MATTHEW HERRICK’S dating profiles depicted a muscular man with olive-green eyes and red-hot bedroom interests. The aspiring actor liked orgies and bondage. He was HIV-positive but preferred unprotected sex. He had a “rape fantasy,” and if he seemed resistant to the advances of would-be partners, it was simply part of what got him off.
Between October 2016 and March 2017, more than 1,100 men accepted invitations to meet Herrick in person. They showed up at his West Harlem apartment in droves, and on several occasions broke into the building. They followed Herrick into public restrooms and approached him at the midtown Manhattan restaurant where he worked as a server, because that’s what they had been instructed to do.
But Herrick had not matched with any of these men online. His dating profiles—and practically everything in them—were bogus. His vengeful ex-boyfriend, Oscar Juan Carlos Gutierrez (whom Herrick had met on a dating app), had created the accounts. He was able to impersonate Herrick because, court documents show, the apps didn’t require him to take any steps to verify his identity.
Herrick eventually got an order of protection against Gutierrez, but the torrent of uninvited houseguests continued. It took almost a year for Gutierrez to be arrested on criminal charges. He was sentenced to prison for criminal contempt, identity theft, and stalking in November 2019.
By that time, the nightmarish experience had taken a severe toll on Herrick’s mental health. “I had extreme insomnia. I was scared to leave my apartment,” Herrick, now 38, recalls. “I was drinking heavily to try to get some sleep,” he adds. “There was a moment where I thought, ‘Do I take my own life, or do I continue fighting? Because I can’t do this anymore.’”
The ex-boyfriend didn’t act alone in making Herrick’s life a living hell. Gutierrez weaponized Grindr and other dating apps to carry out his abuse. According to court records, Grindr ignored roughly 100 pleas from Herrick and his loved ones to remove the fraudulent profiles and block Gutierrez from making new ones. (The company disputes it ignored Herrick’s complaints and claims it worked with the police on his case. Two other gay dating apps took swift action to remove fake profiles, Herrick says.)
In 2017, as Herrick pursued criminal charges against Gutierrez, he also sued Grindr. He wanted the company to disable the bogus profiles, but he also sought to hold Grindr liable for both facilitating and failing to stop the harassment against him. But his lawsuit soon hit a brick wall thanks to what Herrick’s lawyer Carrie Goldberg calls the tech industry’s “get-out-of-jail-free card”—Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. “The whole thing is horrible,” noted a judge for a federal appeals court, which upheld a lower court’s ruling to toss Herrick’s case. “But the question is, what’s the responsibility of Grindr?”
None, the judge concluded. Since Section 230’s passage in 1996, courts have interpreted the key 26 words of the statute to offer broad legal immunity to internet platforms that host user-generated content, treating them differently than traditional publishers,
