WWhile Ashley Madison users may have a lot of secrets, the site itself, launched in 2001, has never been secretive about who it targets: married people who want to have an affair. In fact, his most viral slogan is “Life is short. Have an affair.”
Nearly a decade after a 2015 hack exposed personal information about millions of Ashley Madison users, a new documentary series on Netflix, released May 15, reveals more about what was going on behind the scenes at the company and in the families of some of the victims. .
Ashley Madison: sex, lies and scandal features interviews with former members of the site, who appear on camera to talk about their experiences. They share what was going on in their lives that led them to join Ashley Madison and what happened after the hack.
The victims of the Ashley Madison hack
Not everyone was using Ashley Madison in complete secrecy. The first episode of the series features an interview with a couple, Rob and Stephanie, who say that Ashley Madison has really helped their marriage by offering an avenue for each of them to explore their sexuality. Although Rob’s information was exposed in the hack, he he did not face repercussions in his relationship as he was already in an open marriage. (Sex, lies and scandal was made without any cooperation from Ashley Madison.)
Rob says in the series that he is interested in dating younger, married women, while Stephanie is a dominatrix and can find men who will perform sexual acts that Rob is not interested in doing. She even gives viewers a tour of her sex toy collection. They have two rules: Rob always uses a condom and they always tell each other who they are with, basically getting each other’s permission to date someone else. “I consider myself one of the happiest married men I know,” says Rob. Likewise, Stephanie loves that “he doesn’t lie to me” and describes him as a great husband and father.
But many Ashley Madison users joined the site without their spouses knowing. In the docuseries, Christian YouTube star Sam Rader talks about how he signed up for the site at a time when he was overwhelmed balancing work as an emergency room nurse in Texas, paying bills and caring for his first child. As Rader explains why he created an Ashley Madison account: “I didn’t want to leave my family, but I wanted something exciting in my life.”
Soon after starting the account, he ended up finding new fulfillment in marriage with his wife Nia and says he ignored the account for years. His career making YouTube videos as a family-loving Christian father was just taking off when the 2015 hack happened. When he saw that his name was posted on Twitter in association with the data breach, he immediately told Nia. In the series, she admits how she felt “betrayed” and “enraged,” but decided to forgive him immediately because he hadn’t met any women in person. “I need to accept that he has some curiosities that I didn’t know about,” she says in the series.
Many spouses affected by the hack were not as understanding as Nia. Countless marriages have ended, and the series focuses on a New Orleans seminary professor named John who killed himself after his name was included in the leak.
In the series, John’s wife, Christi, talks about finding his body in the garage. She later learned that earlier in the day John had resigned because the seminary where he taught discovered he had an Ashley Madison account because of the hack.
She denounces the “witch hunt” of people who dug into the data breach and revealed people like her husband, arguing, “I’m sure there are people who are angry at Ashley Madison, but I blame the secrecy, the cancer of shame that was eating away at him.
What the Ashley Madison hack revealed
Many male Ashley Madison users who thought they were paying to message real women were actually chatting with bots or Ashley Madison employees. The series highlights a former stripper and adult performer named Michelle “Bombshell” McGee, who claimed in 2010 that she had an affair with Sandra Bullock’s husband, Jesse James.
Although McGee had previously done some promotional work for Ashley Madison and had an account on the site, she was not actively using it at the time of the hack in 2015. However, she says, three different men showed up to her presentations with gifts. at her, believing they were engaging with her based on conversations they thought they were having with her online. She says she told a man she hadn’t spoken to anyone on the site and described his expression as one of pure terror, “as if he had been tricked.”
Many of the fake profiles can be traced back to an IP address at an Ashley Madison office in the United Kingdom. “We knew there were fake profiles on the site,” Cathy, a former Ashley Madison customer service representative, said in the series. “It was no secret to us.”
She says employees were instructed to fill out profiles with the physical characteristics that male users liked most. Evan Back, former vice president of sales at Ashley Madison, explains that the bots, powered by a form of artificial intelligence, began messaging male users when they realized they were generally too shy to reach out first.
Despite the 2015 hack, Ashley Madison still exists, with over 70 million users. In a post-script, the docu-series says that Ruby Life, the owners of Ashley Madison and former CEO Noel Biderman have declined to comment on claims made in the episodes. A spokesman for Biderman said he is a committed husband and father. Perhaps the series could save viewers’ marriages; If they consider victims’ logic for creating accounts to be understandable, then they can be proactive or even seek advice. As director Toby Paton says of the film: “There’s something quite deep and universal that it touches and speaks to.”
This story originally appeared on Time.com read the full story
