Kelly Gibbons connected with Stewart Lucas Murrey on a dating app. They texted for a few weeks and had a phone conversation before she decided she did not want to meet him in person.
A year later, however, she saw him in real life — when he appeared at her front door and dropped off a $2.6 million lawsuit.
Gibbons has been named as a defendant along with more than 50 other women, whom Murrey claims have ruined his love life, damaged his reputation and cost him millions in missed job opportunities.
At the heart of the lawsuit is a branch of the Facebook group called “Are We Dating The Same Guy?”, a series of private whisper networks in which women can sound the alarm on men who might be “liars, cheaters, abusers” or otherwise “toxic”. The first group was founded for women in New York City in 2022. There are now more than 200 nationwide.
The Los Angeles branch, which has some 52,000 members, is where Gibbons went to share the details of her phone call with Murrey in 2022. She said that he was rude on their initial phone date in February 2022 and that she wanted to warn off other women. “I wouldn’t want my friend going out with someone like that,” she said in an interview.
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Her post quickly gained traction in the group, which at the time had about 10,000 members. Other women soon began sharing their own stories of Murrey. One uploaded a screenshot of her interaction with him, another recounted an in-person date. Others just weighed in with their own opinions, comments and emojis.
The interest faded within weeks, but those who joined that discussion are targeted in the lawsuit. Nine of the women are named, with Gibbons the lead defendant and the rest referred to as “Does 1-50”. The suit accuses the women — most of whom did not know each other — of having “conspired to harm the plaintiff’s reputation” and discriminating against him as a man because he was unable to join the women-only Facebook site and respond to the allegations.
Murrey declined to comment on the case, but asked The Times to reference his subscription-only writings on SickoScoop, and his online fundraiser for legal fees. On the page, which appears to have been taken down, men expressed their support for Murrey, calling him a hero.
Murrey delivered the summons to some of the homes himself. Gibbons said: “In December, I discovered a stack of papers paperclipped together, stuffed into the grates of my door — a court summons.”
She said she asked her landlord for footage from the doorbell camera, which showed Murrey and another person leaving the paperwork. “My heart started pounding, as I thought: this man knows where I live,” she said. “It was pretty eerie. He was filming with his cell phone, walking in. I don’t know who wouldn’t get creeped out by that.”
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The case is unusual but not unheard of in the US. “Anyone in America can file a civil lawsuit,” Erik Syverson, who spent 22 years as a defamation lawyer based in Beverly Hills, said. “All you need is $400, and off to the races you go. It’s a low bar, and it doesn’t mean there is any validity.”
Several of the women described struggling to take time away from work to deal with the case. Vanessa Valdes, another defendant, said it felt like an effort “to drown us in paperwork”. She said: “He wants our bank statements, text messages, every group chat we ever had. He’s also asking for phone numbers, addresses, email addresses of people we don’t even know. It’s overly broad and irrelevant.”
And it has all cost them money — they have now set up a GoFundMe to try and seek help paying for legal assistance. Some of the women are also fighting back through the courts. Valdes will make the first motion to dismiss the case on freedom of speech grounds at a hearing on Monday.
“I thought, what can he sue me over? I didn’t say anything about this man other than my experience,” Gibbons said of her initial reaction to the legal case. Now she sees it as necessary to help others. “It is incredibly stressful and time-consuming, but it’s worth doing, to challenge the precedent.”