Woman sues match.com after date tried to kill her

By RAY PHILP
Published on 25/01/2013 14:00

A woman suing a dating site after a man she met on the internet stabbed her 10 times has had her legal claim branded “absurd”.

• Woman sues dating site match.com after date tried to kill her

• Match.com claims lawsuit is “absurd” as man had no previous convictions

Mary Kay Beckman is seeking $10 million from match.com after claiming the site did not do enough to screen violent users.

Beckman was the victim of a life-threatening assault in which she was stabbed eight times in the body and twice in the head by Wade Mitchell Reilly, a man she had briefly dated after meeting him on the dating site.

After being told that she wished to end the relationship eight days after meeting in September 2010, Reilly broke into Beckman’s garage four months later, where he proceeded to stab and beat her so badly that she was hospitalised for months and required extensive plastic surgery at a cost of $400,000.

“There were 10 stab wounds, eight on my physical body, two on my head, and when the knife broke, there was stomping on my head,” Beckman told US journalists. “I shouldn’t even be here today.”

Beckman has undergone surgery to repair her jaw, preserve her eyesight and remove part of her skull.

However, match.com released a statement saying that while they empathised with Beckman, she had no legal grounds to launch legal action, claiming her lawsuit was “absurd” because Reilly had no previous convictions.

Beckman’s lawyer, Marc Saggese, said that the website is “absolutely not safe” and lulls “women and men into a false sense of security.”

Reilly committed suicide last year in prison where he was serving a 70-year sentence. As well as serving jail time for the attempted murder of Beckman, Reilly had also been found guilty of the murder of a 62-year-old woman he had met just weeks after his assault on mother-of-two Beckman.