THE 21st CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I HAD HOPED: eBay agreed to pay nearly $50 million to couple sent cockroaches, bloody pig mask.
The settlement resolves more than six years of criminal and civil proceedings stemming from the harassment campaign. In their 2021 lawsuit filed in Boston federal court, the Steiners said that the company engaged in a conspiracy to “intimidate, threaten to kill, torture, terrorize, stalk and silence them” in order to “stifle their reporting on eBay.” The Natick residents, who report on the e-commerce industry in their newsletter, said they were subjected to cyberstalking, death threats and in-person surveillance by former eBay workers.
Ina Steiner said the campaign began with threatening direct messages on social media before escalating into anonymous deliveries of live cockroaches and spiders, a funeral wreath, a bloody pig Halloween mask and a book about surviving the death of a spouse. The employees also sent pornographic magazines with David Steiner’s name to a neighbor’s home and planned to install a GPS device on the couple’s car.
She said she did not initially know who was behind it or why.
“I could not conceive that a company I had been covering for the past two decades had tried to terrorize us into stopping our reporting,” she said.
When the lawsuit was filed, the company said “the misconduct of these former employees was wrong,” and that it would “do what is fair and appropriate to try to address what the Steiners went through.”
eBay reiterated its apology Tuesday, saying, “What the Steiners were subjected to by former eBay employees in 2019 was wrong, reprehensible and should never have happened.” The company also acknowledged “the unprofessional tone in internal communications” by former CEO Devin Wenig, former Chief Communications Officer Steve Wymer and former Senior Vice President Wendy Jones.
The company said the conduct “is not representative of eBay’s culture” and said it has since changed leadership and strengthened its policies, procedures and ethics training.
The Steiners’ “home address was also posted online, with public invitations for adult activities, as well as threats being made against them on Twitter (now known as X) and other social media platforms.” Did eBay’s employees not have the common sense to know that this was going to end very badly for them?