A few months after Mandy Lehman’s divorce was finalized, she started using dating apps. At 42, she was rusty when it came to dating—and completely new to online dating. “I came out of a 12-year relationship,” she told me. “I had no idea what I was doing.”
Mandy connected with a man on Bumble when she was vacationing in Seattle, and they started talking. She was from Cincinnati, where she has a graphic and interior design firm; he was from Seattle, where, he told her, he was working as an innovation strategist, potentially opening a restaurant, and renting out his Airbnb.
Witty text banter between the two of them piqued her interest. Over the four weeks that they chatted virtually, though, he was “hot and cold”—sometimes going silent for eight hours. Mandy spoke to friends and chalked it up to the fickle nature of online dating in 2024, and enjoyed the playful back-and-forth messaging.
In May, Mandy was working out of an Airbnb in Denver. He was at a concert in Europe, and suggested that he fly to Denver before heading to Seattle so they could finally meet face-to-face. They met at a bar, and Mandy recalls feeling uneasy about their first in-person interaction. “He didn’t smile at me or wave or do anything flirty,” she said. “He stared like there was a hole through me. I smiled at him and waved, but he did nothing back. He looked right through me.”
After two gimlet cocktails and a tequila shot, Mandy recalls, she felt extremely open and uninhibited with her body, a euphoria that, she says, was different from the usual alcohol-induced buzz. She remembers dancing at the bar with the man, at one point straddling him. He called an Uber to her Airbnb address, and as she slid in the car, she realized that she should tell him good night. She went out to say goodbye, and he said that he would be joining her back at her Airbnb, a plan she did not object to at the time.
Mandy’s memory is spotty after the two got to the apartment. She remembers bits and pieces of their physical and sexual interactions over the course of the night—specifically, being woken up to him pulling her hair, choking her, and attempting to enter her while she lay sleeping flat on her stomach. She recalls engaging in physical interaction sporadically, sometimes with her on top, but many of the dark spots in her memory were interrupted by jolts of pain, waking her to some sort of sexual or physical interaction.
The following morning, she still felt euphoric—but her Bumble match didn’t seem to share her high, expressing no affection. “I remember thinking, Why does he look guilty?” Mandy recalled. For a brief moment, she considered that he had “roofied” her, but she quickly pushed that thought out of her mind. The next day, he texted her to end things, citing concerns with a long-distance relationship.
Back home in Cincinnati, Mandy started to replay that night in her head. The memories clarified a bit—especially the choking and the hair-pulling—and she started to question him over text, then on FaceTime, about the night’s events. She spoke to a few friends, and they agreed that it was odd that after two gimlets and a tequila shot she would be that sexually overt in public on the first date or have such a spotty recollection of the evening. After testing the same drink structure on other dates and feeling completely in control, she began to wonder whether something sinister had happened. Despite there being no toxicology report, Mandy speculates that she might have been drugged sometime at the bar the evening they met up—potentially when her date went up to the bar alone to get her drinks. So she began to piece things together—and try to prevent it from happening to another woman again.
Tech platforms and online dating apps have long grappled with the question of how to handle formal or informal reports of bad actors—those accused of, charged with, or convicted of things like romance scams, sexual misconduct, stalking, harassment, and rape. But increasingly, women are turning to their own detective work or a patchwork of investigative methods outside dating platforms: engaging in Facebook groups, sleuthing on Instagram, sharing stories on TikTok, or paying for background checks of a person whom they had a potentially illegal or bad experience with. Although dating platforms are scaling systems to respond to reports, the solutions to banning bad actors appear to be more reactive than proactive—in part because of limitations on the amount of information platforms can or want to collect.
Mandy, for example, posted on the popular Facebook page Are We Dating the Same Guy?—a localized group in which women post dating profiles of men they’ve matched with to receive feedback from other women who may have also matched with them—and got a response from a woman who said that the same man had offered to fly her out to his Seattle Airbnb. Concerned that other women might have negative sexual experiences at his Airbnb, but unable to report him formally because they were not technically guests booked through the platform, Mandy contacted Airbnb.
After reporting the man to the various platforms, Mandy eventually called the police, who she said initially discouraged her from reporting given how difficult these cases are to bring to court, and given that she would have to fly back and forth to Denver out of pocket. A subsequent conversation with an employee at the nonprofit organization RAINN confirmed that it was unlikely the case would go to court unless authorities were “99 percent sure” they would win it—and reminded her that it was not her responsibility to protect others. The employee recommended that she specifically ask the police for the sexual assault department, which could increase diligence. This motivated Mandy to file a police report, which has since been closed.
“I don’t know why the police closed the case, they didn’t tell me,” Mandy told me over text. She elaborated that because she did not get drug tested the next day—nor did the police go the extra mile to examine her unwashed clothes from that night or ask the bar for camera footage—she imagined that her case didn’t have a chance of going to court. “It’s no wonder nothing gets taken to court,” she elaborated. “They are relying on [regular people] to provide all the evidence on their own.”
The situation that Mandy found herself in is all too common. A 2023 survey from Columbia Journalism Investigations found that 31 percent of women reported being sexually assaulted by someone they met through a dating website or app. Of these respondents, more than half reported they had been raped.
Although it doesn’t always get to that point, these situations underscore the risks women regularly face on dating apps, which can range from unsettling to outright dangerous. Meanwhile, the apps offer little in the way of protection for their users. This pushes those users into a scenario where they have to take their safety into their own hands.
For example, Samantha, a 24-year-old woman in Washington, told me she met a man on Hinge this summer. On the first date, he shared that he had lied about his age—he was 39, not 36. He was hesitant to invite her to his house, and on their third date, he announced that he had a surprise for her: Instead of having her come back to his place, he was booking a hotel for them.
Suspicions rising, Samantha paid $28.30 for a background check on Truthfinder. The check yielded everywhere he had lived since his college dorm, as well as his legal history and parking tickets. Although he had told her he’d been divorced for two months and separated for three years, she found no divorce record. A phone call to family court verified that there were no records under his name or his wife’s maiden name—confirming that he was still married. (She discovered the wife’s maiden name by finding an obituary from one of his family members, which led her to his father’s Instagram, which followed a woman who appeared to be his son’s wife.)
Sometimes bad actors aren’t even looking for sex. A woman named Charlotte told me that in 2021 she connected with several other women who had dated her boyfriend. They collectively realized that he had been lying about his cancer treatment and, in some cases, taking money from women to pay for treatments he had never received. Charlotte met this man at work, but many other women had met him on dating apps. So Charlotte’s sister Sam, along with another woman who had dated this man, worked to report his profile to Hinge and Bumble. Both platforms took his profile down—but Sam, who works in tech, was skeptical.
“I was optimistic at first because they were quite responsive and keen on getting the details,” Sam told me. “But when they asked about other emails and phone numbers he could be using, I lost faith in their approach. It didn’t seem sophisticated. Even if they used IP addresses or something else, it struck me as low-tech. This is not a fail-safe approach. He’ll make his way back onto the dating apps.”
In a 2021 New York Times op-ed about Match Group’s investment in a nonprofit background-check service—which parted ways from the company last year due to a stated dearth of funding—Cornell University professor Karen Levy argues not only that digital records can be incomplete, missing criminal convictions that were expunged or charges that were dropped, but that there is “substantial social value in letting people shed stigmatizing or embarrassing information in these records.” She adds that records can also have a racial bias, due to the “overpolicing of people of color,” and that while it is important that platforms take steps to address the scourge of gender-based violence, there is the potential for us to go too far when it comes to people’s privacy.
Samantha was most grateful for TikTok and Facebook as platforms for story-sharing. “I genuinely credit the social media platforms and the ability for women to have discourse about their experiences,” she told me. “So many women responded to me. Men were doing this type of thing forever, but it was harder to catch them. Now there is a sisterhood created for protecting each other.”
Mandy felt similarly about finding other women to share experiences with. When she googled the man she had met up with, she discovered he was opening a business with another man outed for allegedly sexually assaulting women in the Seattle community. After a conversation with Amelia Bonow, a local women’s rights activist who had sounded the alarm about the other bar owner, Mandy became resolved in her conviction to warn others about the man, regardless of the police investigation outcome. Mandy told me in a text, “She was my rock.”
After Mandy realized she had likely been sexually assaulted, she reported the man’s profile to Hinge, and a customer service team promptly notified her that his profile had been taken down. She then contacted Bumble, who told her that it was investigating. After about a week, a customer service representative notified her that the man’s profile had been taken down and offered her six free therapy sessions, which Bumble provides to users who experience sexual assault through a connection on the app. (A company representative told me that the app’s self-guided courses to set boundaries and heal from sexual trauma and toxic relationships were accessed by more than 6,000 members last year.)
When asked, a Bumble representative declined to share how the app prevents banned bad actors from circumventing the system, saying that bad actors might use that information to their advantage. Bumble confirmed that it does not share data with other platforms at this time; Match Group, which owns Tinder, shared that its trust and safety team works “across the portfolio” of apps to share information.
At Mandy’s request, Airbnb conducted an investigation and said it had taken down the man’s listing; it provided her a private link to share with law enforcement that is accessible only by law enforcement. (An Airbnb spokesperson told me that “we run standard criminal background checks on U.S.–based hosts and guests, and certain convictions can result in removal from the platform,” and that the company facilitates “information and data sharing with law enforcement globally, with proactive outreach in certain criminal matters and reactive support for legal requests for information or emergency disclosures, as well as engages with agencies to foster cooperation.”)
Samantha posted her story on TikTok and shared the scenario on a private Facebook group; many women responded—including her date’s wife. Ultimately, as a result of this conversation, Samantha decided to report his profile to Hinge. The next day, the company contacted her to let her know it would be deleting his profile.
Mandy and Samantha were pleased with Bumble’s and Hinge’s swift action to take down the profiles of the men they had matched with—but the experience was indelible. Neither of them plans to use dating apps again.
When it comes to how invasive background checks should be—whether they are provided through dating apps, or accessed by individual detective work—there are two schools of thought. One is that it is critical that people have access to reports of gender-based harm at their fingertips. The other is that access to more and more records can be a slippery slope, in which wrongfully accused individuals—potentially those from marginalized groups—are denied access to a product.
What’s clear is that while platforms or their parent companies might not be sharing certain information across companies due to a spiderweb of capitalistic and legal considerations, women certainly are. An informal network of online to offline communities has cropped up as a means to help women fact-find and also seek out emotional support.
Bonow—the women’s rights activist whom Mandy connected with after discovering that two men with a reported history of sexual violence were coming together as business partners—shared with me over email that she was “in awe of” Mandy.
“I’m an activist with a lot of experience taking difficult stories to press, whereas Mandy hadn’t ever navigated anything remotely like this,” said Bonow, adding that Mandy was “brave and determined and relentless in a way that most people do not have the capacity to be.” Bonow told me she felt that Mandy was doing this to help other women.
“We’ve never even met, but I love her—and the way we have tag-teamed this as strangers is really an encapsulation of what I love about women.”
