the content on the page is restricted and only intended for viewing by those 18 years of age or older, with no pornographic images visible. Let’s say her child aimlessly clicked “enter,” as we all do when provided with a list of terms and conditions that could literally involve us consenting to giving our data to AI overlords for all we know. When I checked (for purely journalistic reasons), no advertisements flashed on my screen, and everyone depicted on the home page was fully clothed, even if they were scantily clad. It’s possible the child could have continued clicking through screens in search of Wicked content, and eventually stumbled upon the type of content her mother alleges she was exposed to on the site. But, this might be a case of principle vs practicality where, to the mom, the fact her child was directed to a site that contained pornography trumped the possibility that her child maybe didn’t “immediately” show her mom when she got on the site, as the lawsuit claims, and rather showed her mom the results of her going through the site on her own.
Even with the doll recall happening 11 days before the movie debuted, the Broadway adaptation still raked in $114 million at the box office in the United States alone in its opening weekend. With a Wicked Part II set to hit theaters next year, Mattel should definitely invest in a spell check to save itself any future legal headaches, and prevent the possibility of minors stumbling upon porn. Just a thought.