Priest allegedly visited gay bathhouses & his Grindr data outed him. Now he’s suing Grindr.

A Catholic priest who was outed as gay because his Grindr data suggested he was having sex with men is suing the tech company for millions of dollars for violating his privacy.

Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill was once the highest-ranking non-bishop American cleric. He took a vow of celibacy and worked as general secretary of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), an anti-LGBTQ+ Catholic organization.

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One advocate called the fines “a very important victory in the fight to ensure consumers’ safety online.”

Then, a conservative Catholic website named The Pillar outed him in a July 2021 article after allegedly obtaining Grindr data from a third-party source and tracking him to gay bathhouses where he was believed to have had sex with men for years.

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Burrill resigned in disgrace, and his lawyer asked Grindr for $5 million in compensation. Grindr refused, so Burrill has now filed a lawsuit against Grindr in the California Superior Court, alleging that the popular hook-up app neither protected his data nor informed him that third-party vendors could access it, The Washington Post reported. Burrill says Grindr’s data policies caused him to lose his job and inflicted “significant damage” to his reputation, but Grindr has denied his allegations, saying they “are based on mischaracterizations” of their user data policies.

Burrill’s lawyer, James Carr, said that Burrill was “publicly ‘outed’ as gay” as a result of his data being released. “To have that decision forced out of your hands and into the public realm is reprehensible,” Carr told The Washington Post.

Gregory Helmer, another one of Burrill’s lawyers, said, “We want answers so we can use that as a warning to other Grindr users.”

The lawsuit alleges that The Pillar received the data from the Catholic Laity and Clergy for Renewal (CLCR), a Denver nonprofit that claims to help bishops identify weaknesses in the training of priests to “empower the church to carry out its mission.” But Jayd Henricks, president of CLCR, denied sharing information with The Pillar.

The Pillar said that it legally obtained Burrill’s data from a vendor who was selling anonymized data that Grindr sold in accordance with its terms of service. The data allegedly didn’t include names or pictures of users, but Grindr assigns a unique number to each phone and tracks timestamped location data based on GPS signals. That data is then aggregated and sold.

The Pillar identified a phone was using Grindr from the USCCB staff residence in Wisconsin from 2018 to 2020. Reporters at the publication tracked that phone to Burrill’s family lake house, to the homes of his family members, and to an apartment in his hometown where he’s listed as a resident, leading them to believe that the phone belonged to Burrill and not to someone else who works at USCCB.

Burrill’s alleged phone also sent a GPS signal from inside a Las Vegas gay bathhouse, as well as other bathhouses in cities that he traveled to for his work. This data — and his use of the app to begin with — was enough to show The Pillar that he “engaged in serial and illicit sexual activity” because members of the Catholic clergy are not supposed to be having sex at all.

Burrill, a priest from Wisconsin, worked for the USCCB starting in 2016 and was elected general secretary last year. USCCB is a Catholic organization made up of members of the Church’s hierarchy and opposes LGBTQ+ equality. It has worked against the development of an LGBTQ+ suicide hotline, tried to stop same-sex couples from adopting children, repeatedly criticized President Joe Biden for supporting LGBTQ+ rights, and supported anti-trans legislation this year.

In June 2022, a bishop appointed Burrill as the parochial administrator of a parish in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Burrill is reportedly still “trying to get back on his feet” after suffering “shame and embarrassment,” Helmer said.

In 2021, Grindr’s then-CEO Jeff Bonforte pledged to investigate the incident and to publicly share the results of its investigation, even if Grindr was found to be the source of the de-anonymized data.

At the time, Grindr published a blog post that considered only three possible methods that led to The Pillar getting anonymous data and reverse engineering it to out the priest. None of them involved a breach by Grindr.

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