Last October, Matthew Herrick was smoking a cigarette in front of his West Harlem brownstone when the first visitor appeared. As Herrick tells it, the man innocently pressed the buzzer for Herrick's apartment. Then he asked matter-of-factly if Herrick was the one who'd been communicating with him via the hookup app Grindr, and who'd minutes earlier invited him over for sex. Herrick said that he hadn't---he hadn't even looked at the app in a week---and asked how the stranger even knew his name. That's when the man pulled out his phone and showed Herrick a Grindr profile that included a photo of Herrick in his kitchen, taken from his Instagram account, including the 32-year-old actor and model's face and bare chest. Herrick was unnerved. "That's me, but that's not me," he remembers saying.
Herrick says three more men came to his home that first day, all expecting sex. The next day brought just as many, all of whom referred to the same spoofed account. Herrick reported the fake profile to Grindr, but the impersonations only multiplied. Soon there were eight or nine visitors a day, and then more than a dozen, all finding their way not just to Herrick's home, but also to the midtown Manhattan restaurant where he worked. The unwanted suitors had gotten his phone number through the app as well, and bombarded him with messages, calls, and pictures of genitalia.
In the weeks that followed, Herrick says, the fake accounts began to evolve. Spoofed profiles with pictures of Herrick's semi-nude body began to offer rough, unprotected sex, orgies, and drugs. And those more extreme invitations, according to Herrick, would bring a more aggressive and, at times, even violent crowd of visitors.
This is the months-long nightmare Herrick describes in a lawsuit he filed against Grindr last week in the Supreme Court of New York. He accuses Grindr of negligence, intentional infliction of emotional distress, false advertising, and deceptive business practices for allowing him to be impersonated and turned into an unwitting beacon for stalkers and harassers. Herrick's civil complaint against the company states that despite contacting Grindr more than 50 times, Grindr hasn't offered a single response beyond auto-replies saying that it's looking into the profiles he's reported. Even after a judge signed an injunctive relief order Friday to force Grindr to stop the impersonating profiles, they persist: Herrick says that at least 24 men have come to his home and work since then. In total, he counts over 700 sex-soliciting men thrown into his daily life by the spoofed accounts since the ordeal began.
"My entire life has been stolen from me. My privacy has been taken from me. I’m humiliated daily," says Herrick, tears welling in his eyes. "It’s a living hell."
Cases of Grindr catfishing and deception happen every so often on Grindr---sometimes with tragic results. But the Grindr impersonation Herrick describes in his lawsuit was a longer-term form of abuse with equally dangerous consequences. In the worst cases, the suit alleges, the impersonator requested a "rape fantasy." In one instance, Herrick says, a man refused to leave Herrick's apartment building, and wrestled with Herrick's roommate in the hallway until Herrick broke up the fight. Others have screamed obscenities at Herrick at his workplace, stalked him outside, and tried to have sex with him in the bathroom of the restaurant. On one day earlier this month, six men seeking sex came to the restaurant where Herrick works in just a four-minute span. And Herrick says the person controlling the fake profiles will often tell the visitors Herrick will "say no when he means yes," or that he'd sent them away only to hide them from his jealous roommate, and that they should return.
"They were setting him up to be sexually assaulted," says Herrick's attorney Carrie Goldberg. "It’s just luck that it hasn’t happened yet."
Herrick's civil complaint points to an ex-boyfriend as the source of the impersonation attacks. (WIRED has chosen not to identify him as he's not named as a defendant in the complaint.) He allegedly began impersonating Herrick on Grindr even before their breakup earlier this year, but only started using the spoofed accounts to harass him after they separated. The complaint states that the ex "would manipulate the geo-physical settings" of the app---a simple enough hack using GPS-spoofing apps for Android or jailbroken iPhones---to make fake accounts appear to be located at Herrick's home or work.
The ex-boyfriend told WIRED in a phone call that he denies "any and all allegations" in the complaint, but declined to comment further due to what he described as another pending case that involves both him and Herrick.
Goldberg said she had personally verified all the claims in the complaint. "Any attack on my client’s credibility is countered by the voluminous evidence I’ve seen," says Goldberg, who has risen to prominence as a fierce advocate of victims of revenge pornography cases. Goldberg declined to share any of that evidence, however, preferring to reveal it at a later stage in the lawsuit. Goldberg and Herrick also declined to comment further on the ex-boyfriend or his alleged involvement in the spoofing attacks, emphasizing that Grindr is the subject of their lawsuit for allowing the spoofing regardless of who carried it out. "A malicious user is just running amok using their product as a weapon," says Goldberg. "Grindr can control that, and they’re not."
Grindr did not respond to WIRED's requests for comment.
Herrick contrasts Grindr's alleged lack of direct communication or action on the spoofed accounts to the behavior of a lesser-known gay dating app, Scruff. When profiles impersonating Herrick began to appear on Scruff, he filed an abuse complaint with the company that led to the offending account being banned within 24 hours, according to Herrick's complaint against Grindr. Scruff also prevented the same device or IP address from creating any new accounts. Herrick says that Grindr, despite terms of service that explicitly disallow impersonating other people, never responded even after dozens of requests from him and from family members trying to help. "It’s the ostrich with its head in the sand strategy," says Goldberg. "It’s cheaper for them not to staff a department that addresses complaints and abuses of the product."
One reason for Grindr's unresponsiveness, in fact, may be that it isn't actually legally liable for the ordeal Herrick has experienced, says Ashley Kissinger, a media defense attorney with Levine, Sullivan, Koch and Schulz LLP. Despite the early ruling Herrick has already won against Grindr, Kissinger points to section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which says that internet services can't be held legally responsible for content posted by their users. "If I were defending the case I’d have a strong argument that section 230 protects them from these claims," says Kissinger. Herrick's complaint counters that the case should be considered not one of illicit content on a service, but product liability: "Grindr affirmatively availed itself as a weapon to destroy [Herrick's] life," the complaint reads. But Kissinger points to a 2003 case where a woman sued Matchmaker.com over false profiles that had resulted in harassment. Matchmaker argued the section 230 defense and won.
In the meantime, Herrick says he's reported the situation to the police repeatedly. He declines to talk about any criminal investigation against the ex he believes is behind the spoofed profiles. But on some occasions sympathetic cops have patrolled his block or parked outside his building. They've also suggested he move or get a new job, a notion that infuriates him.
"Why don’t you move? Why don’t you run? Why don’t you hide? I find that so insulting. How is that a solution?" says Herrick. "Why doesn’t Grindr do its job?"
