A civil litigation case against eBay, filed by the founders of a Massachusetts-based news site that covers ecommerce, has just been settled. The gist of it: The company and former execs have to own up to—and pay up for—perhaps the most disturbing harassment campaign ever led by a giant tech company against its critics.
Back in 2020, six former eBay employees and one contractor were charged with participating in a horrifying campaign—featuring doxing, threats, and deliveries of live pests—against David and Ina Steiner, the husband-and-wife founders of the Massachusetts-based news site EcommerceBytes. The Steiners wrote about eBay regularly, often not in a flattering light. In 2021, the couple filed a civil suit; EBay later agreed to pay a $3 million criminal penalty to the US Attorney’s Office in the District of Massachusetts.
Now the civil litigation case just reached a final settlement. The Steiners will receive more than $46.15 million from eBay, $2 million from former CEO Devin Wenig, $500,000 from former eBay executive Wendy Jones, and $50,000 from former eBay executive Steve Wymer.
EBay is also giving $6 million to charity, with an additional $1 million from Wenig going to a nonprofit that protects First Amendment rights. The company is required to issue a strongly worded statement condemning the actions of the former employees who were involved.
Notably, the settlement contains no confidentiality provision, which means the Steiners can continue to speak out about the case.
“From day one, that was a dealbreaker,” says Chris Murphy, an attorney for the Steiners at the personal injury firm Scalli Murphy Law in Everett, Massachusetts. “As journalists, and as victims, the Steiners were very clear that they wanted everyone to see and understand what eBay did to them. And from day one, they were ready to go to trial over it.”
“It’s a relief in some sense that we have some finality,” David Steiner said in an interview with WIRED. “But I think that it’s going to take a while to really see what this means in the bigger context of a settlement, versus having gone to trial. We were really adamant that this type of behavior by a Fortune 500 corporation didn’t go unchecked.”
Ina Steiner underscored that the couple ultimately pursued a civil suit because they wanted to better understand the kind of culture that precipitated this harassment campaign—and that in filing the civil suit, they gained access to 68,000 documents they would not have otherwise seen. “We were often in the dark during the federal investigation, and we were told very little as victims,” she said.
Spokespersons for eBay referred WIRED to a statement published online, in which the company extended its “deepest apologies” to the Steiners, condemned the employees who “perpetrated and pled guilty to criminal charges for the misconduct against Ina and David Steiner,” and acknowledged “the unprofessional tone in internal communications demonstrated, to different degrees and number, by Mr. Wenig, Mr. Wymer, and Ms. Jones.” The company emphasized that new leadership is now in charge, and that the incidents from 2019 are “not representative of eBay’s culture or thousands of employees around the world today.”
According to the initial criminal complaints, the harassment campaign led by eBay executives and contractors unfolded over a period of two months in the summer 2019. It began with anonymous, threatening Twitter DMs to the Steiners, then quickly escalated to deliveries to the couple’s home. These deliveries included a bloody pig mask, pornography, a package of fly larvae and live spiders, and another package containing live cockroaches. Other deliveries were themed around death, including a copy of a book on grieving a spouse and a funeral wreath from a local florist. All throughout, the anonymous Twitter account continued to send harassing messages. As text messages would later reveal in court documents, those DMs and deliveries were concocted and sent by the defendants.
Eventually, the eBay workers turned to in-person surveillance, tailing the couple in a rented Dodge Caravan. They also listed classified ads on Craigslist for a swinger party, a threesome, a block sale, and an estate sale, all pointing to the Steiner’s home address. At one point, an emergency plumber was sent to the home. Once the couple alerted the Natick police department, who alerted the feds, the harassers eased up their campaign and scrambled to cover up their actions. While Wenig has maintained that he had no knowledge of the specific actions that group had taken on behalf of eBay, he allegedly gave the initial order to “take her down,” referring to Ina Steiner, to former eBay chief communications officer Steve Wymer.
One subtlety of the Steiner settlement involves a law around punitive damages. In Massachusetts, punitive damages are typically not permitted in a standard personal injury or civil harassment case such as this one. The Steiners’s lawyers were able to successfully argue that because eBay is domiciled in California, where damages are allowed for personal civil harassment, these damages should be allowed in this particular case.
Murphy says that he believes it’s the first time this has been allowed in this kind of case in the state of Massachusetts, and that it sets a new precedent for harassment campaigns that originate from other states.
The Steiners are still operating EcommerceBytes out of their longtime home in Natick, Massachusetts. Murphy made a point to say that they remained in their home throughout the harassment campaign and the subsequent pandemic, enhancing their home security systems and sleeping in separate rooms in case one of them was physically assaulted during the night. Ina Steiner’s most recent post, about the settlement itself, was published to the news site just after 9pm local time last night—the first outlet to break the news.
