What do you call a true crime documentary with only a passing interest in the crime itself? You might call it Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies & Scandal. Netflix’s new three-part series, released on Wednesday, charts the rise and sort-of fall of Ashley Madison, the online dating site aimed at married people seeking to have affairs. Episode one charts the company’s rise to prominence in the Noughties, thanks to a series of provocative ad campaigns and its CEO’s near-constant presence on the talk show circuit. Episode two looks at the 2015 hack: when a group of cyber-criminals leaked the website’s entire database of users’ personal details (more than 30 million people), as well as internal emails and other compromising data. The final episode looks at the fallout: resignations and investigations – most of which led nowhere.
There’s obviously a prurience to a documentary like this. (It’s right there in the Soderberghian subtitle.) Ashley Madison has always been magnetised to controversy: there’s something uniquely brazen about its sleaze-dipped business plan. You could argue that the company is simply meeting the public demands for a service, in a free and inevitable marketplace – but there’s no getting around the fact that the profits are mined from personal betrayal. At both ends, the cost was a human one: firstly the spouses being cheated on, then the supposed “witch hunt” of users that followed the data leak, resulting in multiple suicides. Sex, Lies & Scandal affords its adulterous interviewees – most prominently, a Christian influencer called Sam Rader – compassion and airtime. But if they aren’t the villain of this story, who is?
