Leah Willingham
Online giant eBay agreed to pay $US48.7million ($69.8 million) to a Massachusetts couple who said former employees of the company targeted them with threats and bizarre anonymous deliveries — including live insects, a funeral wreath and a bloody pig Halloween mask, according to settlement details.
The parties reported reaching a tentative settlement in February as the case was headed to trial, but they were unable to finalise it. David and Ina Steiner asked a federal judge in June to restore the case to the trial calendar and reached a new settlement this month.
The agreement with the Steiners, founders of EcommerceBytes, a newsletter covering the e-commerce industry, includes an additional $US7 million in charitable donations, including to organisations supporting First Amendment rights. The settlement contains no confidentiality provision, allowing the Steiners to discuss the case publicly.
“David and I were on the same page that this settlement should and must be made public — as victims who want to prevent something like this from ever happening to anyone else, and as reporters who believe in transparency,” Ina Steiner said in an email response to questions from The Associated Press. “We hope that this case will serve as a deterrent.”
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, terrorise, 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.
Escalating pressure
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 neighbour’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 terrorise 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, 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.
In 2020, federal prosecutors charged seven former eBay employees, alleging they carried out a coordinated harassment campaign against the couple after becoming angered by coverage in the couple’s online newsletter. Most of the defendants pleaded guilty to charges including conspiracy and cyberstalking and were later sentenced to prison terms or home confinement.
In 2024, eBay agreed to pay a $US3 million criminal penalty under a deferred prosecution agreement with federal authorities.
A ‘painful, life-changing experience’
Under the settlement, the Steiners will receive $US48.7 million in compensation, including $US46.15 million from eBay, $US2 million from former CEO Wenig, $US500,000 from former executive Jones and $US50,000 from former executive Wymer.
The company will fund $US6 million in charitable contributions to various nonprofit organisations, with Wenig contributing an additional $US1 million to a charity dedicated to protecting First Amendment rights in Ina Steiner’s name.
In a statement, Steiner attorney Christopher Murphy cited the recovery amount, personal payments by former executives, a commitment for $US7 million to go to nonprofits and the absence of a confidentiality provision in a system where “wrongdoers too often hide their misdeeds by dangling compensation in front of those they victimised and trading that compensation for confidentiality or an NDA.”
Protecting journalists and publishers and deterring corporate misconduct were goals from the beginning, he said. “We believe this resolution sends a clear message that corporations and their executives cannot engage in this type of misconduct without facing significant consequences,” said Murphy, of Massachusetts-based Scalli Murphy Law.
Ina Steiner said she and her husband hoped that “some good will come out of this painful, life-changing experience.”
AP
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Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: www.smh.com.au
