Dating app giant failed to rein in dangerous users, Pulitzer Center/The Markup investigation reveals
For years, the dating app giant that owns top platforms like Tinder and Hinge has failed to crack down on users it knew were accused of sexual violence, according to the Dating Apps Reporting Project, an investigation produced in partnership with The Markup and the Pulitzer Center’s AI Accountability Network.
The story, co-published in February with The Guardian and The 19th, reveals that Match Group hasn’t been transparent about the scale of rape and assault on its dating apps. Using hundreds of internal documents, thousands of pages of court records, and dozens of interviews, reporters Emily Elena Dugdale and Hanisha Harjani describe how the company documented “hundreds of troubling incidents every week” on Match Group apps but struggled to act “in part because safety protocols could stall corporate growth.”
Dugdale and Harjani’s reporting spotlights a case involving Stephen Matthews, a Denver cardiologist who for years used Match Group apps to meet and rape women. Last year, Matthews was sentenced to 158 years in prison after a jury convicted him of 35 counts related to drugging and/or sexually assaulting 11 women from 2019-2023.
The journalists found that Matthews had been repeatedly reported for rape to Match Group as early as 2020, but it didn’t ban him from the apps until he was arrested in 2023. By then, they found, “at least 15 women would eventually report that Matthews had raped or drugged them.”
To tell the story of Matthews’s case, Dugdale and Harjani fought to access court records with free legal support from Colorado attorney Steve Zansberg, who they connected with through ProJourn, and attorneys at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. Aaron Glantz, editor of the 18-month investigation, said those records were crucial to building a timeline that showed how safety lapses at Match Group allowed Matthews to keep hurting women.
“He was raping women before the company acknowledged they had a problem; he was raping women while the company was supposed to be solving the problem; he was raping women after the people who the company hired to solve the problem were let go,” Glantz said in an interview. “When you look at that pattern of behavior, and you put it up against what the company was saying, and then bolstered by the internal documents and sourcing that we have in the story, it becomes a really damning indictment.”
The fight for Colorado court records
ProJourn — a partnership between the Reporters Committee, Microsoft, Davis Wright Tremaine LLP, and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to provide local journalists and newsrooms free legal help with pre-publication review, public records access, and business legal needs — first connected the reporters with Zansberg in the fall of 2023.
Dugdale, who’s based in California, said she was shocked when a Colorado district court refused to release even the most basic court records in the Matthews case, like transcripts of open court proceedings, to her or a local reporter. Colorado is an outlier among states in that its Supreme Court has refused to recognize a constitutional right of access to judicial records.
“When Steve came into the picture, it became clear that this was a battle that Steve had been fighting for quite some time,” Dugdale said. “He was the perfect person to help us navigate that situation.”
With Zansberg’s help, the reporters obtained previously sealed court transcripts that filled in key details of the investigation’s narrative. They learned, for example, that Matthews had been reported for rape to Match Group three times within two weeks, Harjani said.
But a court order blocked public access to other judicial records related to Matthews’s case, including dozens of documentary exhibits about Match Group that were admitted into evidence and provided in open court with members of the public present. In late 2023, Zansberg connected the reporters with Rachael Johnson, the Reporters Committee’s Local Legal Initiative attorney for Colorado, who filed an objection to the order on behalf of COLab.
“It was exciting to see people come together for this across the state and fight for something that seemed to us like a no brainer — we should be able to access these things,” Dugdale said.
The court ultimately maintained its sealing order. Still, Glantz said “even in losing, it was just so valuable to know that we had the support of these attorneys.” He said it motivated the Dating Apps Reporting Project team to keep working to shine a light on how Match Group addresses reports of sexual violence on its platforms.
The team then tested Match Group apps and found that the Matthews case isn’t an anomaly: Banned Match Group users, including those reported for sexual assault, can easily rejoin its platforms while keeping the same name, profile photo, and birthday, according to the investigation. Dugdale and Harjani’s reporting on internal Match Group documents found that company employees are aware of the shortcomings of its safety features, but some feel pressured to hurry investigations and cut costs.
In a statement, Match Group told the Dating Apps Reporting Project that the company is an industry leader in using technology to promote safety and it’s “committed to doing the work to make dating safer on our platforms and beyond.”
Glantz said he’s grateful for the free legal support from Johnson and Zansberg, who he said was “absolutely indispensable” to helping the team overcome obstacles to accessing court records in Colorado. And, he added, “we’re really happy that RCFP has an ongoing investment in Colorado, because those people need help.”