In Materialists (2025), Celine Song’s matchmaker heroine pairs a client with a man whose warning signs were visible in advance. The date ends in sexual assault, and her manager treats it as an unfortunate cost of doing business: apologize, offer a refund, move on. It is fiction, but the corporate posture it depicts is uncomfortably close to what investigators found in the real industry.

The real-world record

An 18 month investigation involving the Pulitzer Center, The Markup, and The Guardian examined Match Group, the company behind Tinder, Hinge, Match.com, OkCupid, and Plenty of Fish, roughly half the global online dating market. The reporting described an internal incident database, known as Sentinel, that logged hundreds of reports of sexual assault and drugging every week. It described a transparency report promised publicly in 2020 that never materialized, trust and safety teams reduced in later rounds of cost-cutting, and a banning system porous enough that removed users could rejoin using the same name and photographs.

One case ties it together. A Denver anesthesiologist was first reported to a platform for rape in 2020. He remained active across the company’s apps for years afterward, at one point even surfaced as a promoted profile, until his arrest in 2023. By then, more than fifteen women had made reports. For a company holding that information, each subsequent match was not an accident; it was an introduction.

Could a platform be liable in Canada?

The natural framework is negligence, which asks four questions:

• Duty of care. Did the platform owe its users a duty to take reasonable steps for their safety? Where a company designs a service whose entire purpose is to introduce strangers for in-person meetings, and holds itself out as caring about safety, the relationship between platform and user is arguably close enough to ground a duty.
• Standard of care. What would a reasonable platform do with hundreds of weekly assault reports? At minimum: investigate credible reports, actually exclude the reported users, and prevent trivial re-registration. Evidence that a company logged the danger and let it continue speaks directly to falling below the standard.
• Causation. The survivor must connect the failure to the harm: had the platform acted on prior reports, the match that led to the assault would never have been made.
• Damages. Physical and psychological injury, therapy costs, lost income, and related losses are all compensable.

Platforms will point to their terms of use, which typically disclaim responsibility for user conduct. But Canadian courts scrutinize liability waivers closely, and are reluctant to let boilerplate shield a company from the consequences of its own institutional choices, particularly where the harm is bodily and the conduct approaches gross negligence. A clause buried in sign-up terms is not a licence to knowingly re-introduce reported offenders.

If this happened to you

Survivors assaulted by someone they met through a dating service may have civil options alongside the criminal process: an individual negligence claim, a claim for negligent misrepresentation about the platform’s safety practices, or participation in class proceedings as they emerge. Records help: the profile, the match history, any reports made to the platform, and its responses. These conversations are confidential, and there is no obligation attached to having one.