Stefany Phillips still remembers the exact date—Dec. 27, 2014—that she received a phone call from a woman who had been engaged in an 18-month affair with her husband of seven and a half years. That level of memory detail speaks to the Earth-shattering trauma of infidelity, and in the case of Stefany and countless others it was facilitated by AshleyMadison.com, the infamous website that connects would-be cheaters. Spearheaded at its height by media-friendly CEO Noel Biderman, Ashley Madison is a portal that enables sexual and romantic deception. Thus, when it was notoriously hacked in 2015, there were few tears shed—except, of course, by those users whose names, contact information, and bedroom proclivities and fantasies were disseminated to the entire world.
The Ashley Madison Affair spends a small portion of its second episode lamenting the “human wreckage” wrought by that data breach, from destroyed marriages and ruined careers to, in a few apparent cases, suicide. Yet ABC News and Hulu’s three-part docuseries (July 7) doesn’t go too far trying to elicit sympathy for the Ashley Madison users who wound up as the hack’s collateral damage. Whether they were two-timing or not, the millions who signed up for the service were looking for something (companionship, love, kinky pleasures) that they weren’t getting from their spouses, and they generally sought it out in secret, keeping their accounts and resultant activities hidden from their partners’ view. Stefany isn’t the only person to relay the shock and horror of discovering that her husband was cheating via Ashley Madison, and it’s that anger and sorrow which resonates loudest in this exposé, not the harm and distress suffered by people (including celebs like convicted child-porn enthusiast Josh Duggar) who willingly used the platform.
Indicative of its “creepy” nature, Ashley Madison got its moniker from 2002’s two most popular baby girl names, and from January to August of that first year of operation, it grew its subscriber base from 60,000 to 550,000 members. It was a godsend to the unfaithful segments of the population, who no longer had to pretend to be single on traditional dating sites in order to cheat on their spouses. By August 2008, Ashley Madison was running commercials on ESPN and posting tongue-in-cheek billboards around the country, both of which earned it considerable press attention. So too did Biderman, who was more than happy to appear on television and respond to pointed questions about the ethicality of his enterprise while—as was the case on The View—being lustily booed by audiences.
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To most, Ashley Madison was a company that appealed to the sleazy, and they flocked to it in droves. In 2015, the site boasted 31.5 million members (27.5 million of whom were men) and Biderman was floating the idea of a public IPO that would make him rich. At the same time, he continued to regularly pop up on TV, frequently alongside his wife Amanda, with whom he claimed to be in a monogamous relationship, even as he vigorously espoused the belief that monogamy was flawed and that he was simply giving people what they already wanted. In archival clips, Biderman comes across as a cheery entrepreneur willing to take his lumps from critics and to confidently deflect blame away from himself and his customers, going so far as to state that Ashley Madison saved marriages by granting people an outlet for feelings and urges that would otherwise lead to divorce.
Regardless of that notion’s veracity, Ashley Madison did gangbusters business and, in the process, became a well-known part of the culture. For the wrong reasons, its profile grew even larger in 2015 when a hacker collective known as the Impact Team informed the company that it would release all of its proprietary data if it didn’t shut down within 30 days. Ashley Madison called the group’s bluff and lost that bet, with the Impact Team making good on its threat, thereby outing millions of users who could soon be easily identified by spouses, friends, and employers via the many search databases that materialized on the web. Just as damning for Ashley Madison were subsequent revelations that they’d been engaged in fraud, both by charging for account deletion and then retaining client information, and by creating thousands of fake female accounts (fembots) that were used to lure, manipulate, and maintain paying male customers.
Biderman’s own emails (approximately 200,000 in total) were also leaked, and they not only proved that he had known about the fembot scam, but also that he’d been less than monogamous in his own marriage. Lawsuits followed, albeit to little avail; the penalties that Ashley Madison incurred were a pittance when compared to the site’s success. In the wake of the hacking, Biderman was compelled to resign by parent firm Avid Life Media. Yet it continues on today, with chief strategy officer Paul Keable declaring in The Ashley Madison Affair that the company let its users down with the hack (due, it seems, to thoroughly lax cybersecurity), and that it’s since rectified those mistakes by hiring an Ernst & Young report to verify that all bots have been removed from the system and to validate all existing memberships.
The Ashley Madison Affair features actors reading comments from real-life Ashley Madison patrons that both reveal their predictable motivations (and lack of shame about their conduct) and speak to the fake-identity issues that plagued the site for years. Interviews with clients and with the journalists and security experts who broke and covered the story provide further context, although the docuseries presents nothing particularly explosive that hasn’t already been reported elsewhere. Victims of cheating husbands are allowed to recount their ordeals, and two men who were outed in the hack (but didn’t actually sleep around) express their frustration and remorse. Meanwhile, multiple commentators opine on the ugliness of Ashley Madison’s core service, the unfairness of making private lives public, and the responsibility people have for their own actions—especially when, by keeping their behavior secret, they make clear that they know they’re risking their own families, livelihoods, and reputations.
