Kentish Gazette Canterbury & District
‘Internet dating law campaign has cost me my job’
Romance scam victim Anna Rowe has been sacked as a teaching assistant after going public with her campaign to change online dating laws.
The 44-year-old from Rough Common, who was duped into a passionate relationship with a married serial womaniser she met on Tinder, was told on Friday that she has lost her job at Faversham’s Ethelbert Road Primary School.
A day earlier we revealed she was calling for a change in legislation enabling people who create fake profiles on dating sites to be prosecuted for fraud, communication and sex offences.
The story has since been reported in the national press and as far afield as the United States and India.
Anna, of Ross Gardens, said yesterday (Wednesday) that people were “horrified” to learn her campaign to change the law had led to her losing her job.
She said the school sacked her because she had brought it into disrepute.
She said: “The school was saying it had to do it because of the sexual content of the article and the mention of Tinder.
“There was nothing overtly sexual in the article. I had to talk about what had happened to me as a vehicle to get the campaign to change the law moving.”
Last week Anna told this newspaper how she had taken to popular dating app Tinder in the summer of 2015 to find love.
She was matched to a man who called himself Antony Ray but used a picture of Bollywood star Saif Ali Khan on his profile page.
They met in November and embarked on a relationship which saw Antony visit her Rough Common home two or three times a week, with the pair even talking of marriage.
But Anna later discovered that Antony Ray had been using a fake name and was in fact a high-flying City of London lawyer with a wife and family in Yorkshire.
Her ordeal prompted Anna to campaign to change the law so that anyone caught misrepresenting themselves online could be prosecuted.
She said: “I did not consent to sex with a married man who was having relationships with other women simultaneously.”
After a media storm after her story appeared in this paper last week,anna is due to appear on ITV’S This Morning today (Thursday).
Anna said: “It’s been a whirlwind of a week. I just can’t believe how far it’s gone and how many people have been interested in the campaign.”
Anna’s petition to the government is on the Change.org website or can be accessed via her Facebook page.
Kent County Council, the local education authority, said it could not comment as it was a personnel issue.