Whitney Wolfe, the female co-founder and the face of Tinder in magazines has left the company and sued it blaming top officials for engaging in atrocious sexual harassment and sex discrimination against her. Her complaint alleges Tinder’s Chief Marketing Officer Justin Mateen had repeatedly called her a “whore,” and did it sometimes even in front of the CEO of the company.
The complaint also alleges that the CMO told Ms. Wolfe that her “Co-Founder” title was being removed because having a young female co-founder “makes the company seem like a joke,” and “devalues” the company.
The complaint records a list of epithets used by Mr. Mateen and the CEO Sean Rad to refer to other people in emails and text messages including calling one woman as a “liberal lying desperate slut,” calling a group as “middle age Muslim pigs,” using a text depicting IAC Chairman Barry Diller as a penis and referring to “fu…ng” the wife of a famous blogger. The complaint stated that the behavior exceeded being “frat-like,” and represented the worst of misogynist alpha-male stereotype too often associated with technology startups.
Wolfe says the CEO did not take any action even after repeated complaints about Mateen’s behavior and she finally decided it was enough after Mr. Mateen called her a “whore” at a company event.
Even back in 2012 when there was no dating app named Tinder, Wolfe had been part of the team working at the IAC-funded incubator, Hatch Labs that included other co-founders of Tinder including Sean Rad, Christopher Gulczynski, Jonathan Badeen and Joe Munoz.
The complaint details how Ms. Wolfe had been the driving force behind the app prototype called “Matchbox” which the team had decided to abandon, but took up again at Wolfe’s insistence. The prototype later evolved into the dating app Tinder, a name, which the complaint claims was suggested by Ms. Wolfe.
Reuters reported that IAC/InteractiveCorp (IACI.O) owns a majority stake in Tinder and besides being a defendant, a spokesman for the IAC had said that Mateen has already been suspended pending an investigation into the “inappropriate” messages.
California employment law firm Rudy, Exelrod, Zieff & Lowe LLP filed the complaint on behalf of Ms.Wolfe at the Los Angeles Superior Court and posted the complaint on their website.