The Paola Sanchez Lawsuit That Turned a Facebook Dating Group Into a Legal Battlefield

The Paola Sanchez lawsuit has an almost novelistic quality, which is likely why it went viral. A man who felt mistreated, a private Facebook group of women, a federal complaint naming 27 women and a few tech companies, and, in May 2025, a judge in Chicago quietly dismissed the entire case. However, the peculiarity of what transpired in between is not adequately conveyed by that conclusion.

In March 2022, Paola Sanchez founded the first Are We Dating the Same Guy group in New York City. The idea was fairly straightforward. In order to find out if anyone else had dated a man they had matched with on dating apps, women would post pictures of those men and ask, “Any tea?” The network had grown to over 200 groups and 3.5 million members by the beginning of 2024. There were more than 80,000 women in the Chicago chapter alone. These groups became a pre-date ritual for some users, similar to how some people check LinkedIn prior to a job interview.

Nikko D’Ambrosio followed. On January 8, 2024, D’Ambrosio, a 32-year-old sweepstakes kiosk salesman from Des Plaines, Illinois, filed a lawsuit alleging invasion of privacy, emotional distress, defamation, and doxxing. He claimed that a woman with whom he had had a consensual encounter had written about him in the Chicago group, labeling him “clingy” and “psycho,” and that other women had added insults in the comments. Sanchez, Meta, Patreon, GoFundMe, the AWDTSG website, and numerous other people were named as defendants in his lawsuit. On January 25, the original filing was rejected due to a lack of subject matter jurisdiction. On the same day, his attorneys filed a new class action.

It’s difficult to overlook this particular detail. A federal jury had found D’Ambrosio guilty of two counts of tax fraud just days before the filing of that initial complaint. In addition to $263,000 in business meals and $64,500 in charitable donations to a Chicago church that had no record of receiving anything from him, he had claimed more than 474,000 miles of business travel over the course of two years, which is about twice the distance to the moon. He received a one-year federal prison sentence in May 2024. As this was happening, it was difficult to avoid wondering what the public and the court would think of a man who was being sentenced for lying to the IRS while pursuing a defamation lawsuit.

For her part, Sanchez organized an online fundraiser to raise more than $30,000 to support the group. Later, she started a different GoFundMe page to develop an app. According to the Washington Post reporting, by February 2024, the AWDTSG community as a whole, across all of its subgroups, had raised nearly $80,000. Reading the court documents gives me the impression that Sanchez realized this wasn’t really about her right away. It concerned whether a private setting where women exchanged cautions could withstand a legal challenge from a conversation participant.

Judge Thomas Durkin dismissed the Second Amended Complaint with prejudice in May 2025. Defamation per se, defamation per quod, false light invasion of privacy, doxxing, strict products liability, negligence, negligent entrustment, and unjust enrichment were all dismissed. In essence, the ruling stated that D’Ambrosio had sued everyone who had any connection to a few Facebook posts for every conceivable claim he could think of, and none of them were successful. It was the kind of decision that made me feel almost exhausted as I read it.

However, the case’s revelations will outlive the docket. There have always been whisper networks. They now reside on platforms that are owned by publicly traded corporations, and the individuals in charge of them—often volunteers, but sometimes someone like Sanchez—find themselves drawn into unexpected courtrooms. Depending on which side of a post you’ve ended up on, that may or may not be good.