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I agree it is not as if they put an AO game in a M box. It is more sophisticated than that.

And I am not sure of the companies knowledge of when they knew. I do know that they lied and said it was not in their game but came from outside sources, when, in fact, it was in their content.

I don't think hiding the content absolves them of responsibility, and I don't think they can claim ignorance as an excuse. The game rating system is based on voluntary compliance by the game companies. If they have no obligation to know their own games it is meaningless. As I said earlier post, I don't think this lady deserves a cent, other than a refund if she wants to return it. I do think the company, if it knowingly falsely advertised this game, should not profit from that fraud.

I do know that they lied and said it was not in their game but came from outside sources, when, in fact, it was in their content.

They really screwed up the PR on that one. It's possible that whoever made the statement believed it, but they should have at least done a little research on the matter.

I don't think hiding the content absolves them of responsibility, and I don't think they can claim ignorance as an excuse.

Except that many games have "hidden" content buried in the code, never intended for public viewing, because in many cases it's just too complicated to dump it all. Sometimes it's a consequence of sloppying coding (where you don't want to lose track of your pointers or something), other times you may simply forget about the content that you're not using anymore. Countless games are rife with "hidden" content, intended for full release but scrapped when development time ran out (Knights of the Old Republic II is rife with this kind of thing) or early "draft" concepts that were eventually usurped when the designers decided to go in a different direction (Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver has a lot of audio files from conversations that never take place in-game). Is a developer expected, after sweating to make it to deadline, to comb back through several million lines of code to pore over content that may have been omitted but still included in the game code to insure that it doensn't run afoul of ESRB standards? Is a publisher -- who may not employ any programming staff at all -- to be expected to hire an outside consulting firm for every title that comes through it just to make sure there are no naughty words hidden in data files that consumers are never expected to view?

The game rating system is based on voluntary compliance by the game companies

Yes, it is. But some would argue that it isn't fair to rate a game based upon content that is never accessed.

(I do want to add that raving lunatic Jack Thompson actually wants to take this further and blame game companies for content that they didn't add. GTA:SA doesn't apply because Hot Coffee was their own creation, but he's lately gotten livid about The Sims 2 because someone released a mod that removes the 'pixelization' of nude characters. Exposing his abysmal ignorance, he claimed that it allowed viewing the genitalia of the characters, even the children; when EA responded by pointing out that the characters are as anatomically correct as Ken dolls, he said that it didn't matter and that they had a responsibility to stop these mods).

As I said earlier post, I don't think this lady deserves a cent, other than a refund if she wants to return it. I do think the company, if it knowingly falsely advertised this game, should not profit from that fraud.

IIRC, Rockstar/Take-Two are offering refunds to anyone who wants.