Thanks to the way embarrassing information spreads on the Internet, you may have already heard about a man who ranked and tracked his online dating prospects in a spreadsheet. What you might not be aware of though, is that one of the women whose name and contact information was publicized is considering legal action ... against one of her spreadsheet sisters.
ABC News' Christina Ng spoke to Liliana Beidaut, one of the women who appeared on a spreadsheet created by a fella named David Merkur. This spreadsheet was meticulously maintained and included notes on Merkur's interactions with women he met on dating site Match.com. This document is now easy to find on the Internet because one of Merkur's dates goaded him into e-mailing her a copy — a copy she forwarded to her friends.
Predictably, those friends forwarded the spreadsheet to their friends and so on. The whole thing — and all the personal information it contained — went viral in the blink of an eye.
And now Liliana Beidaut, and the other women whose names appeared on the spreadsheet, are coping with the backlash.
"I've gotten a lot of calls from random people saying, 'Oh, you're the 9.5,'" Beidaut told ABC News, referring to the high rating Merkur gave her on his spreadsheet. While seemingly agitated by the incident, she isn't upset with Merkur though:
"I think the guy is really nice," Beidaut said. "I never met him and I don't think he did something that bad. He was nice, and he was trying to keep himself organized. I think he took that seriously and was really looking for a girl."
The object of Beidaut's irritation, instead, is the woman who shared the spreadsheet.
"Why would she send it to the whole world? It was a really stupid move," Beidaut said while speaking to ABC News. "My face is plastered everywhere now. I wasn't looking for that. I was just thinking that I was using Match.com."
Beidaut has spoken to "at least one other woman on the list who is similarly upset" and is considering taking legal action against the woman who shared the spreadsheet.
This certainly wouldn't be the first time that the Internet and romance collided in an explosion leading to legal action. A man recently sued women who posted reviews of their relationships with him onto a website called LiarsCheatersRUs and a college student was exposed to potential liability when a PowerPoint presentation in which she ranked her sexual partners in detail in 2010.
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