Is owning a child sex slave legal in California, as a social media influencer wrote? No, that's not true: It is at least a misdemeanor in California to solicit prostitution from teens. In April of 2025, Democratic lawmakers blocked passage of a proposed amendment that would have made soliciting prostitution with trafficked minors a felony, but that did not remove existing misdemeanor penalties and one section of the law allows prosecutors to seek felony penalties.
The claim appeared in an April 29, 2025 X.com post published by @RileyGaines (archived here) which opened: "For clarity, this means owning a child sex slave is legal in California." It continued:
How can any reasonable, just person identify themselves as a Democrat?
At the time this fact check was written, the post appeared like this on X:
(Source: X.com screenshot by Lead Stories.)
The post included a screenshot of the article the Associated Press produced about the defeat of legislation aimed at mandating felony charges for soliciting sex with 16 and 17-year-olds. The updated version of that article is here.
California's Legislative Counsel, the legal staff that drafts legislation for members of the Assembly, wrote in its analysis of the proposed legislation that under existing California law, a person who solicits any act of prostitution is guilty of a misdemeanor. Under existing law, if the person solicited was under 16 years of age, it's a misdemeanor and can be a felony. The proposed law would have made all such solicitations of a person under 18 a felony. But defeat of the proposal did not legalize child sex trafficking.
Additional Lead Stories fact checks pertaining to Riley Gaines, the author of the post, can be found here.
