On Friday 13 June this year, a name that many people had been desperately trying to uncover for almost a decade was finally revealed. In a Northern Irish courtroom, a former vegan recipe content creator turned internet entrepreneur from Somerset was exposed as the hitherto anonymous proprietor of a gossip website named Tattle Life. His true identity is Sebastian Bond, and his unmasking may have kickstarted the biggest flurry of celebrity lawsuits since the Leveson inquiry revealed the extent of phone hacking in British tabloids.
Tattle Life is a members-only forum that invites users to create and contribute to publicly readable threads of what it calls “commentary and critiques of people that choose to monetise their personal life as a business and release it into the public domain”. The site itself is monetised via Google adverts and ostensibly specialises in “calling out” (overwhelmingly female) people in the public eye, policing them on their online commercial integrity (adverts, brand deals, sponsorships and so on) and on their lifestyles, specifically their parenting, marriages, relationships and friendships. In practice, many of its targets are not by any measure well known – they’re small business owners, people with a modest online presence. Daily theorising on their personal and professional lives sits alongside mean-spirited commentary on stars such as Stacey Solomon, Katie Price, housekeeping influencer Mrs Hinch and huge vloggers such as Lydia Millen and Zoe Sugg. Northern Irish fashion retailer Donna Sands fell into the former category and it is she and her husband, Neil, a former Silicon Valley executive and serial entrepreneur, who have dealt the heaviest blow to the site since its inception more than eight years ago.
