Katie Yates was in the bath when Jason Smith grabbed her head and pushed it under water.
‘He tried to drown me. I couldn’t breathe. He lifted me out and did it again,’ says Katie, 42. ‘Then he tried to beat me to death. I was petrified.’
Her crime? Allegedly making eye contact with a man in the supermarket that day. ‘I wasn’t allowed to look at anyone – women, men, children,’ she says. ‘I fancied them all, apparently.’
Over the course of their ten-month relationship Smith isolated Katie from her family and friends before subjecting her to a litany of almost unimaginable physical, sexual and emotional abuse.
The day after he tried to drown her, she reported him. Six months later, in June 2019, Smith was found guilty of 14 counts of rape and assault against Katie at Newport Crown Court in Wales and jailed for 15 years.
Yet he will be eligible for parole this summer, adding salt to a wound that refuses to heal.
Katie’s relationship with Smith was the first since her divorce five years before. ‘Now I don’t trust people,’ says the mother of two. ‘I don’t have friends. I don’t like going out. And I feel guilt – I’m a parent to two boys who are my world. To let the first person I allowed into our home be that type of person…’
She pauses, still stunned that her foray into dating as a single mum should have come to this.
Especially as she thought that by using a dating app to meet men she was taking all necessary precautions, because she was able to check them out online before she actually met them.
With more than 150 million users worldwide, Plenty of Fish is one of the oldest dating apps online, having been founded in 2003.
‘Some people associate older platforms with credibility simply because they have existed for many years,’ says Jemma Davis, cyber behaviour specialist and founder of online security training company Culture Gem. ‘Longevity can create a sense of legitimacy, but it does not remove risk.’
Indeed. Just this week we learned that 39-year-old serial rapist, Bruno Sala, violently attacked four women he met on dating apps – including Plenty of Fish – in Hampshire between 2019 and 2022, in one case passing a victim to other men and treating her like ‘meat for sale’.
Katie Yates met Jason Smith on Plenty of Fish, one of the oldest dating apps online, thinking she was taking all of the necessary precautions
But over the course of their ten-month relationship, Smith isolated Katie from her family and friends before subjecting her to a litany of unimaginable physical, sexual and emotional abuse
In January Plenty of Fish hit the headlines following former Spandau Ballet singer Ross Davidson’s conviction for raping a woman he met on the platform in 2012. Davidson had a brief relationship with his victim before they lost contact. In 2015 he invited her to his North London home, at which point he became ‘aggressive‘, the court heard. She awoke in his bed the next morning to find him raping her.
She reported him to the police in 2023 after learning he had been charged with similar offences.
Davidson, 37, who was also convicted of the attempted rape of another woman he had met on Tinder, is awaiting sentencing.
He is far from the only predator to have joined Plenty of Fish, which ‘tends to attract a broad age range and often people seeking longer-term relationships’, says Davis.
In September 2017 Anthony Lowe, 52, pleaded guilty to murdering Katherine Smith, 26, who he stabbed 33 times with a kitchen knife in her Cardiff flat just six weeks after meeting her on Plenty of Fish.
At his trial, it emerged Lowe, from Coventry, had a criminal record of 142 prior offences, including domestic violence. He had lied about his name, calling himself Tony Moore on the app, and told Katherine he was ten years younger.
After he was sentenced to life imprisonment in March 2019 Katherine’s mother Debbie paid tribute to her ‘beautiful, intelligent and caring’ daughter.
She later said that had Lowe been subjected to an identity check before he joined Plenty of Fish, he ‘wouldn’t have been able to go on it, Katherine wouldn’t have been able to meet up with him’. She added: ‘If I had my way I’d make sure they were held responsible for it.’
Then there was Carl Langdell, 26, who met history teacher Katie Locke, 23, on Plenty of Fish, lying that he owned a law firm when in fact he was serving a suspended sentence for making threats to kill.
After their first date in December 2015, Langdell took Katie, from Buckhurst Hill, Essex, to a Hertfordshire hotel and strangled her. He then took pictures of her dead body before sexually assaulting her corpse and dumping her in the hotel grounds.
After he was sentenced to life in March 2016, her family said for them ‘to realise that any fantasist or predator can lie and publicly portray themselves as anything their warped personalities would like is shocking’.
Langdell killed himself in custody at HMP Wakefield in February 2021. A coroner at the inquest described him as ‘psychopathic’.
In June 2019, Smith was found guilty of 14 counts of rape and assault against Katie at Newport Crown Court in Wales and jailed for 15 years
Three months after meeting, Smith assaulted Katie for the first time, trying to strangle her for ‘looking at a bloke’
To the outside world, Smith seemed perfectly normal. Behind closed doors, however, he punched her while she was driving if he thought she had looked at another driver
Dave Wilby, meanwhile, described himself as a ‘nice, honest decent guy’ on Plenty of Fish. Despite his victim declining his offer of a drink after they exchanged messages in December 2015, Wilby, 45, from Swaffham, Norfolk, continued to message her anyway before turning up at her front door that evening at 7pm, saying: ‘It’s me from Plenty of Fish.’
He pushed his way inside while her children were upstairs and raped her in her living room. Wilby was found guilty at Norwich Crown Court the following July and sentenced to 12 years.
Of course, most men signing up to dating apps aren’t rapists or murderers. But should twisted individuals want to meet women to prey on, they are inevitably a place to find one.
A BBC Freedom of Information request found that Plenty of Fish was one of three dating sites most associated with crime reports between 2017 and 2020, alongside Tinder and Grindr,. And it’s difficult to ignore the number of convictions where the perpetrator of abuse has met his victim on the site. These cases beg the question: how safe is Plenty of Fish? And why exactly does it have such a poor track record?
Theoretically, it should be better regulated since the government’s Online Safety Act – intended to reduce online harm, including on dating apps – was passed in 2023. Under its terms, dating sites are legally required to block illegal content like abusive messages and unsolicited nude images, to verify age to ensure children are not exposed to harmful content, and to be accountable for the safety of users.
Platforms that fail to comply can be fined up to £18 million or 10 per cent of their global revenue.
But no dating apps have been fined so far. Tinder, owned by Match Group – the same parent company as Plenty of Fish – has introduced voluntary identification checks in response, where users can verify their identity with a passport or driving licence to get a ‘verification badge’ on their profile.
And since last December, Plenty of Fish has asked users to upload at least one profile picture that shows their face, which is run through automated technology to estimate whether the user meets the minimum age requirement of 18.
A Plenty of Fish spokesman explains: ‘Safety requires constant and continued improvement. Since the time of these alleged incidents, our platform and our broader approach to trust and safety have evolved significantly. We’ve strengthened our policies, invested in more advanced detection and prevention tools, and enhanced the ways we identify bad actors from our services.’
But ‘stronger identity verification expectations, clearer reporting processes, and faster enforcement standards’ are still needed, says Jemma Davis. Because, of course, none of this will reveal a fake name or criminal record.
‘Apps are not forced to build sufficient safeguarding checks into the platform, so women users can be put at risk,’ adds Andrea Simon, Director of the charity End Violence Against Women Coalition, who says that by not prioritising women’s safety they ‘are hosting our abuse and profiting from it’.
Given that some 10 per cent of Britons meet their partner online, there are a lot of people to profit from.
Simon adds that when ‘a survivor does report an abuser to the platform, too often they’re ignored or dismissed, little to no action is taken and the perpetrator is still able to create a new account’.
Better awareness of the men falsely posing as perfect suitors is clearly paramount.
As Katie, who has bravely waived her right to anonymity to warn others of the dangers, puts it: ‘The predators on the site are so good at what they do, you don’t see the signs.’
A trainee hairdresser from Cardiff, she signed up to Plenty of Fish in January 2018, aged 35. Her children were aged seven and five. ‘I felt safer meeting someone this way than on a random night out,’ she says, ‘I’d be able to get to know them first.’
Eventually, Katie says, ‘I realised if I didn’t leave I’d die.’ She called her mum and her father drove to pick her up. The sight of Katie’s swollen face and black eyes rendered him almost speechless
‘Some people associate older platforms with credibility simply because they have existed for many years,’ says Jemma Davis, cyber behaviour specialist
Such was his control over Katie that she had lost contact with most of her friends. ‘He’d put a wedge between me and my mum and he said my children would get taken away if I told anyone’
Smith, then 29, appealed not just because of his handsome profile picture but his ‘genuinely nice’ messages.
They discussed their children – Smith had a son and said he loved being a dad. They also talked about their work – Smith said he was on leave from his job as a railway maintenance worker (‘a lie’, she would later find out) – their favourite foods, and goals. A lot of it was ‘general chat’, she says, building what Davis describes as ‘fast trust’, which is reassuring but ultimately meaningless.
‘You may think you are vetting someone in advance, but you are often interacting with a carefully managed digital identity rather than the full picture.’
A month of messaging later, they drank coffee at a local pub on their first date, and Smith ‘still seemed normal’ she recalls, ‘I thought I’d found a catch.’
Six weeks into their relationship Smith turned up at her house saying he’d had an argument with his landlord and asked to move in. It seemed rushed, but Smith promised to help cook and clean.
Over the following weeks, he became possessive. When Katie’s parents, also from Cardiff, wanted to see her, Smith told her he needed her at home. ‘If I did go, he’d demand to know why I was gone so long when I got back.’ When she wanted to see friends, he asked her to video call him to prove who she was with.
While she’d have preferred Smith not to be so ‘clingy’, and felt ‘betrayed’ when it emerged he was unemployed, she had been single for so long that she had no point of reference. ‘It was upsetting he was causing issues, but I just thought he really liked me.’
It was that April, just three months after meeting him, that he first assaulted her, pushing her onto her bed and trying to strangle her for ‘looking at a bloke’. Her overwhelming reaction before she lost consciousness was one of confusion. She came around to him slapping her face. ‘I couldn’t believe it had happened, but he acted so normal afterwards, I questioned whether it actually had,’ she says.
Many people will be baffled by her decision to continue the relationship at this point – but that’s to misunderstand the psychological traps, the threats and the isolation she was now victim to.
Such was his control over Katie by this stage that she had lost contact with most of her friends. ‘He’d put a wedge between me and my mum and he said my children would get taken away if I told anyone.’
Smith ‘tried to be the perfect father figure’, she says. ‘But they could tell I was scared of him and tried to protect me by behaving better to keep Jason happy.’
Smith’s jealousy was indiscriminate. In June he bent her arm back behind her body after accusing her of being unfaithful with a woman whose hair she’d cut. ‘It was agony and I couldn’t use it for weeks. I think it was broken but he wouldn’t let me go to hospital. It’s still painful now,’ she says. ‘He made me tell people I fell down the stairs and nobody questioned it.’
After he had assaulted her Smith would sometimes say sorry, ‘but he said it was me making him do it’. ‘It was always my fault. I started to believe him.’
When she left the house Smith called her constantly. ‘He once called me 70 times while I was at hairdressing college,’ says Katie, who quit her course, overwhelmed.
To the outside world, Smith seemed perfectly normal. Behind closed doors, however, he could drink a bottle of whisky a day, took Katie’s bank cards without asking and stole money from her children’s birthday cards too. He punched her while she was driving if he thought she had looked at another driver.
Katie wore sunglasses to mask her black eyes and learned to look down when they were together in public to placate him. Even then, he accused her of trying to ‘hide’ her attraction for someone. ‘I couldn’t win.’
When they got back in the car after a trip to a chip shop in Merthyr in July, he poured gravy over her head. ‘He said, “that’s for staring at the bloke in the chip shop,”’ says Katie, whose shoulder burned and blistered. ‘I was humiliated, in shock.’
Soon, it wasn’t just the prospect of losing her children he threatened. ‘He said if I said anything to anyone he’d go after my parents.’ At night she lay next to him, frozen. ‘I struggled to sleep. I lost weight.’
That December, after Smith attacked her in a holiday park in West Wales and Katie reported him to the park’s security, who removed him from their lodge, Smith responded by ripping up all her clothes and her sons’ Christmas elves. Then he raped her.
‘He said I deserved it “and you know why”. I was crying, telling him, “please no,”’ she recalls. ‘My boys were in the other room so I had to be quiet.’ Four days later he tried to drown her after accusing her of looking at a man in Sainsbury’s.
‘The side of my face had swelled up,’ she recalls. ‘He said “I might as well make the other side even.” I thought, “he’s actually going to kill me.” I realised if I didn’t leave I’d die.’
The following day she called her mum in tears. Smith grabbed the phone before she’d had a chance to say she was in danger. ‘But she knew something was wrong,’ says Katie, whose father drove to her house.
The sight of Katie’s swollen face and black eyes rendered him almost speechless. ‘He didn’t recognise me. I looked like someone out of a Halloween film.’
Smith ran away but was arrested that day and remanded in custody. Katie stayed with her parents as she tried to reconcile the loving man she met with the monster he hid.
‘My mum was white with shock. My dad stayed up for weeks crying, blaming himself,’ she says. ‘It broke him.’
Katie insisted on giving evidence in person rather than via video link at Smith’s trial at Newport Crown Court in June 2019. ‘I wanted the jury to see me,’ she says, ‘I don’t think it’s the same on a screen. I was crumbling inside, shaking, but I had to speak out to help make sure nobody else went through this.’
Her victim liaison officer has told Katie he could be eligible for parole this June. ‘I’m petrified,’ she says, ‘I know he will come after me in some way.’
She says people still blame her for not leaving Smith sooner. ‘But I couldn’t. I felt so alone.’
More must be done to protect people on dating apps such as Plenty of Fish, she says: ‘There should be background checks. I didn’t know who I was letting in.’
Additional reporting by Jane Cohen