YoIn theory, the Internet promised, among other things, a solution to the age-old puzzle of finding a date. If you wanted a romantic relationship, maybe you would check out eHarmony. For fun and adventure, try Tinder. If he wanted to narrow down the potential pool, there were Farmers Only and Christian Mingle, among other demographic-specific sites. And if you were married and wanted to have a clandestine affair, you could create an account on Ashley Madison.
At least, that was the speech. From its founding in 2002 until the summer of 2015, Ashley Madison, named for the two most popular girls’ names, promoted itself as the premier destination for adulterers: no trials, no risks, no conditions other than the payments necessary to secure enough “credits” to talk to other users. The Toronto-based company, founded by Darren Morgenstern based on a statistic that 30% of people on existing dating sites were already married, promised a certain fantasy, particularly aimed at men: a list of women ready and willing to have an adventure; a secret good time outside the confines of one’s society; self-proclaimed extensive security measures to avoid torpedoing domestic life. The company’s CEO, a Canadian businessman named Noel Biderman, appeared on news shows and daytime talk shows with his wife, promoting the site as a way to resurrect partnerships by covertly satisfying one’s extramarital needs while boasting of his own monogamous marriage. The site’s slogan was simple and bold: “Life is short. Have an adventure.” And it was popular: by 2015, the company had launched in 40 countries and had more than 37 million users.
As chronicled in Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies & Scandal, a new Netflix docuseries about the site’s rise and fall, nothing about Ashley Madison was ever that clean. “The whole story is really about fantasy and reality,” said Toby Paton, director of the series. “There is the kind of fantasy that people live within their marriages, if they are not honest with their partners. And then you have this fantasy that the Ashley Madison guys are very consciously creating on this site, where you can go ahead and meet someone else, and it can be completely discreet, and you can have this adventure that’s going to save your marriage.”
That fantasy imploded in July 2015, when a still-anonymous hacker called “Impact Team” threatened to expose the site’s cheating users and the “fraud” company that enabled them. After weeks of holding the company hostage, the hacker revealed personal data of more than 30 million users: names, addresses, sexual preferences and fantasies, credit card information and messages, as well as Biderman’s personal emails, revealing that he repeatedly sought out young companions. . (Biderman and Ruby Life, the owners of Ashley Madison, declined to participate in the series.)
It turns out that the company was not particularly cyber-secure and never deleted any user information, despite charging them extra money for a “complete deletion” of their profile. “The promise of safety, anonymity and protection was simply something we said. It wasn’t something we did,” says Evan Back, Biderman’s childhood friend and the company’s former vice president of sales, in the first of three episodes. “It was like gambling.”
The bet proved devastating to millions of people, beyond the public figures caught up in the leak and subsequent media frenzy, including reality TV star Josh Duggar, the husband of Real Housewives Of New York star Kristen Taekman and, in a previous scandal, the politician Eliot Spitzer. . The series features a handful of former users and their loved ones who were shocked by the revelations and willing to speak out publicly. Everyone who appeared in the series had to do so “openly and honestly, without disguise, without any kind of mask, without shooting people in silhouette, without AI to disguise their identities,” Paton said. “Everyone who was going to participate had to be willing to do it openly as who they are now and tell their story. “It was very difficult to find people who were willing to do that, and I think that speaks to the stigma that exists around infidelity and cheating.” Paton’s team spoke to dozens of people over several months, most of whom were not prepared to come out of anonymity. “There were so many people in their lives who maybe didn’t know the whole truth of what was going on,” Paton said. “They didn’t feel comfortable disclosing that.”
Among those who did speak out were popular Christian vloggers Sam and Nia, who individually recount the betrayal and public humiliation of Sam’s infidelities, both through Ashley Madison and beyond. Christi Gibson remembers her final moments with her husband John, a minister and professor at the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, before she committed suicide; That same day, John, who had long struggled with sex addiction, had been fired for his inclusion in the Ashley Madison leak. She left a note expressing her deep remorse and shame at being included in the site’s data.
Gibson came forward, he says, to demonstrate the human cost of shame and judgement, including those who joined the data breach with schadenfreude, from anonymous Twitter users to late-night stand-up comedy and an Australian radio show that searched for spouses of the people who called. ‘information in the air. The Netflix series, likewise, attempts to find the real people amid the company’s turnaround (a subsequent investigation found wasteful robots imitating women) and the official police investigation into the hack, which remains unsolved. “We didn’t want this to be a critical series,” Paton said. “We didn’t want to make a show that was about how bad Ashley Madison is and how bad it is to cheat on your partners, because we all know that.” The series is more interested in “why people cheat, what happens in relationships, what are some of the difficulties that people encounter in relationships that lead them to cheat. Why did people access Ashley Madison?
Paton discovered that deception was “the real killer.” And the series reveals that the Ashley Madison saga is a fallible pyramid, from the adulterous spouses to the website that oversold its security and the humanity of its users, to the mysterious hacker who claimed the moral high ground by revealing private data. “There is an argument that the real villain of the piece is whoever hacked and published those names,” Paton said, “because of the amount of devastation it caused to marriages around the world and to people’s lives. “People literally lost their lives as a result of being exposed in that attack.”
Despite the Impact Team’s stated intentions, the hack certainly didn’t stop the adultery, nor did it end Ashley Madison for good, although it did force Biderman to resign as CEO. The company restructured and rebuilt; In 2017, it settled a $576 million class-action lawsuit from former clients for $11.2 million, although their data remains online. Biderman’s successor, Rob Segal, promised renewed safety measures and protections, among other changes. According to the series, the site now claims to have more than 70 million users. Its marketing has a significantly lower profile than under Biderman’s reign, but “I’m not surprised it’s still around today,” Back says in the series. “I always say that as long as men have penises, Ashley Madison will always be in business.”
