In theory, the internet promised, among other things, a solution to the age-old conundrum of finding a date. If you wanted romantic partnership, maybe you’d check out eHarmony. For fun and flings, try Tinder. If you 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 make an account on Ashley Madison.
At least, that was the pitch. From its founding in 2002 until the summer of 2015, Ashley Madison, so-called for the two most popular girls names, billed itself as the premier destination for adulterers – no judgment, no risks, no strings attached other than the payments required 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 affair; a secret good time outside the bounds of one’s partnership; self-proclaimed extensive security measures to prevent torpedoing one’s domestic life. The company’s CEO, a Canadian businessman named Noel Biderman, appeared on news programs and daytime talkshows with his wife, touting the site as a way to resuscitate partnerships by covertly meeting one’s extramarital needs while boasting of his own monogamous marriage. The site’s tagline was simple and cheeky: “Life is short. Have an affair.” And it was popular – by 2015, the company had launched in 40 countries and claimed more than 37 million users.
As recounted in Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies & Scandal, a new Netflix docuseries on the site’s rise and fall, nothing at Ashley Madison was quite so clean cut. “The whole story is really about fantasy and reality,” Toby Paton, the series’s director, said. “There’s the kind of fantasy that people are living within their marriages, if they’re not being honest with their partners. And then you’ve got this fantasy that the guys at Ashley Madison are very consciously creating on this site, where you can go on and you can meet someone else, and it can be entirely discreet, and you can have this affair that’s going to save your marriage.”
That fantasy imploded in July 2015, when a still-anonymous hacker called “the 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 did release personal details for 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 young escorts. (Biderman and Ruby Life, the owners of Ashley Madison, declined to participate in the series.)
The company, it turns out, was not particularly cyber-secure and never deleted any user information, despite charging people extra money for a “full delete” of their profile. “The promise of security, anonymity and safety was just 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 gamble proved devastating for millions of people, beyond public figures ensnared in the leak and subsequent media frenzy, including the reality TV star Josh Duggar, the Real Housewives Of New York star Kristen Taekman’s husband and, in an earlier scandal, the politician Eliot Spitzer. The series introduces a handful of former users and their loved ones left shellshocked by the revelations and willing to speak publicly. Everyone who appeared in the series had to do so “openly and honestly, undisguised, no kind of mask, no shooting people in silhouette, no AI to disguise their identities”, said Paton. “Everyone who was going to be on it had to be willing to be on 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 there is around infidelity and around cheating.” Paton’s team spoke to dozens of people over several months, most of whom were not ready to move beyond anonymity. “There were so many people in their lives who maybe didn’t know the full truth of what was going on,” said Paton. “They didn’t feel comfortable revealing that.”
Those that did speak out include the popular Christian vloggers Sam and Nia, who individually recount the betrayal, and public humiliation, of Sam’s infidelities, both via Ashley Madison and beyond it. Christi Gibson recalls the final moments with her husband John, a minister and professor at the New Orleans Baptist theological seminary, before he killed himself; earlier that day, John, who had long struggled with sex addiction, had been fired for his inclusion in the Ashley Madison leak. He left a note expressing his deep remorse and shame at being included in the site’s data.
Gibson came forward, she says, to demonstrate the human toll of shame and judgment, including from those who piled on to the data leak with schadenfreude, from anonymous Twitter users to late-night monologues to an Australian radio show who looked up callers’ spouses’ information on air. The Netflix series, likewise, tries to find the real people amid the company’s spin – a subsequent investigation found profligate bots imitating women – and the official police investigation into the hack, which remains unsolved. “We didn’t want this to be a judgmental series,” said Paton. “We didn’t want to make a series that was going to be all 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’s going on within relationships, what are some of the difficulties that people find themselves in within relationships that lead them to cheat. Why were people accessing Ashley Madison?”
Deceit, Paton found was “the real killer”. And the series reveals the Ashley Madison saga to be a fallible pyramid of it, from the adulterous spouses to the website that oversold its security and the humanness of its users, to the mysterious hacker who claimed the moral high ground in revealing private data. “There’s an argument that the real villain of the piece is whoever did that hack and published those names,” said Paton, “because the amount of devastation that was caused in marriages around the world and in people’s lives. People literally lost their lives as a result of having been exposed in that hack.”
Despite the Impact Team’s stated intentions, the hack certainly did not stop adultery, nor did it end Ashley Madison for good, though it did force Biderman to step down as CEO. The company restructured and rebuilt; in 2017, it settled a $576m class-action lawsuit from former customers for $11.2m, though their data remains online. Biderman’s successor, Rob Segal, promised renewed security measures and protections, amid other changes. According to the series, the site now claims to have more than 70 million users. Its marketing is significantly lower-profile than under Biderman’s reign, but “it doesn’t surprise me that it’s still around today,” says Back in the series. “I always say that as long as men have penises, Ashley Madison will always be in business.”
Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies & Scandal is available on Netflix on 15 May
