Glen Powell Has a Dating Horror Story for You (2024)

Photo: Chris Saucedo/Getty Images

Dating is hell, and Glen Powell isn’t helping. Powell is currently promoting a movie in which he plays a hit man, and in an apparent effort to scare the bejeezus out of us all, he recently shared a dispatch from the dating world that desperately needs a fact-check.

In a recent appearance on TikTok comedian Jake Shane’s podcast, Therapuss, Powell answered a fan’s question about an imminent Bumble date with a guy she’d never met by sharing a deeply troubling cautionary tale. According to the actor, his sister’s friend had gone on a date with a “super charming” guy who brought her to his apartment and asked to give her a massage. “He starts massaging her shoulders,” he said. “Everything’s just feeling odd.” The woman apparently left despite her date asking her to stay, and the next day she started “itching like crazy” and went to a doctor. “He does a test on her skin,” he said. “It turns out it’s a black-market lotion that breaks down skin for human consumption. This man was rubbing lotion on her body to eat her.” According to his story, the woman sent police to the man’s house, where they found “several girls’ bodies.”

Chilling, delivered with astounding confidence, and also probably not true. Once you get past the sheer terror of this story, you arrive at questions like “Wouldn’t this have made the news?” and, for some people, “Haven’t I heard this before?” One BuzzFeed contributor claimed to have been told the same story, but the version he heard happened in a Las Vegas hotel room. A Reddit post from five years ago details a debunked urban legend about a woman who gets welts on her back after a Tinder date only to find out her date put meat-tenderizer enzymes on her skin to break it down, and police then found out he’d been killing and eating women.

Meanwhile, back in 2001, the fact-checking website Snopes debunked a category of tales called “Romantic Encounter With a Necrophiliac,” which all involve some variation of a woman experiencing a weird medical condition, leading her to find out she’s had an intimate encounter with a man who has sex with corpses. According to Snopes, the story evolved around 2009 from necrophilia to cannibalism, bringing us closer to Powell’s tale, which he claimed he heard “ten years” ago. Based on a follow-up tweet he posted, he did genuinely think it was true until now. He wrote, “Props to my little sister’s friend who told her this dating story … I’ve been telling this for years. I’m questioning my whole life now … False alarm. Back rubs are back.” I didn’t know they’d gone out of style?

This post has been updated.

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• celebrity
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