One crisp fall evening in 2022, one of the Denver cardiologist's old medical school classmates was on Hinge when her phone screen filled up with a familiar face.
Matthews was being promoted on the app as a Standout, a popular profile that Hinge's algorithm thinks you'll like. To match with a Standout, users must send the person a rose. They get one free rose a week, but they cost $3.99 a pop after that. His classmate did not send Matthews a rose.
By this point, Matthews had already been reported for rape at least once to Hinge. Court documents show that he had already allegedly sexually assaulted nine women and drugged 10. Not only did the apps allow him back on, they featured Matthews' profile.
As the COVID-19 pandemic dragged on, people got tired of forking money over for dating apps. Match Group still made a hefty profit, but its growth flatlined. Its stock cratered, losing nearly half its value between October 2021 and April 2022. That month, an analyst from J.P. Morgan wrote that the firm had received more messages about "the underperformance of MTCH shares in recent weeks than any other topic."
In May 2022, Match ousted Dubey and installed Bernard Kim as CEO, a former executive at the gaming company Zynga that popularized viral games like "FarmVille."
While Dubey spoke frequently about trust and safety and worked closely with Breeden, Kim hardly mentioned safety when he began his time at Match Group, instead emphasizing the need for continued rapid expansion to drive long-term shareholder value.
Lawrie said that Kim, with his background in gaming rather than dating apps, had no interest in love. "He just wants to make money. He's just there to increase profits," Lawrie said. "If he's looking at a bottom line, then it's easier to have a lawsuit than it is to provide safety. I know which one he's gonna pick." Match Group declined to make Bernard Kim available for an interview. Messages sent to Kim directly went unreturned.
While the tension between growth and safety exists across the tech sector, it is especially high at dating apps companies where executives have to worry about constant churn—users leaving the apps when they are no longer looking for dates. Every time Match Group delivers on its promise, it also loses customers.
In February 2024, six dating app users filed what they hope will be certified as a class action lawsuit. They argue Match Group uses "addictive" features to encourage compulsive use while not leading to any real increase in off-app relationships. "The app is designed specifically to hook them, and to keep them paying subscription fees—not to help them find love," attorney Ryan Clarkson said. Match Group filed to dismiss the lawsuit in September, noting in its quarterly report that it "will defend vigorously" against the allegations.
Despite Kim's efforts, Match Group's stock price continued to drop, and during that time, so did any mention of trust and safety. In over a year of quarterly investor calls, Kim only referenced safety efforts once.
Employees who pushed for these initiatives were forced out or laid off, including Breeden—a leader who was so convinced of her own invincibility that she showed up to an event wielding a Captain America shield.
Match Group fired its power hire in October 2022. Layoffs hit her team over the next several months. In February 2024, the remaining critical investigators and law enforcement liaisons on Breeden's central safety team were shown the door.
Lawrie said group chats of former Match Group employees have been gossipping about the cutbacks.
"You're not gonna see them taking safety seriously ever again," he said, adding that the only thing that he thinks might change that is legislation.
Four months before Matthews was arrested, a post on a Facebook group in Denver blew up, right around Christmas.
Over and over again, women furiously detailed negative experiences they or their friends had with Matthews.
Some women described him as "sketchy." Others called him "terrible" and "not safe." Multiple women told a similar, dark story: that they were offered drinks, blacked out, and sexually assaulted.
The thread reached 150 comments. Two women wrote the same thing: that they had been waiting for someone to post about the cardiologist.
The flood of Facebook comments mirrored details in the police reports released the following year. Nearly all of the 16 women included in the district attorney's initial complaints were offered tequila. Eight recalled playing Jenga. Six mentioned a hot tub.
As these stories circulated in this small corner of the internet in December 2022, the Denver cardiologist stayed on Match Group apps.
Those fortunate enough to know about the Facebook group—and who had the foresight to check for Matthews on it—would be saved from a bad date or worse. But the fact that he could still log into Tinder and Hinge left him with a pool of thousands of unsuspecting women whom he could—and would—continue to match with.
The Dating Apps Reporting Project is aware of four additional women who have accused Matthews of drugging and/or raping them who were not part of the criminal complaint. Each of these women met Matthews on a Match Group app during a single year between the summers of 2020 and 2021.
During the years Matthews was on their apps, Match Group hired and fired Breeden. It made loud promises on sexual violence, announced initiatives and product lines, and promised a transparency report. But it was not straight with the public, which meant the women matching with Matthews on Match Group apps were not aware of the risk they faced.
Match Group's partnership with Garbo, the background check company, also fell apart in the summer of 2023. "It's become clear that most online platforms aren't legitimately committed to trust and safety for their users," Garbo wrote in a searing blog post.
After spending so much energy talking about monetization, gamification, and growth, Kim began to publicly acknowledge this problem. Speaking at the Citibank conference in the fall of 2023, he said the company was investing in new features to make sure "women have a good experience while they're in the product. They feel safe. They feel secure. Etc."
The "etc." does not seem to include increased transparency about safety. Instead, in May 2023, Tinder released a "female-focused package," a curated list of "high-quality profiles." It is unclear how Tinder determines these high-quality matches. Hinge's Standout feature, which is similar, had previously promoted Matthews.
In fact, under Kim's leadership, all mentions of a transparency report disappeared from the company's annual impact report. Ironically, this was around the same time that new legislation in Europe required tech companies to disclose reports of "non-consensual behavior" and other issues. Match Group will be required to submit a transparency report to the European Union on the scope of harm on their platforms later this month. Lawmakers in India and Australia are also demanding transparency.
This is exactly the situation Breeden and her team pondered three years ago. "What if publishing in one jurisdiction sparks a requirement in another?" read a slide in the same internal presentation where Match Group's trust-and-safety leaders wondered whether they should "push back on how much [they] are required to reveal."
After Match Group published a disappointing earnings report in February 2025 that fell below analysts' expectations, it also announced that Kim would be replaced by former Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff. Tinder's revenue, sales, and subscribers had all gone down.
As Match Group struggles to reverse its decline, it's also aware that its reputation is in the spotlight. Earnings calls and shareholder letters over the first three quarters of 2024 indicate that the company knows it is a business imperative to make women feel safer on its platforms. Match Group brought in a new vice president to head trust and safety whose job partly focuses on complying with increased global transparency requirements. The company is experimenting with requiring faces in photos and rolled out a "Share My Date" feature so you can be tracked while meeting up with an online stranger. On Tinder, it orchestrated a "major ecosystem cleanup" geared toward identifying fake profiles and getting scammers off the app.
But neither the cleanup nor tracking a date from your phone would have stopped Matthews—a man who never sought to hide his identity, who assaulted his dates in his own home—from finding and harming women.
Four years after Matthews' first documented assault, he walked into a wood-paneled courtroom in Denver and was sentenced to 158 years to life in prison. "I will sentence. I cannot heal," Judge Eric Johnson told the room filled with survivors and family members.
"Countless women have suffered and will continue to suffer," said Laura Wolf, an attorney who represented the woman whose police report triggered Matthews' arrest. "Hinge and other dating platforms have taken no steps to ensure the safety of the product they are selling, matching unsuspecting women to known predators without pause or concern."
Match Group didn't make it easy for the Denver prosecutors to convict Matthews. A search warrant was issued to Hinge in July 2023. Two months later, prosecutors were still empty-handed—with the judge in the case asking at a hearing if he needed to start "dragging people in to get stuff done." It wasn't until February 2024 that the Denver District Attorney's Office said they finally received documents returned by Match Group.
Matthews will likely never leave prison. Match Group executives currently face no charges. But the company knew about Matthews, and it knows about thousands of other abusive users. It has the data that could help users avoid dangerous situations, but it hasn't shared it, leaving millions of people in the dark.
Lawmakers around the world are starting to ask for answers from the most powerful force in modern dating. In June, Colorado passed a law, triggered by the Matthews case, that forces dating app companies to tell the state attorney general what safety measures they are taking to protect users. Although the law leaves room for the possibility of additional transparency in the future, it does not currently require the company to tell the state, or the public, how many people are raped or assaulted after using its platform. In the U.S., we've just scratched the surface. In most states, there's little that requires Match Group to share information with you—or with Congress.
The reality is that if Stephen Matthews were released today, he could get right back on a dating app. Match Group knows this—and now so do you.
How The Markup Tested Match Group's Dating Apps
By Natasha Uzcátegui-Liggett
The Markup created more than 50 accounts across Tinder, Hinge, OkCupid, and Plenty of Fish to test how Match Group treats reports of sexual assault and whether users banned from Tinder after a reported sexual assault could return to Match Group apps by creating new accounts. The Markup conducted experiments in April and May of 2024 and again in January and February of 2025. The results were similar across both rounds of testing.
To start, The Markup tested if and how quickly Tinder would ban users who were reported for in-person behavior. We found that Tinder consistently banned reported users within two days of receiving a report.
Next, The Markup tested whether a banned Tinder user could use their exact same basic account information to sign up for other Match Group dating apps: Hinge, OkCupid, and Plenty of Fish. Hinge and OkCupid prevented us from creating accounts, but Plenty of Fish allowed us to create new accounts. Within 48 hours, the Plenty of Fish accounts were taken down.
The next tests focused on identifying what type of changes would allow banned users to rejoin Tinder or create new accounts on other Match Group apps and use them like normal. To simulate what a typical user would try, The Markup utilized online guides and forums to identify commonly suggested techniques to get around a ban from a Match Group app.
The Markup then tried a combination of these suggestions, especially those that self-identified banned users claimed to have had success with. Across several rounds of testing, The Markup found multiple ways to successfully create new Match Group accounts that bypassed the ban. Each method only involved simple changes in how people signed up and the information provided during the process.
When attempting to rejoin, or create a new account on another Match Group app, The Markup used the normal sign up processes users go through and used the same phone as the original banned account. During multiple tests, new accounts were successfully created without needing to change the user's name, birthday, or profile photos.
The Markup did not test any methods that required significant technical knowledge and only utilized information that would be easily accessible to someone who did a cursory search of how to get around a ban. For example, The Markup did not test whether changing a profile photo's metadata could alter the results. The Markup's test accounts created for these experiments purposefully did not like, match with, or message any real Match Group users.
Stephanie Wolf contributed reporting. Statistical journalist Natasha Uzcátegui-Liggett led The Markup's testing of Match Group apps.
The Dating Apps Reporting Project is an 18-month investigation. It was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center's AI Accountability Network and The Markup, now a part of CalMatters, and copublished with The Guardian and The 19th.
