Love, lies and the law intersect at Twin Cities trial over STD transmission, defamation

Before the cops and the lawyers, they swiped right.

In 2021, a Twin Cities man and woman matched on Tinder and fell into a months-long romance. Last week, they arrived in Hennepin County District Court for a civil trial that asked a seven-member jury to consider several competing claims for damages around two main questions: Did the woman knowingly transmit herpes to her partner and did the man defame her by publicly spreading accusations that she was infected and a sexual predator.

The Star Tribune is not naming the two parties due to the sensitivity of medical information shared at trial.

This case was the latest example of how intimate relationships can intersect with the courts. Jill Hasday, a University of Minnesota professor, studied this phenomenon extensively for her book, “Intimate Lies and the Law.”

“In general, the law denies remedies for intimate deception, even though intimate deception can inflict enormous, even life-changing injuries,” Hasday said. She said these cases often involve an extreme depth of feeling over being wronged.

“Their worries about having a sufficient legal remedy sometimes lead them to take the law into their own hands, which is a mistake,” she said, adding that “for better or worse” nothing surprises her anymore about deception between intimate partners.

Aaron Ponce, the attorney who represented the man in this case, said at closing arguments that his client trusted his partner and “ended up with a sexually transmitted infection that has no cure, that will be with him forever.” Michael Kemp, the attorney for the woman, said the case was about fragility. His client was fragile like glass, the man she dated was different.

After matching on Tinder, the two Twin Cities residents started their relationship simply, texting and talking on the phone and over video. The attraction was mutual.

She called him one night and said she needed a ride because her ex-boyfriend was being abusive. It was the first time they met in person. He was struck by her beauty and asked how he could help. She told him to just drive. They went to his house, talked some more and had sex. The relationship kept up for a few months. He was 51. She was 25.

They wobbled between moments of domesticity and distance. He could be parental, a thing she welcomed at times and found overbearing at others. She was erratic and dealing with trauma. He wanted monogamy and demanded STD tests. She provided them and said she was clean. He felt they were in a committed relationship. She didn’t see it that way. Jealousy percolated in the corners of conversation but she said he was the closest person in her life at that time. He thought about marriage and tucking her in at night. She called him “monkey butt.” He called her “giraffey.”

They used condoms for sex, some of the time. Then, one day, he noticed a lesion on his groin.

What came next ripped their relationship apart and led to criminal investigations, prosecutions and dueling civil lawsuits.

After a few months, investigator Michael Merwin was assigned to the case.

Merwin had spent decades as an investigator. He was in Alabama for a weeklong Secret Service training when he got a phone call about the case. Someone was mailing flyers to a downtown Minneapolis apartment building where the woman had lived.

The flyer included the woman’s name, her picture and a physical description. It provided a phone number to call to prevent the spread of a “serious disease” and said the woman was a serial predator who was committing sexual assault and had potentially infected more people. It asked for anyone with information to call, “Max.”

Merwin looked up the phone number. It was the former boyfriend who had contracted herpes. Merwin called him from Alabama.

“I told him, ‘You’re going to mess up my investigation,’” Merwin testified. “His message was, ‘We’re calling off the dogs,’ and he would no longer distribute those flyers.”

The man emailed Merwin the next day and told him he was going to get justice, that he had thousands of dollars to spend and wouldn’t stop “until the day I die.”

He proceeded to send personal letters to her ex-boyfriends saying they might have a communicable disease and to contact him. He hired a private investigator. He went directly to the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office and contacted a Hennepin County judge. He emailed St. Louis Park City Council members and the city manager. Then he sent another batch of flyers.

The woman had moved out of Minnesota to Ohio to be near family. She was trying to get her life together. She was sober and had gotten a job. Then she started receiving calls from old neighbors, friends and ex-boyfriends. They had received the flyers or gotten calls or visits about her. She said many of them were worried she had HIV or AIDS.

She testified that her life crumbled. She hadn’t told her family about any of this, due to shame, but had to once the private investigator showed up at the home of her mom and brother. She was humiliated and terrified.

“It was creepy and scary to me,” she testified. “I didn’t want to show my face in Minneapolis around where I used to live and where these flyers were being sent out.”

Dr. Frank Rahme is an infectious disease expert with Allina Health who examined the man after he came to the hospital with two lesions — one on his face and one on his pubic area.

The man’s medical history showed he had previously tested negative for HSV1 antibodies but was now positive. He was immunocompromised due to a birth defect that severely affected his kidneys and made his outbreaks severe. He testified that he is on the organ transplant list for a new kidney and this could have an impact on that process.

In his clinical experience, which was extensive, Rahme testified people have wildly different responses to finding out they have an STD especially one like herpes where once you have it “it is there, forever.”

“Some people it really freaks them out,” Rahme said. “Some people blow it off and everywhere in between.”

The physical response to herpes also varies wildly. Some are entirely asymptomatic, others deal with persistent outbreaks. It is extremely prevalent in society, Rahme estimated 80% of the adult population in the United States has antibodies for oral herpes. It can be extremely hard to diagnose when it was transmitted and by whom.

At trial, the man said he knew the exact moment it happened. He was not sleeping with anyone else and his sore showed up about one week after he had sex with her. She said she never had any symptoms of infection.

“She purposely came over to give me that disease, I am 100% certain of that,” the man told the jury.

After being diagnosed, he found it nearly impossible to date.

“I decided I needed to go where people have this disease,” he testified.

He flew to Ghana and met a woman with herpes, but that relationship didn’t last. He is now dating what he called “an ideal person” but the relationship is only platonic.

As for the original Tinder date, she has since tested positive for herpes.

The jury found the woman lied by telling the man she didn’t have herpes but ruled she didn’t knowingly infect him with HSV-1. They found he was not harmed by her actions and awarded him nothing. They found he defamed the woman by sending letters about her into the public and his behavior was “so extreme and outrageous that it passed the boundaries of decency” and ordered him to pay the woman $120,000.

Jurors Caleb Sorensen and Tim Carr said most of the jurors started from the same point of view: The woman’s actions might have been wrong but she didn’t intend to harm anyone.

The man’s actions were a different story.

“We all felt like he wanted so much to be a victim,” Sorensen said. “It’s understandable you might not be in the right state of mind [when you get an STD] but we felt like sending the letters out, which does so much emotional damage and reputational damage, that somebody shouldn’t have to go through any of that.”

“I kind of thought that he thought it was romantic, but I don’t think she did,” Carr said. “I think she just looked at it as another partner.”

Kemp, the woman’s attorney, said they were happy with the outcome but his client remains shaken by everything that has happened to her.

Ponce, the man’s attorney, declined to comment.