She said it took her weeks to make the nine-minute TikTok video. The first take was 17 minutes long, exceeding the app’s 10-minute limit. So she started to whittle the story down, only to watch the clips back and become obsessed with eliminating the short “ums,” she whispered in the moments she became nervous.
Shorter, more concise, she urged herself. She nitpicked at her own propensity for talking with her hands, a habit she picked up when she learned American Sign Language in high school. With each version of the video, she was acutely aware of potential criticism from anyone who decided not to believe her story.
“I wanted to make it absolutely perfect,” Matysiak said.
She’d made a handful of TikTok videos before, mostly clips of her dogs or photo slideshows of memories with her friends. None had ever gone viral, and as she watched the final version of the video in which she tells the story of being raped in a Dallas IHOP parking lot, she was simultaneously convinced the video would be seen by the world, and by no one at all.
Finally satisfied, she saved the video to her drafts and drove to Missouri, where her family lives, to celebrate her 27th birthday. Two days later, just hours before heading out on a camping trip where her cell phone service would be limited, she reopened her TikTok app and pressed post.
“This is the man that raped me,” she says in the video. Her voice is even, turning briefly guttural in a few moments where emotion causes her throat to constrict.
“This is his name. This is his photo. This is how he did it,” she continues.
“I was raped,” she says. “And afterwards, I did everything a victim is supposed to. But nothing happened.”
Now with 423,000 views and 2,200 comments, Matysiak’s video represents the growing trend of women turning to social media to talk about the good, the bad and the really ugly that comes with online dating. And as more and more women have turned to the online sphere to tell their stories of dating violence and sexual assault, more and more have begun including the names and images of the individuals they are accusing. This can invite the risk of retaliation, in any form: legal threats, vandalism, physical attacks or doxxing.
Support Moves Online
“Historically, survivors [of dating violence] have always gone to friends and family for support over more formal support systems,” Crystal Garcia, a content and training coordinator with the Texas Association Against Sexual Assault, said. “Where are we finding our friends and family now? Online. So it's a very logical outcome that we're here, because we feel connected to our followers.”Following the guidance of traditional journalism ethics, the Observer has not named the man Matysiak accused of raping her because he is a private citizen who did not face legal charges. We were unable to locate him for comment.
Matysiak met the man she says raped her online. It started with a message from a stranger that appeared in her Instagram inbox in August 2024. She recognized the sender as a man she’d seen on the Facebook dating app a few days prior. She’d declined to match with him — he was a bit younger than she tended to go for — and she didn’t think much of the fire and heart emojis he sent for weeks in response to Instagram stories she posted of her day-to-day life.
By October, the stranger hadn’t stopped flirting via emoji, so Matysiak decided to give the guy a chance. It wasn’t long before they moved from Instagram to text messaging and then to hours-long FaceTime calls.
They talked about their jobs — she’s a teacher who moved to North Texas two years ago from Missouri — and about the upcoming holidays. They talked about that feeling of “wanting that other person with you” that the holidays tend to amplify. They shared a love of breakfast food, so after a few weeks of talking, he invited Matysiak to a first date at IHOP.
“Breakfast for dinner,” she said, rolling her eyes with embarrassment at having accepted IHOP as a first date location.
Before agreeing, she went through the rituals of a female dating app dater. She checked Dallas County criminal records for the guy's name, then she checked the surrounding counties. She’d already combed through his social media accounts, which seemed to check out, and she felt reassured by their regular FaceTime dates.
She told him clearly about her boundaries: no sex on the first date, and she remembers him agreeing. She insisted they meet in public.
The date was on Nov. 13, and she said it was “immediately awkward,” she said. Within the first five seconds, she knew that this wasn’t the man for her.
“He was wearing Crocs, and I hate Crocs with a passion,” Matysiak said. “[At the restaurant door] he said, ‘Can I have a hug?’ And I said, ‘Sure.’ And as I pulled away from the hug, he leaned down and kissed me [on the lips.]”
She felt a pit in her stomach when he referred to himself, for the first time, by a name other than the one listed on his social media accounts. She realized she’d searched through the various record systems using a nickname. Matysiak spent the dinner internally groaning over what she chalked up to another bad first date. But she didn’t consider leaving.
“I will sit through a whole date. Like what's the worst thing that can happen to me at dinner, you know?” she said. “I don’t want to walk out and him not pay, and then I’m leaving the service [person] short. I just, I can’t do it. I’m too nice a person. And so I stayed.”
When the date ended, Matysiak tried to excuse herself, saying she had to be up early to teach. Instead, the man joined her in the front seat of her car. They spoke for a few minutes, then he placed one hand on her throat and the other on the back of her head and began kissing her while holding her head in place.
Matysiak jumped, and her knee nudged the button that pops open her trunk. Promising to close it for her, she said the man crawled into her backseat, closed the trunk from the inside, and then reached around to grab her throat again before pulling her into the backseat where her raped her.
“His hand was around my neck, probably the entire time. And every time I would say no, he would say, ‘You don't tell daddy no,’” she said.
As Matysiak drove home that night, she called the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN) hotline. The next afternoon, she went to the emergency room in Dallas County for a Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner (SANE) exam. She recounted her story to doctor after doctor, and then, after asking to press charges, to detective after detective. She was in the emergency room for nearly 12 hours. She remembers being cold and then numb.
While in Greek life in college, Matysiak was taught all the things the victim of a sex crime is supposed to do: who to call and how to report. Don’t shower before you go to the emergency room. Bring the clothes you were wearing with you. Hand over any evidence to the police. She followed those instructions, although in some cases, it didn’t matter. When she went to the emergency room, she brought the clothes she’d been wearing on the date in a plastic bag, but no one ever took them.
They’re still sitting, untouched and unwashed, in that bag shoved into a corner of her closet.
She doesn’t know what to do with them.
Molly Matysiak spent months waiting for the police to help her bring her alleged attacker to justice, but that never happened.
Mike Brooks
The Black Hole of Reporting
Over the next six months, Matysiak attempted to urge the Dallas Police Department to work faster, afraid another girl would be harmed during the time the investigation took. “He does know a police report was made,” a DPD detective texted Matysiak in February, four months after the rape. “If he attempts to call you, please let me know and record him.”
“Does he know it was me?” Matysiak responded a few days later.
The detective told Matysiak they’d give her a call to answer any questions she had. After that call, Matysiak didn’t hear from the detective again. Text messages provided to the Observer show that Matysiak attempted to contact the detective in late April and early May. In the second message, she went as far as to tell the detective that she’d posted about her rapist in a Dallas Facebook group called “Are We Dating the Same Guy.” Another girl had messaged her about a similar experience with the same man, and was willing to come forward if it would help Matysiak’s case. Both messages to the detective went unanswered.
On May 27, 2025, in the middle of the workday on the last day of school, Matysiak received a call from a DPD detective different from the one she’d spent months attempting to communicate with, who told her that a Dallas County grand jury had declined to indict the man she’d accused on rape charges. In the six months of investigation, detectives told Matysiak they never spoke to the man she’d accused.
Matysiak was not allowed to speak to the grand jury and has no idea what information was shared on her behalf. Hanging up the phone, she walked back into the staff meeting she was in the middle of, face red.
“[The detective] just said there wasn’t enough evidence and they dropped it. My first reaction was like, well, is there anything I can do?” She said. “And she was like, ‘There's nothing. You can't really do anything about it now.’”
While upset, she wasn’t entirely surprised. She’d spent the previous months researching the “scary and sad” statistics surrounding violent sex crimes. According to Garcia, the coordinator with the Texas Association Against Sexual Assault, only around 10% of sex crime survivors decide to report their experiences to authorities. An even smaller percentage than that ever sees justice.
An investigation by NBC News released earlier this year found that Dallas is one of several major cities where less than 4% of reported violent sex crimes result in a conviction. Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Chicago had similarly low conviction rates.
“[Molly’s] story, for me, is my normal day,” Garcia said. “In my 25 years of experience … I have rarely seen a case go from the start, which is where I meet the victim at the hospital, all the way to the finish — trial and conviction.”
The grand jury process, in which a jury of citizens is presented with evidence of a crime to determine whether there is enough evidence to warrant criminal charges, is “completely confidential.” Advocates for sexual assault survivors still do not fully understand how it works. Part of this secrecy is to ensure that the principle of innocence until proven guilty is upheld — after all, “it is the criminal justice system, not the victim justice system,” Garcia said.
Still, within that secrecy, hundreds of thousands of survivors like Matysiak are left wondering where their case went wrong.
Once the summer started, Matysiak became listless. Then she became angry. Then furious. The final words of the detective who’d called to tell her the case was dropped, that there was “nothing she could do,” echoed in her mind.
“It felt like more and more of me was taken away by the justice system,” she said.
So, she turned to the internet.
Not All Red Flags Are Created Equal
Women have always found ways to talk about dating, but as a United Nations special report noted in 2021, the COVID-19 pandemic increased women’s reliance on online spaces for those conversations. And though life has since returned to normal, those online spaces have thrived. Facebook groups called “Are We Dating the Same Guy?” exist for almost every major city as a way for women to avoid cheaters or to vet their latest online dating app matches. In early 2023, when TikTok and Instagram began cracking down on what they label as sexually suggestive content, users developed lingo to circumvent the monitoring. Some of it is straightforward: the abbreviation “SA” stands for sexual assault, and a grape emoji generally replaces the word “rape” in a sentence. Other workarounds, like the “mascara trend,” see users use a tube of mascara as a metaphor to talk about past relationships.
The phrase “red flag” is thrown around to describe anything from a mild annoyance to a truly off-putting characteristic. Google data shows searches for the phrase “red flag” started increasing around the pandemic's start before peaking in 2023. They’ve leveled out since, but the word’s popularity far outpaces pre-social media years. The “red flag” trend consists of daters listing behaviors they won’t tolerate in a potential partner, or behaviors they ignored, trying to make a relationship work.
Much of the online verbiage surrounding dating emerged in the years following the Me Too movement, when survivors of sexual violence demanded cultural, legal and societal changes to sexual abuse and rape culture. Under the guise of empowerment, though, Garcia said that the trends are often a repackaged version of old problems.
“You’re expected to know the red flags,” Garcia said. “There's a lot of messaging that people put out about how to be a better dater and see the red flags. But we need more information about how not to be a red flag.”
Garcia's first problem with the trend is that the phrase “red flag” covers a wide range of behaviors. Take Matysiak’s same-breath mention of wearing Crocs and kissing someone on the lips upon meeting, which can equate harmful behaviors to regular ones. The other issue is that talking about red flags often turns into a new, coded way of placing blame on a victim for failing to note those perceived issues.
Matysiak uses the term herself when talking about that IHOP date. But she also pauses, noting that sometimes the online lingo surrounding dating fails to capture the nuances that come with getting to know and accepting a person.
“We all ignore red flags when we want to,” Matysiak said. “You start talking to somebody, and you're two months in, and you're like, ‘Hmm, is that [a red flag], is that not one?’ And to some extent, that's part of dating, too. I have my standards, but you adjust to things; they change.”
As talking about experiences with dating violence has become more commonplace online, Garcia worries that viewers are growing to become entitled to the stories of survivors. The posting of an assailant's face and name, for instance, started occurring in private groups before public ones as communities began to demand specifics in the name of protecting others.
While Garcia said she understands the desire to create a supportive community of women looking out for other women, she worries that social media commenters sometimes fail to realize that there is not a Law and Order SVU-type Olivia Benson in every police station, just waiting for a survivor who needs justice to call. Those calls to “do something" often drastically overestimate how many survivors ever see justice.
“You will see hundreds of comments saying, ‘Report him, call the police,’” Garcia said. “But it's really difficult to go in and get the SANE exam. It's really difficult to report. If information comes out publicly in the newspaper, that survivor carries all of that with them, not the commenters. So it feels supportive and then it also feels coercive at the same time.”
The Risk of Naming Names
The next time a woman does a pre-first-date Google search on the man whom Matysiak accused of raping her, Matysiak hopes her video is the first thing that pops up. It operates as a warning as much as it is an embrace of her own story, and she learned it’s an easier way to let friends and family know what happened to her without actually having to talk about it.
It’s easy to forget that the internet, even behind the illusion of a private account or a private Facebook group, isn’t private, Garcia warns. While she’d never discourage survivors from telling their stories, if that’s what they want to do, she has seen these posts be met with retaliation. In cases like sexual assault or domestic violence, an abuser has already proven their ability to harm, and publicly identifying them can amplify that response.
Matysiak wasn’t thinking about those risks when she posted her video.
“People need to know who he is,” she said. “It was so easy, the way that he did it, that I knew it had to have happened before.”
Jennifer Mondino, senior director of the National Women's Law Center's Times Up Legal Defense Fund, told NPR she has seen “people in all walks of life and all kinds of industries in all parts of the country” get hit with a defamation lawsuit after speaking out publicly about their experiences with dating violence.
As noted in the United Nations special report, a legal risk can come with naming names. The report calls it a “perverse twist in the #MeToo age,” that women who take to public forums to denounce their alleged perpetrators “are increasingly subject to defamation suits or charged with criminal libel or the false reporting of crimes.” This “weaponization” of the justice system has been effective in silencing women and undermining free speech, the report states.
In 2020, a media report by Mother Jones found that of 100 defamation lawsuits filed in the U.S. between 2014 and 2020 that related to dating violence, half were filed after the creation of the #MeToo hashtag in October 2017.
“I didn’t even think, when I posted the video, about defamation,” Matysiak said. “But everything I’ve said, and everything I’ll continue to say, I have [evidence].”
Publicly posting about dating violence can often incite “physical and psychological violence and threats, including death and rape threats,” the United Nations special report found, with individuals often working to discredit or malign an accuser.
While some have worried that the rise in online conversations about abuse could result in a wave of wrongly accused individuals having their digital identity smeared, reports suggest that false accusations are relatively rare. A well-cited 2010 study put the number somewhere between 2-10%, while the FBI has suggested 8%.
Even with that low number, Matysiak said she felt that police were skeptical about her case when she came forward. She provided police with every piece of digital communication she’d ever had with her alleged perpetrator, but was met with a, “Is that really it?” Then she realized most of their conversations had been over FaceTime, something she’d considered sweet then.
The more she considers the weeks that led up to that date, the more Matysiak is convinced that her alleged rapist knew how to avoid being caught by the legal system. The way he’d given her a nickname prior to meeting. The way, in their text messages, there is no proof of conversations about boundaries because he’d asked to have those talks over video.
“[Abusers] are learning how to get away with things more, which is scary,” she said. “The way he put his hands around my throat, he knew exactly what he was doing to not show [bruising]. … There are a lot of things like that that get me.”
While Matysiak feels failed by the criminal justice system, she is looking to the civil system as a next shot at recourse.
She describes the response to her TikTok video as “overwhelming.” While she knew, theoretically, that anyone could see the post, she didn’t necessarily expect it to reach nearly half a million people. A majority of the comments have been supportive. Some say, “Me Too.”
“Survivors stand together and shout his name from the rooftops!” urges one commenter.
“Think of all the future women you may have saved by sharing your story,” said another.
Matysiak got into education, she says, because she hoped to advocate for children. Somewhere along the way, that desire for advocacy must have spilled over into the rest of her life. She hopes to start volunteering with the Dallas Area Rape Crisis Center, the same organization that stood beside her during her hours-long emergency room visit, to offer other women the same support.
She’s also made follow-up videos on her TikTok page that discuss resources available to survivors of sexual assault. Those videos haven’t garnered nearly the same viewership as her first post, but she's satisfied if she can help one person.
“If this would have happened to me at 21 [years old], I don't think I would have spoken out,” she said. “I've gone through a lot in life, and I'm at the point where I'm tired of being quiet about all those things. This was just one more thing that happened, and I was like, I can speak on this.”
