Paola Sanchez AWDTSG Lawsuit: Dismissed, Sanctioned, Affirmed on Appeal

The lawsuit filed against Paola Sanchez over her “Are We Dating the Same Guy?” Facebook network was dismissed in full in May 2025, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit affirmed that dismissal in May 2026, calling the appeal “entirely frivolous” and moving to sanction the plaintiff’s attorneys for filing briefs the court said contained fabricated quotations that bore “the hallmarks of the misuse of generative artificial intelligence.”¹²

Who Paola Sanchez Is and What She Was Sued Over

Sanchez founded the first “Are We Dating the Same Guy?” (AWDTSG) Facebook group in New York City around 2022. The concept let women in a given city post photos and descriptions of men they were dating so other members could respond with their own experiences or flag concerning behavior. It grew into a network the organization describes as spanning more than 250 cities and 10 million members.³ Sanchez and developer Blake Millbrand incorporated Spill The Tea, Inc. in Delaware as the corporate entity behind the groups.¹

On January 25, 2024, a 32-year-old salesman from Des Plaines, Illinois, Nikko D’Ambrosio, sued Sanchez, Millbrand, Spill The Tea, Meta Platforms, a woman he had briefly dated named Abbigail Rajala, her parents, and 26 anonymous “Jane Does” in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.⁴¹ Rajala had posted a critical account of their dating experience in the Chicago AWDTSG subgroup, which had roughly 100,000 members, along with a screenshot of what she described as a menacing text D’Ambrosio sent her from an alternate phone number.⁵ The Rajala parents were named on the theory that their daughter’s post was made using their home internet connection.

The Nine Claims in the Complaint

D’Ambrosio’s Second Amended Complaint pleaded nine causes of action. They included defamation per se and per quod, misappropriation under the Illinois Right of Publicity Act, unjust enrichment, doxing under the Illinois Anti-Doxing Act, invasion of privacy by false light and conspiracy, negligence and negligent entrustment, and a strict products liability claim against Meta that treated Facebook itself as a defective “product.”¹ D’Ambrosio’s attorney, Marc Trent of the Trent Law Firm, also tried to convert the suit into a class action on behalf of other men allegedly harmed by AWDTSG groups, though D’Ambrosio remained the only named plaintiff.⁶

Why the District Court Dismissed the Case

On May 13, 2025, U.S. District Judge Sunil R. Harjani dismissed every claim with prejudice, meaning the complaint could not be refiled.¹ On defamation, the court held that the posts amounted to opinions about D’Ambrosio’s dating behavior rather than actionable false statements of fact, applying Illinois’s “innocent construction rule.” One post D’Ambrosio pointed to as defamatory turned out to reference a different person entirely. The court also noted he had failed to show any actual injury to his employment.⁷

The right of publicity claim failed because D’Ambrosio’s name and likeness never appeared on the Spill The Tea GoFundMe page or Patreon account, so there was no link between his identity and any commercial activity by Sanchez. The strict products liability claim against Meta was rejected because Facebook’s platform is not a “product” under the law. The remaining counts, from doxing to unjust enrichment to false light, failed because D’Ambrosio did not plead facts sufficient to satisfy their elements.¹ Meta and the Spill The Tea defendants had also raised Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act as a defense, but the court did not need to reach that issue because the state-law claims failed on their merits.⁸

The Seventh Circuit Affirms and Moves to Sanction the Lawyers

D’Ambrosio appealed. On May 15, 2026, a Seventh Circuit panel led by Judge David Hamilton affirmed the dismissal on every claim in D’Ambrosio v. Meta Platforms, Inc., No. 25-2231.⁹ On the Right of Publicity Act, the panel held that placing advertisements near posts that mentioned someone is not enough to establish a “commercial purpose”; a plaintiff must show the defendant used his identity to help sell something. On the Anti-Doxing Act, the court laid out a six-element test and found D’Ambrosio had not shown that any defendant knew of, or recklessly disregarded, a reasonable likelihood of death, bodily injury, or stalking. On defamation, the panel agreed that a link to a news story about a man named “Anthony LaMonica” was not defamatory toward someone named “Nikko,” because the URL, story preview, and mugshot all pointed to a different person.⁸

The sharpest part of the ruling addressed the plaintiff’s lawyers. The court declared the appeal “entirely frivolous” as to the Rajala defendants and found that briefs filed by the Trent Law Firm contained “fictitious quotations and misstatements of law.”² Judge Hamilton wrote that the errors bore “the hallmarks of the misuse of generative artificial intelligence,” while emphasizing that “submitting nonexistent authorities or quotations is a false statement to a court regardless of the tool used.”⁸ The court also noted that attorney Aaron Walner apparently did not sign the filing and did not appear to have reviewed the fabricated citations it contained.⁵

The panel ordered D’Ambrosio and his attorneys, Trent and Walner, to show cause why they should not be sanctioned under Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 38, which allows fees and double costs for frivolous appeals. Walner separately faced potential fines under Rule 46(c) for misrepresentations in the doxing section of the brief. The court also forwarded the matter to the Illinois Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission for possible professional discipline, and gave the firm until June 16, 2026, to request a hearing or file statements on whether sanctions were warranted.⁸⁵

The Plaintiff’s Federal Tax Fraud Conviction

While his civil suit was pending, D’Ambrosio was dealing with a separate federal criminal case. In January 2024, a jury convicted him on two counts of making false statements on his 2019 and 2020 personal income tax returns.¹⁰ Prosecutors said he had underreported more than $300,000 in annual income from electronic sweepstakes gaming machines while claiming, among other fabrications, over 474,000 miles of business travel, more than $263,000 in meal expenses, and a roughly $70,000 charitable donation to a Chicago Catholic church that had no record of ever receiving money from him. The total tax loss was approximately $119,000.¹¹

On May 29, 2024, U.S. District Judge Thomas Durkin sentenced him to one year and a day in federal prison. At sentencing, Judge Durkin told D’Ambrosio, “You lied badly… You doubled down,” noting that he had also lied to the FBI and committed perjury at trial. Prosecutors introduced text messages between D’Ambrosio and a woman named in his defamation suit that an assistant U.S. attorney called “cruel, degrading and horrible messages.”¹⁰

A Parallel Case in California

The Chicago suit was not the only one aimed at AWDTSG participants. In Los Angeles, Stewart Lucas Murrey sued more than 50 women in June 2023 (nine named in his complaint) who had posted about him in the Los Angeles and Orange County AWDTSG groups, seeking up to $2 million in punitive damages on claims that included defamation, sex-based discrimination, and civil conspiracy.¹² In April 2024, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Gregory Keosian granted an anti-SLAPP motion filed by one defendant, Vanessa Valdes, dismissing all 11 counts against her. The judge ruled the posts addressed a “matter of public interest: women’s security against male violence and harassment” and found no evidence of a conspiracy.¹³ Between the two cases, courts have so far treated AWDTSG posts as protected opinion or speech on a matter of public interest rather than actionable defamation.

1
Courthouse News Service. Are We Dating the Same Guy Group Not Guilty of Defaming Man
2
Eric Goldman Blog. Court Rejects Lawsuit Over Online Criticisms of a Dater
3
Are We Dating the Same Guy. Are We Dating the Same Guy
4
CourtListener. D’Ambrosio v. Meta Platforms, Inc.
5
Ars Technica. Legal Fail: Don’t Use AI to Sue Facebook Users for Calling You a Bad Date
6
404 Media. Man Who Sued Are We Dating the Same Guy Groups Files Class Action Lawsuit
7
FindLaw. Man Who Raised Red Flags on Facebook Group Gets Lawsuit Dismissed
8
CaseMine. D’Ambrosio v. Meta: IRPA Commercial Purpose Requires Identity to Help Sell
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TDR Law. TDR Obtains Complete Victory in 7th Circuit
10
Chicago Tribune. Chicago-Area Man Who Sued Women for Badmouthing Him on Facebook Sentenced to 1 Year in Prison for Tax Fraud
11
U.S. Department of Justice. Suburban Chicago Man Sentenced to Federal Prison for Overstating Business Expenses
12
NBC News. Judge Dismisses Are We Dating Same Guy Facebook Group Lawsuit
13
Los Angeles Times. Dating the Same Guy Defamation Lawsuit