Like so much of the Internet, eBay began at a moment of intense optimism that technology could bring people together. The auction website proclaims that “eBay was founded in 1995 on the simple premise that people are basically good.”
But what if people are not actually good? What if technology instead amplifies their worst impulses and makes them into people that are very bad indeed?
In 2019, eBay executives decided that a news site and message board for eBay sellers was trouble. The site, EcommerceBytes, would point out inconvenient facts, like that the CEO earned 152 times the salary of the average worker.
There are many ways to shut someone up. You can buy them off or just buy them. Convince them of the error of their ways. Unleash the lawyers. Pretty much immediately, employees at eBay settled on a solution to the problem of Ina and David Steiner, the suburban Massachusetts couple running EcommerceBytes. How about we terrorise them?
You may remember the case. Top eBay personnel, including the CEO, told subordinates they wanted the Steiners dealt with. James Baugh, the company’s head of security, led a group of mostly young female employees that attacked the Steiners so thoroughly that the couple said they have never really recovered. Baugh’s team sent them offensive and suggestive items, hounded them on social media and stalked them at home.
Death was the dominant message. EBay’s people sent the Steiners a funeral wreath. A copy of Grief Diaries: Surviving Loss of a Spouse. A bloody pig mask worn by killers in the Saw horror movies.
To be threatened is bad enough; to be threatened anonymously is much worse. The Steiners had no clue who hated them this much. They piled up baking pans on a laundry cart at the back door so an intruder would make a noise. They slept in separate beds so one would survive an attack long enough to call the police.
As the stalking moved from virtual to their doorstep, the Steiners managed to write down the license plate of a car that eBay employees were using to surveil them. They were stunned when their enemy turned out to be the company they had devoted their lives to writing about. It was corporate terrorism, a concept so new it didn’t even have a name.
In 2020, federal prosecutors in Massachusetts indicted six former eBay employees, including Baugh, on charges of cyberstalking. (A seventh employee was charged later.) The public was aghast. Two things seemed inevitable: First, that this would become a dramatic movie, and second, that eBay was going to pay the Steiners a bundle for trying to destroy their lives.
Six years later, only the film has happened. Whatever It Takes: Inside the eBay Scandal, a 90-minute documentary directed by Jenny Carchman, shows how a mom-and-pop business 3,000 miles (4,828km) from eBay’s San Jose, California, headquarters provoked such hostility. The film, which debuted at a film festival in 2024 but became widely available only last month, takes its title from an eBay executive’s text message to the security team about silencing the Steiners.
Whatever It Takes does not pontificate – it moves with the speed of a thriller – but some larger implications are obvious. The episode was an early example of increasing pressure against the news media by those with power and money.
‘Low-level guys take the fall’
When Carchman, a director and producer of documentaries on subjects ranging from Ed Koch to The New York Times to the Grateful Dead, first read about the eBay case, she thought: This story has everything.
“It had hubris – this company thought it was entitled to take down these reporters,” she said. “It showed how Wall Street operates – investors are hungry for a return but not in the long-term health of the company. It had inexperienced women being led by an older man who was preying on some of them. And in the end, it was like a mob story: The low-level guys take the fall, but not the bosses.”
The Steiners were introduced to Carchman through the lawyer who represented them in a lawsuit they filed against eBay in July 2021. They accused the company and its employees of “a systematic campaign to emotionally and psychologically torture.” The couple’s trust in strangers had been greatly diminished by the stalking, and they spent over a year vetting the director before agreeing to participate. They had no editorial control.
Whatever It Takes was finished and shown at festivals, where it garnered a good reception. But it still did not have a satisfying ending.
Meanwhile, Ina Steiner, David Steiner and Steiner Associates v. eBay Inc, et al, slowly unspooled in Massachusetts civil court.
“If you believe you can fight a fair fight against a corporation, or people of extreme wealth, you had better be prepared to spend the rest of your life fighting,” Ina Steiner wrote in EcommerceBytes last November, after yet another trial delay.
From eBay’s point of view, the stalking was deeply regrettable but not really its fault. The company blamed its security team for going rogue. That means, it said, that the executives as well as the company itself were not responsible, despite the team acting in the name of eBay and as eBay employees.
Prosecutors basically endorsed this view. They did not charge any executives, and the penalty eventually levied against eBay – US$3mil (RM12.24mil) – was trivial for a company worth US$20bil (RM81.66bil) at the time. One reason eBay avoided a steeper penalty was that it said it was “ready to address restitution” with the Steiners.
In their suit, the Steiners argue that several executives, including CEO Devin Wenig, either knew about the stalking or were willfully ignorant. Although the perpetrators tried to wipe their phones, several revealing messages survived.
Baugh, the security chief, reported to Wendy Jones, the senior vice president of global operations. On May 23, 2019, according to the suit, Jones asked Baugh if he could deal with the Steiners “off the radar.” She added: “Just get it done. I don’t want to know the details.”
Two months later, Wenig wrote to the communications chief, Steve Wymer, about Ina Steiner. “If we are ever going to take her down,” he said, “now is the time.” Wymer later texted Baugh that Ina Steiner “is a biased troll who needs to get BURNED DOWN.”
This might sound incriminating to a layperson, especially since the harassment operation started shortly after. But Andrew Lelling, the US attorney who handled the criminal case, said it hadn’t amounted to much.
“In my experience, executives at companies say things like this all the time,” Lelling told the filmmakers. “I think what you’re seeing is loose talk by the executives at the company. But linkage is missing. Jim Baugh decided the right way to handle the situation is commit a federal crime. Is that something the senior executives could have reasonably expected?”
You bet it was, David Steiner said. “Dismissing this as ‘bro talk’ – that enrages me,” he added.
Lawyers for Wenig and Jones declined to comment, as did Baugh, who was sentenced to 57 months in prison but is now free. A lawyer for Wymer did not respond to messages.
Wenig left eBay with a severance package in excess of US$55mil (RM224.56mil). Jones retired with a US$16mil (RM65.32mil) deal, according to the suit. The company, which earlier called the stalking “reprehensible,” did not respond to messages.
The Steiners’ suit proved unusually contentious. At one point, five exhibits were marked as uncontested while 2,325 exhibits were contested. It was also unwieldy. There were so many lawyers – more than 60 – that the judge said they wouldn’t all fit in her courtroom for jury selection.
Just as the trial was about to begin in March, there was a breakthrough. The Steiners told the court they had reached a deal with eBay and the executives. A trial would not be necessary. But as winter became spring became summer, no settlement was announced.
‘We are all at risk’
If you’re interested in collectables – and millions of Americans are – eBay is inescapable. The stalking episode did not seem to faze customers. There were no mass defections to other auction sites, perhaps because there are no other sites with eBay’s scale.
Gary Sohmers is a longtime collectables dealer who was interviewed in Whatever It Takes. He stopped selling on eBay long ago. “I don’t need the aggravation,” he told me. He suggested the public was hardened to horrors. “Every day, there are shocking things. And then the next day, there are three more.”
Still, to read through the voluminous pile of legal documents – the ones, at least, that were not sealed – is to be shocked all over again. So much is bizarre and so little is explained. If the Steiners’ case ever gets to trial, many questions might be answered.
The young women who were handpicked for Baugh’s security group said it had been, in essence, a cult. They were psychologically isolated and kept separate from other company employees. They couldn’t be out of touch with the office even for routine hygiene.
“We’d text each other like: ‘Hey, I’m going to take a shower. Can somebody else make sure that they answer for the next 15 minutes?’” one of the women, Stephanie Stockwell, said in a deposition. “You always had to be responsive.”
They also had to be alone. The women were discouraged from having boyfriends or partners who could provide emotional support. “I couldn’t handle anything besides this job,” Stockwell said. “I couldn’t focus on anything. Yeah, my judgment was not present.”
It’s surprising, given the truths that later emerged about the way women were treated across the tech industry, that the Steiners never became a cause among women’s rights groups. “We were very much alone,” Ina Steiner said.
Nor did media organisations rally to their side. EcommerceBytes covered not only eBay but Amazon, Walmart and other venues. It might not have resembled a traditional news operation, but it was Ina Steiner’s stories that irked eBay executives. The auction company at the time was trying to fend off a hostile investor that would revamp management.
“At its core, this is a story about First Amendment rights,” David Steiner said. “That’s especially meaningful now, when the press has been under fire and is in a way losing the war.”
In a 2022 sentencing hearing for a member of eBay’s security team, US District Judge William G. Young took special note of this aspect. The charge might have been cyberstalking, he said, but the case was really about “corporate agents trying to suppress by fear and terror speech on important public matters. That’s incredibly reprehensible.” He added that “we are all at risk” from such behaviour.
Love us, or else
The tech companies, with their devices and social media and now artificial intelligence, have wormed their way into the heart of our lives. They’ve become utilities, which is to say essential. Must we love them, too?
That sometimes seems the ultimate demand. To the extent that people at eBay had an official stalking plan, prosecutors described it as such: Torment the Steiners anonymously and then publicly help them deal with the problem that the company had secretly caused. Employees called it the White Knight Strategy. They thought the Steiners would end up loving eBay and stop writing critical stories.
The Steiners, both in their 60s, say in court papers that they have suffered habitual insomnia, panic attacks and a perpetual fear they are being followed and tracked, among other problems. David Steiner said his essential tremor, a neurological disorder, has been exacerbated. Ina Steiner has been diagnosed with PTSD and depression.
EcommerceBytes has fewer readers and thus fewer ads than it did before the stalking, and that has cut their income. The suit, which accuses eBay of defamation, negligent supervision of its employees, stalking, infliction of emotional distress and other actions, asks for nearly US$500mil (RM2.04bil) in compensatory and punitive damages.
“How naive I was – not just about what happened to us, but about the legal process, the judicial process,” David Steiner said. “People will eat their steak, but they don’t visit the slaughterhouse. We’ve been to the slaughterhouse.”
When the settlement talks fell apart, the Steiners filed a motion to reopen their case. A settlement might be announced at any moment, but for now it’s back to the slaughterhouse. The trial is scheduled for Jan 4. – ©2026 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
