What started out as a search for romance for a Nevada woman nearly ended in her murder at the hands of a jilted suitor, and now she is suing Match.com for failing to disclose the dangers of online dating.
Mary Kay Beckman, 50, filed a lawsuit seeking $10million in U.S. District Court last Friday accusing the popular dating site of bringing her together with Wade Ridley in 2010.
Beckman, a Las Vegas-area real estate agent, said she had known Ridley only eight days when she broke up with him in September 2010.
Four months later, Ridley, 54, stabbed the woman 10 times, and after the knife he was welding broke, he stomped on her head and left her for dead, CBS Las Vegas reported.
Since the vicious attack, Beckman has undergone three head surgeries to repair her broken jaw, preserve her eyesight and remove part of her skull to the tune of $400,000 and counting, WAVE3 reported.
Ridley was later convicted of murdering another woman in Phoenix. He committed suicide last year while serving a 70-year sentence for the killing.
Beckman’s attorney, Marc Saggese, told KAS-TV that Match.com, where his client and Ridley had met, is ‘absolutely not safe,’ even though subscribers who pay $30 a month to use the service think it is.
‘The basis of the lawsuit is the advertising that is utilized by Match.com, lulling women and men into a false sense of security,’ Saggese said.
Match.com said in a statement Monday that Beckman’s experience was horrible but the lawsuit is ‘absurd,’ because there are safety tips throughout the site.
The statement said that Beckman was a victim of a ‘sick, twisted’ man with no known criminal record.
Match made in hell: Wade Ridley, left, met Mary Kay Beckman, right, on Match.com in 2010, but when she broke up with him eight days later, he turned violent and nearly killed her four months later.
According to Beckman’s lawsuit cited by Courthouse News Service, when she decided to stop seeing Ridley, he sent her threatening messages.
Then on the night of January 21, 2011, he sneaked into Beckman’s garage and assaulted her, stabbing the woman nearly a dozen times in the body and head, hitting her with a rock and stomping on her head before fleeing.
Less than a month later, Ridley met Anne Marie Simenson, 62, through Match.com in Arizona and stabbed her to death with a machete and a butcher knife before getting away with her car, jewelry and electronics.
When police captured him shortly after, he told officers that he wanted Beckman dead for ‘mistreating’ him and was surprised that she had survived.
‘I struggled a lot thinking why did she die and why did I live,’ Beckman told CBS5.
The woman claims that the dating site misled her into thinking that she would end up in ‘a stable and loving relationship with another member.’ Instead, she ended up with a man ‘whose intentions are not to find a mate, but to find victims to kill or rape,’ her complaint alleges.
Besides $10 million, Beckman wants Match.com to post a disclaimer on the site similar to the warnings on cigarettes and alcoholic beverages.
‘They don’t say one in five users are part of an attempted murder,’ she told reporters. ‘They don’t tell you people are missing.’
