Inside the social media groups tracking down two-timing men

When Kelly Gibbons joined a Facebook group called Are We Dating The Same Guy?, she had probably planned to use it as it was intended: to see if men she met in Los Angeles had love interests other than her.

The result was not a new boyfriend but a $2.6 million lawsuit, physically dropped outside her home by a man she had never met. It accused her and 50 other women of “defamation”, “libel” and “invasion of privacy” – as well as “civil conspiracy” and “gender violence”.

“I thought, what can he sue me over?” said Gibbons of her reaction to the suit, in which she is named as the lead defendant. She stood accused of conspiring with the other women to harass Stewart Lucas Murrey, a man she had never met – and she had never met most of the other women involved either. “I didn’t say anything about this man other than my experience,” she added in an interview.

It all began when Gibbons made a post in the group about Murrey, after the pair matched on a dating app and began to speak. She was “curious if anyone has met ‘Lucas’ in person”, it read. Gibbons shared details of a phone call where Murrey had been “rude” to her, with the reasoning that she wouldn’t “want my friend going out with someone like that”.

Soon came responses from other LA women who said they had met Murrey online. One described how he had demanded they meet up immediately, before tracking her down and ambushing her at a Beverly Hills hotel. “I’ve been looking for you all over town! You’re a hard girl to pin down!”, he reportedly said.

Another woman had been called a “moron” by Murrey on Hinge, a dating app, and warned him that she would be reporting the interaction to the app itself. He replied:

This is what Are We Dating The Same Guy? was set up to expose: men who had lied or cheated, who had behaved abusively or were just “toxic”. Established in 2022 by a group of women living in New York, the concept has spread around the world: there are now branches everywhere from Birmingham to Brisbane. When Gibbons wrote her post about Stewart Lucas Murrey, the LA page had just 10,000 members, but it’s now used by more than 53,000 women. For the London page the figure is 88,000.

Today most single women rely on dating apps to meet potential partners, in cities far too big for every eligible man to be someone’s friend’s cousin’s colleague’s brother.

Are We Dating The Same Guy? helps women know which men to avoid on the basis of safety but also of fairness. Women using the page are “girl’s girls” who don’t want to get involved with guys who secretly have girlfriends but are on the apps anyway. Case in point: just last week amateur sleuths using the network managed to track down a runaway British chef who had abandoned his wife and children in Massachusetts. He was rumbled by the women after matching with an Are We Dating The Same Guy? member on Bumble – in Dallas, some 1,700 miles away.

At least that’s how Paola Sanchez sees it. The group’s 29-year-old founder and administrator writes on her website that her team’s work helps women “navigate today’s dating landscape” and describes the page as a “safety support community”. But it has not been without consequences: “Ever since I had a rock thrown through a window at my family’s home by a man who wanted to stop our efforts to empower women, I’ve had to keep a low profile due to threats of harassment and violence against me,” she adds.

What is surely to the dismay of Sanchez and her team of women who run the worldwide network, the Los Angeles lawsuit is the biggest but not the first. Nikko D’Ambrosio, 31, filed a suit against the Chicago outlet of the group after members claimed that he was “clingy” or had “ghosted” them after sleeping with them. Last year a man in his 40s sued the team behind a Canadian page, alleging that he had been “called names, accused of sending lewd photos and of being a bad parent”. It’s no wonder then that Gibbons, the defendant in this most recent case, now sees her fightback as necessary to help others. “It is incredibly stressful and time-consuming, but it’s worth doing, to challenge the precedent,” she has said.

British women using Are We Dating The Same Guy? will be pleased to know that here in the UK, women can share anecdotes about their dating woes without fear of a legal case – so long as they aren’t making criminal allegations. That’s according to Jonathan Price, a lead media lawyer at Doughty Street Chambers who regularly defends women who’ve posted allegations of negative or abusive behaviour online.

“For defamation purposes, what matters here is the underlying meaning of a statement,” he explains. Pointing to the woman who told of being approached unawares at a Beverly Hills hotel, “it depends on how that’s phrased – perhaps that implies something very sinister that could be grounds for defamation”. The details of Gibbons’s phone call however would be “too trivial for sure” to lead to action here.

Price is unsurprised that an LA judge ruled in favour of the female defendants in the case on Monday.

But the Facebook groups remain a battleground for young people, who are polarised along gender lines over whether women speaking up about their difficult experiences with men has “gone too far”. Under Gibbons’s GoFundMe page, set up to fund the defendants’ legal fees, one supporter writes: “give em hell, ladies”. But on Reddit the story is different. One user posts that “we are setting a bad precedent allowing a vigilante mob group to cast punishment as they see fit”.

Admins have had to shore up their restrictions on who can join the London group after it was infiltrated by a handful of angry men, upset not by posts discussing themselves but by the idea of other men being put on blast in a girls-only page.

“Because these men are posting themselves publicly on dating apps, there isn’t a reasonable expectation of privacy when it comes to their first names or images, but posting details of a private conversation could be cause for trouble if it’s sufficiently intimate and makes him identifiable,” Price says.

Women should use extreme caution when making allegations of violence or abuse, however. These pages are closed, but their size means that anything posted is essentially a public declaration in legal terms. “British defamation law is more permissive for claimants in the UK than in America,” he says. “If you make a criminal allegation to a group like this, then the burden of proof is on yourself – and proving such a thing in court can be traumatic, lengthy and expensive.”

Useful or not, these groups have become essential for women in today’s dating world, and for good reason: when contacted, Hinge didn’t confirm that it had banned Murrey from using the site since it received a complaint about him. And as one London member – anonymous, as speaking to journalists leads to automatic removal – quips: “I never use it myself except for anything other than laughing at men.”