WASHINGTON — The powerful House Oversight Committee is widening its investigation into the company behind the controversial, now-defunct TeaOnHer gossip app, which let men dish on the women they’ve dated — and has been accused of exposing nude pictures and other sensitive data.
Lawmakers demanded answers Thursday from Utah-based Newville Media Corporation over how it migrated user data from TeaOnHer to Trinity Social, which bills itself as an all-in-one social media platform mirroring Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok.
TeaOnHer faced controversy after revelations emerged that men were using the platform to share sensitive information about the women they dated. Instagram/teaonherofficial“You told the Committee that TeaOnHer users post about themselves, but you told TeaOnHer users, before migrating them to Trinity Social, that TeaOnHer had a ‘review model,’ for users to post about other people,” wrote Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) and Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC), the chairwoman of the Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Information Technology, and Government Innovation, to Newville founder Xavier Lampkin.
The Oversight panel began probing TeaOnHer last year in response to reports shortly after the app launched that it exposed the personal data of women who undertook relationships with men on dating platforms — including government IDs, selfies, and some X-rated images.
“I built it as a beta project in Utah to kind of test it out a little bit before I try to market it. [But] this took off before I even had a chance to hone in and get the platform locked down,” Lampkin told The Post Tuesday.
“…Prior to this investigation, I was pondering the idea of actually shutting down The tea app just due to the high volume of complaints I was getting from people.”
Comer and Mace raised concerns about how a man who identified himself as a co-founder of Trinity Social boasted about a forthcoming “OnlyFans-style feature.”
Lampkin claimed that man was actually just an investor and explained that he was talking about a “tipping” feature similar to Facebook and Instagram. While OnlyFans also has a tipping feature, Lampkin stressed that he was not trying to make his platform into a pornography site.
He also argued that the GOP-led Oversight panel was unfairly singling his site out for X-rated content when platforms like X are rife with it.
Ultimately, that tipping feature for Trinity Social was not developed and has not been implemented.
The two lawmakers said Thursday they were “concerned the pornographic posts on Trinity Social are similarly non-consensual, and possibly illegal under federal law.”
TeaOnHer, a would-be rival to the Tea app — a popular but controversial dating tool aimed at women — was quickly barred from Apple’s App Store and suffered a breach this past August that exposed data of roughly 86,000 users. Notably, the Tea app — which he was competing against — suffered a data breach last summer that exposed some 72,000 voters.
Lampkin, who says he is running for president in 2028 as a Republican, insists that TeaOnHer didn’t suffer a data breach on the scale of the Tea app.
The tech founder clarified that his “API swagger” system on his since-defunct app was left open, which allowed sophisticated tech-savvy netizens, such as Tech Crunch, to extract IDs from that. As far as he is aware, only three of those IDs were extracted before he closed it.
Lampkin is not aware of any other of the 86,000 users’ data getting leaked.
Additionally, he noted that the platform was public, similar to how X typically operates, and allowed people to view posts as a guest.
“You then migrated the TeaOnHer userbase to Trinity Social, without providing account holders any options for recusal from the migration,” Comer and Mace told Lampkin Thursday.
TeaOnHer has also been accused of disseminating sensitive content about minors.
The lawmakers claimed, citing screenshots, that TeaOnHer told users that removing posts about juveniles required proof that the requester was a child’s parent or guardian.
Proof sought included birth certificates, custody papers, and government-issued IDs — paperwork that was not required to access the app in the first place.
The Oversight Committee began investigating Newville Media last year over its now-defunct TeaOnHer app. Getty ImagesThe committee also found that Trinity Social has no age verification mechanism to “prevent minors from viewing sexually explicit content.”
“Moreover, Trinity Social does not even include a basic warning to users that they may encounter pornographic content, nor does it require users to — at minimum — affirmatively state they are 18 years old or older before accessing the platform,” wrote Comer and Mace.
Last year, the Oversight panel had demanded Newville Media fork over troves of data, including internal communications, and preserve key material about TeaOnHer.
On Thursday, Comer and Mace expressed concerns that by discontinuing TeaOnHer, Newville Media is attempting to cover its tracks.
“In your November response, you stated TeaOnHer’s ‘existing content [is being] preserved for investigation.’ Despite this assertion, you appear to have shut down TeaOnHer.com and the TeaOnHer app,” the lawmakers wrote.
“The Committee is concerned by these actions as they imply you may not be preserving TeaOnHer’s content, which would be misleading the Committee and obstructing our investigation.”
Lampkin denied that this was intentional and claimed that he lacked the financial resources to pay the bills for Amazon Web Services to keep the platform data.
“As a solo founder … I’m not like rich or anything like that. And the way that the platform blew up the AWS costs, infrastructure costs grew into the tens of thousands of dollars,” he said. “It grew to a place where I couldn’t pay for it no more, and Amazon restricted the account and closed it, which means that the whole system was gone.”
Rep. Nancy Mace leads the Oversight Committee’s work on cybersecurity issues. AP“I didn’t have $45,000 to pay Amazon to retain the account. If I did, I wouldn’t have let it fail.”
As part of an expanded probe into Newville Media, the Oversight Committee is demanding more communications revolving around TeaOnHer, including correspondence with Lampkin and its legal team.
They also want documentation on the August data breach, communications sent to TeaOnHer users, communications with Apple about availability in the App Store, material on the transition from TeaOnHer to Trinity Social, and details on how data from TeaOnHer is being retained.
Comer and Mace have given Newville a Feb. 26 deadline to answer their requests.
Attempts to contact Lampkin and Newville Media for comment were not immediately successful.






