Six women who were drugged and raped by the same cardiologist are suing the parent company of popular dating apps Tinder and Hinge for allegedly ignoring repeated reports about their attacker and allowing him to use the matchmaking platforms as a “hunting ground” for victims.

The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in Denver District Court, accuses Match Group of recommending Dr. Stephen Matthews to women on Tinder and Hinge even after the company had received multiple complaints that he had drugged and sexually assaulted women he met through its apps.

Matthews, a 38-year-old Denver cardiologist, was convicted in August 2024 on 35 felony counts of assault and sexual assault and sentenced to 158 years in prison. Prosecutors said he drugged 10 women and sexually assaulted eight of them between 2019 and 2023, though investigators believe there are additional victims.

The company has refrained from commenting directly on the lawsuit’s allegations but released a statement Tuesday saying “we are committed to strengthening our safety efforts, building innovative new technology, and working closely with industry partners to help protect our users. We will always look for ways to improve our systems and help our community stay safe both online and when they connect in real life.”

The 54-page complaint alleges that users began reporting Matthews’s abusive behavior as early as 2020. In September of that year, one victim notified Hinge’s safety team that she had been assaulted by Matthews after waking up naked on his apartment floor following a date during which she drank just one beverage. She underwent a rape exam at a Denver hospital that confirmed she had been “vaginally penetrated while incapacitated,” the complaint states.

Hinge confirmed receiving her report, though just four months later, the app again recommended Matthews’s profile to her. She reported Matthews a second time, insisting that he posed “a potential threat to other women within the Hinge community.” Later that day, Hinge assured her it had banned him and “taken additional steps to ensure that he permanently stays off Hinge.”

The suit claims Matthews remained active on both Hinge and Tinder for three more years after that initial report, using his real name, photographs, and phone number. During that period he continued to drug and rape women, leaving behind a trail of victims that included the five other plaintiffs behind the lawsuit.

“He was using the dating platforms as a catalog,” the attorney representing the six women, Carrie Goldberg, told Courthouse News. “The dating platforms presented potential rape victims to him, and he would just choose if he wanted a redhead, a blonde or a brunette that day.”

According to the suit, Matthews only stopped using Match Group’s dating platforms in March 2023 — “but not because Hinge or Tinder had banned him,” the complaint states. Rather, he was arrested on March 27, 2023, after a woman brought her allegations to police.

Citing violations of the state’s product liability statutes, the Colorado Consumer Protection Act, and several other claims, the plaintiffs seek economic and compensatory damages for physical and emotional harm.

The plaintiffs argue that the company knew it lacked the infrastructure to ban rapists from using its platforms or stop them from migrating across its apps. But instead of adopting measures to make the platforms safer — like facial recognition tools to ensure that banned individuals can’t simply make new profiles — Match Group adopted the mindset that it’s the “cost of doing business” that some of its members will be rapists and some members will get raped.”

“Rapists know that Match Group has no effective method to ban them within a dating platform or across platforms,” the complaint states. “To date, Match Group has sustained no cost and, indeed, has only profited from its failure to warn members of known predators, its victim-rapist matching, and its defective infrastructure to stop assaultive users.” 

Match Group is likely to invoke Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in its defense, a 1996 law that shields online platforms from liability for content created by their users. In 2019, Ms. Goldberg represented a client who sued the gay dating app Grindr, claiming the platform failed to intervene when his former partner impersonated him on the app as part of a harassment scheme. A federal appeals court dismissed that case, ruling that Section 230 protected Grindr from liability.