Ebay Ordered to Pay $55.7 Million for Harassment Campaign

A landmark civil settlement has concluded one of the most disturbing cases of corporate retaliation in recent memory: eBay has been ordered to pay $55.7 million for orchestrating a brutal harassment campaign against the founders of a Massachusetts-based ecommerce news site. The case, which involved former executives and employees, marks a significant legal reckoning for the tech giant.

The saga began in 2020, when six former eBay employees and one contractor faced criminal charges for a campaign of terror against David and Ina Steiner, the husband-and-wife team behind EcommerceBytes. The Steiners frequently published critical coverage of eBay, and the company’s response was nothing short of horrifying. The harassment included doxing, threats, and even deliveries of live pests,such as cockroaches, spiders, and fly larvae,to the couple’s home. In 2021, the Steiners filed a civil lawsuit, and eBay later paid a $3 million criminal penalty to the US Attorney’s Office in Massachusetts.

Now, the civil case has reached a final settlement that holds both the company and its former leaders accountable. The Steiners will receive more than $46.15 million directly from eBay. Additional payments come from former CEO Devin Wenig ($2 million), former executive Wendy Jones ($500,000), and former executive Steve Wymer ($50,000). Beyond the financial compensation, eBay is also donating $6 million to charity, with Wenig contributing an extra $1 million to a nonprofit dedicated to protecting First Amendment rights. The company is required to issue a strongly worded public statement condemning the actions of the former employees involved.

A key element of the settlement is the absence of a confidentiality provision, allowing the Steiners to continue speaking openly about the case. “From day one, that was a dealbreaker,” says Chris Murphy, the Steiners’ attorney at 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.”

David Steiner expressed a mix of relief and caution. “It’s a relief in some sense that we have some finality,” he told 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 emphasized that the civil suit was driven by a desire to understand the culture that allowed such harassment to flourish. By filing the lawsuit, the couple gained access to 68,000 documents that were not part of the federal investigation. “We were often in the dark during the federal investigation, and we were told very little as victims,” she said.

eBay’s spokespersons directed WIRED to a public statement in which the company extended its “deepest apologies” to the Steiners. The statement 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.” eBay stressed that new leadership is now in place 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 unfolded over two months in the summer of 2019. It began with anonymous, threatening Twitter DMs and quickly escalated to physical deliveries at the Steiners’ home. These included a bloody pig mask, pornography, a package of fly larvae and live spiders, and another containing live cockroaches. Other deliveries were macabre in theme: a book on grieving a spouse and a funeral wreath from a local florist. Throughout the ordeal, the anonymous Twitter account continued sending harassing messages. As court documents later revealed, those DMs and deliveries were all orchestrated by the defendants.