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When Massachusetts husband-and-wife team Ina and David Steiner launched their reporting careers covering Silicon Valley at the turn of the century, the tech beat was still cozy enough to feel personal. The startups were still emerging from garages, and the journalists covering them were often filing stories from their own kitchen tables. Ebay was still a young online auction company founded on the principle that “people are basically good.”
As digital retail took off, the Steiners launched an e-zine called EcommerceBytes, catering to a growing community of small business owners who were increasingly using platforms like eBay to sell their wares. “We talked about this being an opportunity for just average people, disabled people, elderly people to make extra income,” says David of a community that has grown alongside EcommerceBytes, which now has more than 600,000 readers. “We were really excited about that.”
Their first 19 years on the beat were a dream, the kind of happily-ever-after usually reserved for Hallmark Christmas movie couples. But like any successful partnership, it depended on a division of labor. Ina handled what got published, and David handled how it got done. “Back when we started there was no WordPress,” Ina says. “He had to somehow conjure up his own system where we could still publish within budget.”
But they never expected the dream to turn into a nightmare, with them as the targets of a relentless cross-country harassment campaign orchestrated by the very company behind their livelihood. “This was a Stephen King nightmare, a horrible nightmare,” Ina says. “And then to find out the company that I had covered for 20 years was doing this is surreal. It’s taken an enormous toll on us physically and mentally.”
The Steiners have become a startling example of the modern dangers reporters can face simply for doing their jobs. Last month, the Steiners obtained a $55.7m settlement from eBay after six years of criminal and civil proceedings against the company in connection with its former employees’ efforts to intimidate the couple into silence. The macabre campaign unfolded over several weeks in 2019, with the Steiners receiving online threats and disturbing deliveries at their suburban Boston home: live spiders, a bloody pig mask modeled after the one worn by the killer in the Saw franchise, a book on surviving the death of a spouse. Pornographic magazines addressed to David were deliberately sent to the Steiners’ neighbors, and their home was listed online as a destination for pop-up yard sales and swingers’ parties.
The Steiners had scant idea who was behind the threats or what they had done to deserve them. “I thought it was some lone psychopath,” Ina said. “I reached out to my sister and said: ‘I have a stalker. Please tell everyone to disengage and disconnect from me on social media.’ We were so terrified and afraid for our family. I was feeling this sort of shame.”
They went into self-preservation mode, jury-rigging noisemakers from pots and pans to alert them of potential home intruders, installing cameras throughout their house and sleeping in separate beds to ensure one had enough time to call for help if the other was attacked. All the while, local police were left dumbfounded by the case. They didn’t really start figuring it out until the Steiners provided a license plate number from a car that had been monitoring them, which they traced back to an eBay employee who had rented the vehicle with a corporate credit card.
From there, the mystery quickly unraveled: eBay was under pressure – struggling to keep pace with competitors, facing activist investors and embarrassed by Ina’s matter-of-fact reporting on then CEO Devin Wenig’s bloated compensation package. Text message exchanges between executives suggested how far they were willing to go to make the Steiners go away, and just how personal the vendetta had apparently become – a far cry from the cozy Silicon Valley of yesteryear:
“Take her down,” Wenig wrote.
“I want to see ashes,” wrote chief communications officer Steve Wymer. “As long as it takes. Whatever it takes.”
According to investigators, the company’s security chief, James Baugh, acting on orders from on high, then directed a group of young women who worked for him to target the Steiners – even as he was also harassing them and, in one case, was extramaritally involved. In 2020, the Department of Justice charged seven eBay executives and employees with cyberstalking. In 2022, Baugh was sentenced to 57 months in prison. In 2024, federal prosecutors entered into a deferred-prosecution agreement with eBay itself. The company admitted to a detailed statement of facts, was charged with six felony counts (including interstate-travel and electronic-communications stalking) and agreed to pay the maximum $3m criminal penalty.
Meanwhile, the Steiners’ $55.7m civil settlement – in which eBay admitted fault and apologized but disclaimed legal liability – brought a nearly two-year legal battle to a close. Wenig, who stepped down as eBay’s CEO in 2019, agreed to pay $2m to the Steiners and $1m to a first amendment rights charity in Ina’s name. But the formal resolutions haven’t exactly brought an end to the Steiners’ personal and professional nightmare. Since their 2019 ordeal, they’ve each been diagnosed with PTSD, see therapists and take medication to manage anxiety. A simple grocery run still feels like a fraught proposition after all the stalking. David is still haunted by the memory of celebrating his 31st wedding anniversary with Ina over a tuna and dry spaghetti, as their provisions ran dry. “Every time we went out or I tried to shop, something would happen and I’d have to run home,” he says.
The Prime Video documentary Whatever It Takes, directed by Jenny Carchman, retraces the Steiners’ ordeal with the pace of a paperback thriller – among other things, revealing an eBay corporate security operation that scans like a cross between an NSA counter-terrorism strike force and a frat house. The couple was vehemently against the idea of participating at first. But the documentary has helped their friends and neighbors understand the gravity of their situation, and why they were so cagey about accepting help. “We felt toxic,” David says. “We certainly didn’t want anybody else involved in something that was directed at us – so we just stayed in our bunker.”
Somehow, though, the Steiners managed to summon the resolve to continue publishing – partly to keep the scandal from swallowing the brand they built from scratch. “When people were writing about eBay targeting us, it was as if my 20 years of being a reporter didn’t exist,” Ina says. “I was reduced to: that lady who wrote the story about executive compensation.”
Given their own experience of being targeted, I wondered if they could empathize with the female employees who also found themselves caught up in the scandal.
“The New York Times did this interview with [one of the female eBay employees] and it was very sympathetic to her,” Ina says. “But from my point of view, it was like: she was harassing and terrifying me.”
David, of course, feels differently. “Ina, she’s a very forgiving person. But I’m just not there yet.”
The biggest victory in the Steiners’ civil settlement might be the absence of an NDA. They can speak publicly about the case and their ordeal and keep reporting on unfolding developments. While pursuing the civil case, they received a trove of more than 68,000 documents that have given them a far fuller picture of the internal effort to harass them and the executive failures that essentially let it happen. It’s tempting to describe the whole sordid affair as an early form of corporate terrorism. But given Wenig’s past experience as CEO of Thomson Reuters, home of one of the world’s largest newswire services, it reads more like news-on-news crime.
It’s a reminder of how much Silicon Valley has changed since the Steiners started on the tech beat, and how much their plucky operation stands apart from the industry-friendly coverage that dominates the mainstream. For the Steiners, the $55.7m settlement is not the payoff for a fight they wanted to win and leave behind for another chance at a happily-ever-after – on a tropical island where eBay is blocked, maybe. Rather, it underscores the honor of their fight, the value of their integrity and that principled journalism is still well worth doing.
Not surprisingly, EcommerceBytes’ loyal readers understood the value of that work already. “We get emails and comments that are like: ‘We know you guys deserve a break, the compensation and the security, but please don’t stop publishing,’” Ina says. “That is really meaningful to find.”
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Whatever It Takes is now available on Amazon Prime
English (US) ·