...Even after all we now know about embellished online dating profiles the predators continue to prey. I was a victim of the Match.com serial rapist whose fabricated online profile mirrored his fabricated life. He specifically created pictures to post on the website to match his made up career and took it to the next level with fake ID's and a staged apartment. He had everything he needed to lure women in to accept "dates" with him and then keep them interested just long enough to drug and rape us.
Numerous documentaries, news reports and over 10 years later men are still using the internet to meet women and victimize them. Most recently a California man Sean Banks was sentenced to 37 years in prison for raping two women he met on Christian Mingle and Match.com and as with my rapist Jeffrey Marsalis he maintained his innocence until the very end. Irrelevant now because both will be spending the next few decades in prison, potentially the rest of their life!
In 2011 a woman sued Match.com after she met and dated a man through the website and was sexually assaulted on their second date. The man had a violent history involving sex assault cases and if the website had a screening program for all members the victim claimed she never would have been violently attacked.
Match.com had released the following statement: "Members should check out safety tips on the site, that it is their sole responsibility for screening other members and that what happens on dates is not the responsibility of the company". This is the same statement released when notified of my attacker Jeffrey Marsalis' numerous sexual assaults using the same website to meet women. It's lame legalese as far as I'm concerned.
The victim was not suing for a monetary settlement, only asking that Match.com screens its members against the sex offender registry. As a direct result of the lawsuit Match.com released a statement that ..."they will agree to check new members against the sex offender registry". Prior to the lawsuit eHarmony already had a system in which they checked the registry and other sites planned on doing so. This is an excellent way of protecting women from registered sex offenders but if the men haven't yet been convicted then it won't catch new offenders. In this case we can only trust our instincts and set up check in times or any other plan a woman feels comfortable with when planning on meeting a man for the first time.
No comments:
Post a Comment