Some members of the original team behind the dating app Tinder are swiping left on a new film about Whitney Wolfe Herd.
The group of OG execs were already slamming the buzzy movie — released Friday — as inaccurate before it came out, though they’d only seen the trailer.
“Swiped” — starring Lily James as Wolfe Herd — debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival and is now on Hulu.
But Tinder’s co-founder, Jonathan Badeen, already is not a fan, exclusively telling Page Six last week: “I haven’t seen the movie… it’s obviously going to be a lot of lies.”
Badeen says he first heard about the film from “a drunk executive,” who filled him in on the details of the flick. After that conversation, “it’s been a little bit of a freak out knowing this thing was going to be full of errors, and a hit piece on [the actual founders],” he said.
There has been past bad blood between Wolfe Herd and the Tinder execs, including a lawsuit. (Wolfe Herd went on to become the founder of another online dating platform, Bumble, which launched in 2014. She also became the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire, The Post reported in 2021.)
Badeen and several others from the original Tinder alleged in comments to Page Six that the biggest misconception about the origin of their dating app is Wolfe Herd’s role as “co-founder.” (Wolfe Herd’s team has disputed this claim in the past, saying, “she is, was, and will always be a co-founder of Tinder, and that cannot be disputed”).
The Tinder insiders allege that Badeen, Justin Mateen and Sean Rad are the sole co-founders, while Bedeen described Wolfe Herd as having “more like an internish role.”
(Other insiders involved at the time also described her as having a junior role).
The company’s former vice president of communication and marketing, Rosette Pambakian, remembers her as “Justin’s girlfriend,” who “was very intent on letting people know that.”
“She didn’t add anything to meetings or to the business of Tinder, but she was always begging to be included [in articles] as co-founder. She’d say it was important for her career… It was all self-serving,” Pambakian said.
Wolfe Herd’s name as a co-founder first appeared in a 2013 article in Harper’s Bazaar, which left Pambakian and the comms team scrambling to get it removed, she told us.
But while seeing her listed as a co-founder, “very much upset me,” Badeen said. “I didn’t voice anything at that time… No one ever publicly combatted it.”
Things, however, came to a head when Wolfe Herd filed a lawsuit against Tinder and its parent company, IAC, alleging discrimination and sexual harassment, among other claims.
Her relationship with Mateen further complicated things. They broke up and she included several inappropriate text messages, as proof of harassment, in her lawsuit. (The case was settled with both parties admitting no wrongdoing.)
But they say the Tinder co-founder title somehow stuck, and went uncorrected, in part, because the original team said they were muzzled after the lawsuit.
Former brand manager, Josh Metz, who joined Tinder in early 2013, told us he was flabbergasted by the film’s trailer because, “I don’t think she was as serious about the success of Tinder, as the movie trailers have led everyone to believe,” he said. He added: “She was never considered part of leadership.”
Metz further added Wolfe Herd “wasn’t involved with any of the early marketing. It was all Justin, who was coming up with strategies,” he said.
He says he stayed silent at the time out of fear of losing his job. But Metz says he’s speaking out now after “watching the trailer reignited a fire in me… It feels inauthentic,” he said.
Badeen, Pambakian, Metz and other insiders believe “Hollywood is about to canonize a lie,” with “Swiped.”
“The movie plays like a hagiography, but the real story of Tinder, Bumble, and Whitney Wolfe is something else entirely,” a source told us.
“She was not an integral part of Tinder. She was not perceived by me or anyone as an important figure responsible for any of the success,” Badeen said. “When she was out of the company, there was nobody upset about losing her when she left.”
Reps for Hulu and Wolfe Herd did not comment.
Wolfe Herd told CNBC on Friday she was not involved with the film, commenting, “No, I’m not involved in it… Frankly, I was informed about this movie after it was already off to the races. I think they had already written the script and done all these things. I even was asking my lawyer two years ago, like, ‘What do I do? I don’t want a movie about me. Shut it down!’”
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